My favourite things
Apr.24, 2008, filed under Miscellany
The environment and semiotics.
Putting in place effective policies to stimulate climate-friendly behaviour in the UK is clearly essential, but so too is the use of effective communications. Today in the UK, more stakeholders, including every type of media outlet, the Government, environmental groups and companies, are discussing or communicating on climate change than ever before. But what impact are these stakeholders having? Are they helping or hindering efforts to achieve behaviour change? Will producing more of the same communications do the job, and if not, how could the way climate change is communicated be improved?
To help answer those questions, ippr commissioned Linguistic Landscapes to analyse current UK constructions and conceptions of climate change in the public domain, using some of the tools and principles of discourse analysis and semiotics.
The discussion of “linguistic repertoires” is especially good. My favourite, I think, is “British comic nihilism (‘Oh, bugger it and open another bottle!’)”. Some of the pseudo-intellectual diagrams are whimsically bollocks and make me smile.
You have to register to read, and it was published way back in 2006 (there’s a sequel), but worth a look if you’re interested in the way words can affect thoughts and thus population behaviour on a global scale.
With our thoughts we make the world…
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
