hyperbole, part 3
in the same vein as book cover blurbs: what about the way that newspapers and magazines write their headlines? i've never understood the necessity that media people feel to make puns and otherwise corny turns of phrases in newspaper and magazine headlines (though some are fighting back) this also happens on television with the text 'summing up' the story or statistics being discussed by the newscaster. why why why? is there some inate fundamental human desire to cheese everything up??
7 Comments:
"is there some inate fundamental human desire to cheese everything up??"
-- oh, i think so....sometimes i think there's only a finite number of ideas/phrases to go round, which is another idea of the usefulness of platitudes. I wonder if there's a score of some kind in that - like the theatre game where you're only allowed to say certain phrases but they have to deliver all kinds of meaning in different contexts
more geeking today - i had an intro to puredata which again so beautifully demonstrated the essential problem of creation... when you can do anything, how do you decide what to do? endless potential, but vision is essential....
though there is a finite number of platitudes, there is no limit to the way we can recombine them to form new metaphors! its a very elastic system. i think imagery works the same way; its all about cultural dictionaries…
yeah... that's what i think is potentially quite interesting - realization of the limits and how those limits construct "reality"....
:-)
definitely! all of this is very topical to my research on book design and the role of images in layout -- funny how the big cultural themes can connect such apparently divergent fields... (dance and book design?!)
but i also like the idea that, although our limits 'construct' our reality, we also construct (or maintain) those limits. i suppose it is more crowd psychology than individual agency, but there is a balance there; we aren't trapped in signs but think through them…
there's something about how a society choses its messages that says a lot about what it values and what it considers taboo.
I find it interesting that a lot of the stuff we are looking at is about how ambition, desire (in the larger sense)and failure are hidden in actions and speech that seem very modest. And yet... we value people who get ahead and take risks. Wondering about that.
yeah - what a gap that is - we value risk-takers, but as we know, only to a limited extent. There's that bit about tall poppies being the ones to get their heads mown off!
i sure see it at work, where the talk about risk taking has been absorbed from the private sector, but layered over a system that cannot accommodate any risk at all....you know, i'm not sure we value risk takers at all, i think more likely we envy them, maybe...also, sometimes the definition of risk is so different for different people......
it seems like a paradox: how can we value risk but also value stability? i'm tempted to quote myself from my comment to the post before this one:
" - i think a lot about the violence and power plays in simple rhetoric: it is fascinating how people can say so much 'between the lines' (i'm thinking of work situations, personal situations, anything where power or authority is at stake or threatened)"
do risk-takers strive to be better for themselves or to beat others at the game? how much are their ambitions, in either case, shaped by forces outside themselves? there is a whole spectrum of risk-taking.
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