Cultural Cartography

How times move on

Interesting article on the Brandchannel about the use of Cadillac Plan in the US to describe a luxury health plan with all the bells on. They are basically asking how much longer will it continue to make sense to use the word for Cadillac to describe something extremely luxurious and opulent. Back in the day this might have been appropriate but the Cadillac brand has changed a lot since then. Interestingly for someone living in Germany, they suggest that it might make more sense to call it a Mercedes or BMW plan. 

I can´t help thinking that this shows how little the Americans have really moved on in their thinking about cars and automobiles. Surely the days of such luxury car brands have to be numbered. There is an article in the Economist about it this week, pointing out (which I didn't know) that one of the reasons that small cars are so much cheaper than large cars is because the car manufacturers make less profit on them. Not because they are cheaper to produce. But their main point is that we will be buying fewer and fewer large cars in the decades to come, due to economic, environmental and demographic reasons. 

So maybe the Americans will have to come up with a new name for luxury health plans. How about the Ritz Carlton or the Country Club of health plans. That might make more sense. 

Don't worry, be happy

I was driving recently early morning feeling a bit like what I am doing up this early in the morning, when a song came on the radio that included some whistling. And I really noticed that it was that bit of the song that perked me up and made me feel carefree again. 

That got me thinking about whistling and what might be the semiotic significance of whistling. Of course I thought about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs "Whistle while you work" first. That really seems to sum it up. You only whistle when you are enjoying what you are doing, when you are relaxed and happy. The dwarfs had figured this out and suggested that it could be applied consciously (a bit like CBT): 

Just whistle while you work
And cheerfully together we can tidy up the place
So hum a merry tune
It won't take long when there's a song to help you set the pace. 

People on their way home from work whistle, people whistle when they are doing a routine task which they however enjoy. Basically you whistle when things are good. 

So semiotically whistling is connected to happiness, contentment and even whimsy, as it has no real purpose. Just doing something because you want to. 

So no wonder this songs and others with whistling in them made me feel better. 

I have to include the classic whistling song here, which even emphasises
  the idea I am talking about: Don't worry, be happy.

So whistle along and be happy

The world according to children

I often find that children are the most revealing when it comes to the myths and narratives about the culture we live in. For instance when a child said to me that you could not build a snow woman without a snow baby because women have babies. 

Today I was witness to some more semiotics from children, when the kids where I live now showed me their map of the world made of toy animals and Playmobil people. Not sure what it means, but I did notice that Germany had lots of official cars and animals. Africa has of course exotic animals but also some quite cool cars. 

Germany

And Africa. Note the VW Beetles - cool car for a trip to Africa

Signs that save lives

A very brave friend of mine has flown this week to Haiti to work with an aid organisation for 3 months to help provide medical assistance and distribute aid. I had a quick look through the documents that she was sent to help prepare, in particular the Security Manual. It was a very scary document, especially because up until then, I hadn't really thought about the dangers that go along with the sort of crisis situation which now exists in Haiti. The Manual was a general manual so it tried to cover everything - situations where you are threatened by people and situations where you are threatened in other ways. One of those other situations is minefields!! In minefields the signs and symbols that you see have a very concrete meaning: they are there to warn you and hopefully protect you from injury. 

Some of the symbols that are used are stones painted red, coke bottles on a stick and cairns. Now interestingly I have just come back from hiking in the Lakes (beautiful!) and we saw lots of cairns. In fact up Great Gable it was the cairns that helped us find our way. 

On a minefield the cairns have a very different meaning. Instead of meaning walk here, they mean precisely the opposite: Don't walk here. And sometimes, my friend was told, the signs for minefields aren't even obvious, unless you know they are there. 

It's a very good lesson in the importance of context in semiotics. 

And of course a lesson in altruism for us all.  

Tidying up before the guests come

I have registered my site for Orange's internet balloon race. I am getting quietly excited about it. And I also thought I have should have a new blog entry on my site to welcome the guests. It really feels like just before a party when the guests are about to arrive and you are worried that they will spot the only corner of the flat that you haven't cleaned.  So here we go and dear guests, please don't look too closely in the corners.

The brilliant thing about this balloon race is that it makes complete semiotic sense. If you imagine the web as a loosely connected cloud of virtual ideas, then having balloons float from one idea to the next makes perfect sense. It also seems to tap into what happens when many of us surf: you float from one thing to the next. It isn't really hopping like it is when you watch TV, where the different channels have nothing to do with each other. For most of us I am sure when we surf, the sites that we navigate to have something however vague to do with the last site that we were on - if only syntagmatically by virtue of there being a link from one site to the next. 

And also the balloons look great and they have these clever widget things that really work.

O Tannenbaum!!

Christmas is a time heavy with symbolism. At work I was recently asked to comment on the rituals associated with Christmas and to what extent marketers can latch on to them. This weekend my husband and I enacted a ritual which is laden with meaning and above all memory: we bought and decorated our first Christmas tree. The tree is lovely, a Nordman fir with wide branches with thick needles and for the first day the entire flat had a lovely scent of pine.

I am not writing about this here in order to show everyone what a happy family we now are, but because of the questions that arose when we started talking about the lights on the tree. For me it was absolutely clear that we would have electric lights and we would turn them on every night (so that we could sit next to the tree coo-ing and aah-ing!!) and for my man, it was equally as obvious that we would have candles which we would only light on Christmas Eve.

What we have here is a clash of Christmas cultures. In England the tree arrives whenever you are organised enough to sort it out and as soon as you have time, you decorate it and put it in the window for all to see. It is a way of saying to everyone "look, it's Christmas and we are celebrating too." When we were little, we would have a game around Christmas time which was to guess how many Christmas trees we would be able to count on a particular car journey. It always gave us the feeling of a community, even if you don't know the people.

In Germany there is much more of a sense of the tree being for the children and the family. The tree is traditionally only brought in and decorated on Christmas Eve and only when it is decorated with the presents underneath and the candles lit are the children allowed in. I know how I felt when we flicked the switch to put on the lights for the first time - imagine the expression when you see a beautiful tree lit up with candles for the first time. I think in Germany the tree says we are all together as a family and Christmas is starting and it is now time to be quiet and spend time together.

So what did we do about our tree? Well, we compromised. We now have candles on the tree but we lit them at the weekend. It was quite difficult for my husband and a friend who came round, I think it almost felt blasphemous but we have now managed our own combination of German and English traditions. No doubt lots of families and couples with different cultural backgrounds will be doing the same all over the world.

One last thing: of course I started thinking about the environmental question. Are we adding to the destruction of the environment by buying a tree. Well there were two arguments which made me feel better. 1) in Germany they will collect the trees and dispose of them so that they can be used usefully. (See here). And secondly - a Christmas tree is truly beautiful in a way that you seldom see otherwise.

The colour of food

It's struck me recently how clever restaurants are at making sure you know what they are. And most of it is done semiotically. Italian restaurants are red, white and green and greek restaurants are blue and white and so on.

I wonder what the colour of fusion is: At the moment it often seems to be brown and orange.

I promise more posts soon, once I've got into the groove at my new job.

Decoding the urban environment

Parkhaus (parking garage), Berlin Tempelhof
Originally uploaded by restmodern.de

Or what the city you live in says about the city you live in.

In Berlin the doors on the trains and underground close slowly. People do not walk on escalators, they position themselves left and right and in the middle and then drop their cases or bags next to them, so that getting past them is nigh on impossible without seeming like a complete maniac. People don't sigh in the queue at the supermarket when the person in front of them not only gets out the little receipt which they got when they brought back 2 bottles, which has to be deducted from their total but also asks for a tax receipt which has to be written by hand. People don't actually seem to mind that all these things mean that what could be an activity of 10 minutes suddenly takes half an hour. And why not?

Because they don't mind if it takes longer. The city and its inhabitants conspire together to make things take more time. So what does this say? That everyone in Berlin has endless amounts of time? Well maybe. Or that this city and its enviroment is not driven solely by the need to be somewhere else as in London. There is much more of a street life in Berlin than in most of London. More cafes with tables outside, more people just flaneuring. And so, the urge is not to be in front of your desk, the TV or the bar, but out and about.

Spring greens

March in Seattle
Originally uploaded by Paola: mirrormirror.

I was travelling back from York on the train yesterday to London. It was a beautiful spring day. Green, blue and sparkling. It got me thinking about spring a lot and also about green. The classic semiotic interpretation of green is that it is about nature and growth; the use of the word 'green' for anything that has any supposed environmental credentials is a case in point. But yesterday started me thinking whether we had forgotten why green was such an important colour. We have become disassociated from our environment and forgotten that green in spring was the sign to our ancestors that the bitter tribulations of winter were over. It signals hope and rebirth to us now because it literally meant rebirth to generations of people who lived off the land. Add to that the beauty of the spring sun. There is a certain crispness, thinness to the air which I find intoxicating. You can smell the newness, the delicate nature of the buds in the delicate whiffs of earth and bark that come to you on the breeze.

It was as you can see a beautiful journey yesterday and turned me all poetic.
Coupled with the fact that since Saturday I have my first nephew, Milo, a lovely beautiful little boy. So maybe that started me thinking about new beginnings.

Traffic lights

There is an interesting debate going on in the UK at the moment between what roughly seems to be the food industry and the govt about the labelling of food. The food industry has opted for a system based on Guideline Daily Amounts (IGD website) and the Food Standards Agency has opted for a traffic light system. I don't want to go into the whys and wherefores of which system is better, because I'm not qualified to do that. Interesting however if we want to think about semiotics in the real world is the argument that the traffic light system is easier for people to understand (See this article from the BBC). I heard the interview with the Mum they quote there; she basically was in the store with her little kid running away from her and she said, 'I want to be able to understand things immediately. This is very clear to me.'

It got me thinking about 1) traffic lights and their origins. And also 2) their semiotic significance.

1) The origins of traffic lights seems to be widely accepted that they stem from railway signals which had a red lantern and a green lantern which were hidden alternatively by a semaphore arm. It has never been otherwise than Green was "go" and Red was "stop". Why Amber was introduced as "think about doing something" I don't know. It's an interesting case where a colour's coded meaning has come about because of its association with other colours which have very clear meanings.

2) Traffic lights are semiotically significant and also particularly interesting for this site because they are a perfect example of how a code become historically and culurally entrenched and then spreads. There is no ontological reason why red should be for danger and green for safety but it is now culturally embedded so much so that now that is what those colours mean.

or to put it another slightly more academic way:

"It should be noted that whilst the relationships between signifiers and their signifieds are ontologically arbitrary (philosophically, it would not make any difference to the status of these entities in 'the order of things' if what we call 'black' had always been called 'white' and vice versa), this is not to suggest that signifying systems are socially or historically arbitrary. Natural languages are not, of course, arbitrarily established, unlike historical inventions such as Morse Code. Nor does the arbitrary nature of the sign make it socially 'neutral' or materially 'transparent' - for example, in Western culture 'white' has come to be a privileged signifier (Dyer 1997). Even in the case of the 'arbitrary' colours of traffic lights, the original choice of red for 'stop' was not entirely arbitrary, since it already carried relevant associations with danger. As Lévi-Strauss noted, the sign is arbitrary a priori but ceases to be arbitrary a posteriori - after the sign has come into historical existence it cannot be arbitrarily changed (Lévi-Strauss 1972, 91). As part of its social use within a code (a term which became fundamental amongst post-Saussurean semioticians), every sign acquires a history and connotations of its own which are familiar to members of the sign-users' culture." This from a very useful website for students of semiotics by Daniel Chandler. 

I realise that I've already talked about German traffic lights but don't worry, I don't think there will be many more posts on traffic lights.