Showbusiness, age of
the process of it becoming a mental concept
(interpretant), or what de Saussure named the
signifi ed.
The point to emphasize here is that the
sign depends for its meaning on the context
in which it is communicated. Edmund Leach
in Culture and Communication (Cambridge
University Press, 1976) says that signs do not
occur in isolation; ‘a sign is always a member of
a set of contrasting signs which function within
a specific cultural context’. Also, a sign only
conveys information when it is combined with
other signs and symbols from the same context.
‘Signs signal’, writes Donis A. Dondis in Contact:
Human Communication and its History (Th ames
& Hudson, 1981), edited by Raymond Williams,
‘they are specifi c to a task or circumstance’.
Of course there are not only diff erent kinds
or levels of meaning (or signifi cation), there are
also many diff erent kinds of sign. Peirce divided
signs into three categories: the icon, the index
and the symbol. Th ese, like the triangular sign-
object-interpretant, are interactive, and they
are overlapping. Th e icon is a resemblance or
a representation of the object – a photograph
or a map would constitute an iconic sign. An
index is a sign connected or associated with its
object – an indicator: smoke is an index of fi re,
for example.
The symbol may have no resemblance
whatever to the object or idea. It is arbitrary. It
comes about by choice, it exists by convention,
rule or assent. It means something beyond
itself. As Dondis neatly points out, ‘signs can
be understood by animals as well as humans;
symbols cannot’. Th ey ‘are broader in meaning,
less concrete’. Raymond Firth, in Symbols, Public
and Private (Allen & Unwin, 1973), adds a fourth
sign type to Peirce’s three – signal, a sign with
an emphasis on ‘consequential action’, a stimulus
requiring some response.
Signs combine to form systems, or codes, from
the basic Morse Code or Highway Code to, for
example, the complex codes of musical notation.
See langue and parole; jakobson’s model
of communication, 1958; triggers. See alsoTh e explanation may be because the person
you greet is someone you dislike or fear, though
the shortfall signal may have as much to do with
personal mood, and preoccupation, as anything
else. Conversely, there is the so-called overkill
signal, where the greeting is too friendly, too
eff usive, the handshake too forcible. Th e overkill
signal may be a simulation of sincere greeting; on
the other hand, when people of diff erent cultures
or nations meet, one person’s shortfall may be
another’s overkill. See gesture; proxemics.
Showbusiness, age of The present age of
advancing communications technology has
been given many titles – the Age of Informa-
tion, the Telecommunications Age, the Age of
the Global Village. Neil Postman in Amusing
Ourselves to Death (Methuen, 1986) calls it the
Age of Showbusiness, a period in which TV
dominates the lives of the community, turning
people, in his view, into a population ‘amusing
ourselves to death’. In the Age of Showbusiness,
Postman argues, all discourses are rewritten in
terms of entertainment; substance is translated
into image and the present is emphasized to the
detriment of historical perspectives.
Postman’s criticism is targeted at the commer-
cial TV of his native America. He believes it
‘does everything possible to encourage us to
watch continuously. But what we watch is a
medium which presents information in a form
that renders it simplistic, non-substantive,
non-historical and non-contextual; that is to
say, information packaged as entertainment’. It
is doubtful whether Postman would have been
any more sanguine about the eff ect of today’s
burgeoning rival to TV ratings, online entertain-
ment and interactivity. See consumer sover-
eignty; effects of the mass media; main-
streaming; pilkington committee report
on broadcasting (uk), 1962; networking:
social networking; pseudo-context.
Sign In communication studies, a little word that
triggers complex explanations. Father of semi-
ology/semiotics, Swiss linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure (1857–1913) regarded language
as a ‘deposit of signs’; he viewed the sign as a
phenomenon comprising an ‘acoustic image’
and a concept (the thing signifi ed). A word or
combination of words in a language refers to, is
an indicator of, some externally existing object
or idea.
Charles Peirce (1834–1914), the American
philosopher and logician, posed a triangular
relationship involving the activation of the sign:
the object is that which is described by the sign,
but the sign only signifi es – has meaning – in