Place II

Cresswell spends part of this reading talking about the regional concept of place and how it is important for people to share proximity and culture for their culture to grow. Also he focuses on the relationship between nature and culture and how they relate to the definition of Place.
However, one of the things i enjoyed about this reading was the way in which the home as a place was focused on. I personally agree with the idea that home is the best idea of Place I can come up with. Most people imbue their homes with a sense of self, which falls exactly under the concept of Place as defined by the book. However not everyone feels this way, and there are some people who tie negative feelings to the concept of home.

Place

This is the intro chapter of the book and as such it gives an overview of the definition of place. The definition is show through a few different ways. One way that Cresswell talks about place is through Agnew’s ideas of Location, Locale, and Sense of place. The Location being the physical area, the Locale being the intended use and environment of the area, and Sense being the emotions and feeling attached to a place. I also enjoyed the analysis between Landscape and Place, which helps the reader have a better idea of Place. Especially the part when Cresswell talks about a landscape not being livable.

In this reading the concepts of connotation and denotation were discussed and I find I have to agree with the writer when they say that the two can never be fully separated in the context of reading an image. Images, no matter how simple they may be always seem to have a connotation with them. Interestingly enough, this seems to connect nicely to what I took away from the myth part of the reading. The reading talks about myths as being a social, pop culture device that makes certain ideas seem true, even if they may change over time. My best example of an image that always has a connotation associated with its denotation, and has a myth about it would have to be cigarettes. Nobody looks at someone smoking without an opinion, and that has changed over the years with smoking originally being commonplace, moving to being deadly and unacceptable, and nowadays once again being a cool thing to do, even if on a different level. This really seems to exemplify an images' connotation and myth.

Chandler's Signs

Let me start out by saying that this reading is one the most high-minded, and hard to absorb pieces of informational text I have ever read. The basic gist of the article got to be very redundant and long winded, as I think all academic texts are made to be. Maybe there are a set of unspoken rules about writing academic papers that requires them to be mind-numbing. Anyway, This was about signs, and the theories of what they consist of. It has been said that they consist of a signifier and a signified, the signifier being the expression itself, and the signified being the content it imparted. Also, I think the concept that language is arbitrary, and a word can have more than one meaning is something the author wanted to impart. There was also a theory about a three part representation which included an example like the stop light being the representamen, the interpretant being the idea of stopping at the light and the object which would be cars physically stopping. I think these theories are both right, and the rest of the article is a pissing contest about who can break down the system of signs into more categories and interpretations.