UMBERTO ECO
Italian modernist
semiotician, author, cheerleader of hyperreality
and erstwhile mass media fan. His work -- including A Theory of
Semiotics (1977) and The Role of the Reader (1979) -- is
based primarily on a semiotic
understanding of cultural texts and underpins many of the theories
about the nature of reality and originality. Eco introduced the
concept of aberrant decoding of media texts --
the tendency for people of different cultures or sub-cultures to
"read" a text in a way that is quite different from the dominant
reading (this is similar to Hall's
"oppositional
decoding")
One thing he does in his
1979 work is to distinguish between "open" and "closed" texts. Open
texts are designed to be read in multiple ways, while closed texts
tend to have only one dominant meaning. Once again, this bears a close
relationship to Hall's
reception
theory: in this context, the closed text suggests a preferred
reading, whereas an open text can be considered very polysemic,
i.e., it can easily be read in multiple ways.
One more thing about Eco,
though: he still believes in the power of the written word and is
opposed to the idea that new technologies make the
shift to the visual inevitable.
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ALBERT EINSTEIN
The German-born American physicist and Nobel
laureate, and most famous scientist of the 20th century. Best known as
the creator of special and general theories, Einstein contributed to
our understanding of the nature of time and the time-space
continuum. In a world where new media are collapsing our
conceptions of time and space, this is an important consideration.
Einstein's theory of relativity, apart from improving on the
Newtonian model of the universe, altered the way we view reality. Now
that we know (or believe we know) that time and space are relative,
not absolutes, we have to consider how that changes our
metaphysical take on reality and truth. More to come.
CT. Author Index