Semiotics for Beginners Modality and Representation

This Section of Semiotics for Beginners, Modality and Representation, reflect some of the ideas found in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. I love thinking about how absorbed into the media we really become. For instance when watching television, there is no denying that we get so attached to the main characters, and of course this is no accident. Everyone involved in making a movie or television show, or writing a novel or even the artist for a painting knows that they must stimulate some emotion in their audience that will attach them to the main character. When we read a book we become so absorbed that we feel that we are the main character. We can relate to them, we imagine their journeys in out minds eye and draw our own picture of what that character is doing, where they are going, who they met etc. And of course this is exactly what the author wanted. The author may have pictured the scenery in his novel differently, but as long as his readers grasp the concept of his characters actions and motives, it really doesn't matter what we picture. Even when authors but great detail into describing the setting, we are all going to picture it a little bit differently. But this is the power that words and images have. Words become such a vast art form because no two people could possibly have the same image in their minds.
Movies and television on the other hand are obviously different from books because more of our senses are stimulated. We see and hear exactly what the producers wanted us to. However, the viewers may still comprehend the message or themes of the show very differently, even if we don't necessarily realize it. We will see images that may seem normal, something we might see everyday, but there also may be a whole different spectrum we don't even notice we are seeing. Almost like some sort of subliminal message. racism, sexism, "isms" of all sorts, dominance, power struggles, very common debates found in society all the time may be so strongly enforced in an image, but we completely miss it because everyone involved in making the movie or show, has a way in making us see only what they want to see. It is not until you take a closer look that you realize the underlying images and their true meanings.
In this site, Daniel Chandler talks about how absorbed we become. He says that in one experiment children were asked to fill in the blanks, and a large percentage of them tried to pick up the pencil in the drawing. Scott McCloud has the same idea when he says how easily we relate foreign objects to our own image, he explains why we can how we can relate two dots and a line: " :|" to a human face. Both examples show how absorbed in the media we can become. An image no matter how realistic or not, is still easily recognized as the actual object. At the same time however, as universal as some symbols maybe, our vocabulary and they way we recognize the word we live in can never be simplified to just symbols. I agree with this completely because as abstract as words and images maybe, that is their art. Humans have created this language to express themselves, and even if our messages are not always perfectly clear, atleaste we can allow other people to think about what they are seeing and hearing.