Iconism Gone Mad

By -
As I noted some time ago, symbolic communication is an advance over iconic communication, so icons showing up in many daily devices does not necessarialy represent a unalloyed good. Today I encountered a paradigmatic case. A light in my car came on. The meaning of the light is "explained" by a little icon that looks like the stereotypical lightbulb one finds signifying a "bright idea." SO, did my car just have a bright idea? Does the icon of a lightbulb signify that a warning light just came on?

Sure, in the days when they would put English words on these lihgts, perhaps only 25% of the people in the world could read them. That's certainly better than the .01% I suspect can comprehend the lightbulb.

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:16 PM

    Probably 99.9% understand that a light is out somewhere on the car. I'm certain that fewer than 0.1 percent believe the car just had an idea.

    Detroit based nepotism is probably to blame for the design, and nepotism is not just a capitalist thing. It's only human!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9:24 AM

    Great article! Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous3:09 PM

    Thanks for interesting article.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous5:18 AM

    Excellent website. Good work. Very useful. I will bookmark!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous7:05 PM

    The page is so wonderful that I want to write something about myself.
    I am so happy to get some latale online gold and the latale gold is given by my close friend who tells me that the latale money is the basis to enter into the game. Therefore, I should buy latale online gold with the spare money and I have gained some cheap latale gold from other players.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more