DetectiveDanny 1/22

During the last class period, we were presented with the “word” ghoti and had to figure out what it meant, we had to decode it. What I found most interesting was the way in which we all approached this. First, we all tried to pronounce the letters in sequence like an English word. Realizing that this was no word we knew, one moves to the conclusion that it must be some word in another language, so we all started pronouncing it differently. In the end, we found out that it was “fish”. It was hard for us to get here because it did not fit within our natural progression of logic. We had to operate outside of and around the signifiers that we know.
I found this exercise most interesting especially in how we can relate this back to media and culture. It is all about what happens when we see certain things and in what context. For example, if we had seen “ghoti” on a sign in a foreign country, we might assume that it is a foreign word. For example, in a media context, when we see something on television, we are trained to go through a certain thought process. When we see a news analyst pontificating on some subject, we have become accustomed to just swallowing the information without chewing. We will associate someone with the way they are portrayed, instead of painting our own image of them based on facts.
Though because of Critical Media 100, it is pretty difficult for me to read a magazine or watch a television show without constantly seeing the individual signs and signifiers. One of the things that this leads me to ask is how many people are viewers that take these signs out of context and actually examine them critically.