Given the increasing influence of religious fundamentalism on politics (e.g. the Christian right in the United States or the Muslim fundamentalism associated with Al Qaeda), the question of how we can conceive of law and order, or society itself, without employing repressive ideals becomes more urgent. We need a way of conceptualizing the origin and process of idealization (which is necessary f...

This paper offers an approach to “social bookmarking”: four French websites are described here, with regards to their cultural signification. “Bookmarking” can be considered a traditional intellectual and cultural activity: this symbolic level must be taken into consideration to understand how people act on the Internet, and how they attach value and meaning to their actions. Individual partici...

The diffusion of the internet is transforming our understanding of technology and impacts upon the forms through which meaning and signification are shaped by it. The dissociation between symbols and meaning is becoming more evident, as content delivered over the internet makes necessary its packaging and transmission in standardized, context-crossing, ways. At the same time, the forms by which...

We discuss the methodological implications of moving from grounded theory to user requirements for the design of information and communication technologies. This is a problem that is particularly acute for sociology, where theory is seen as a sufficient contribution to knowledge. Cultural theorists have potentially less of a problem moving from the cultural meaning of artefacts to design. The e...

This article is devoted the semiotics analysis of concepts «meaning» and «interpretation». On the basis of the analysis the conclusion becomes, that the sign can display a reality only in the course of human activity. Meaning of a sign is a way of its use and interpretation. From the point of view of the theory of interpretants are checked and described conformity, associated with other sign. T...

Metaphor is a crucially context-dependent linguistic phenomenon. This fact was not clearly recognized until some time in the 1970’s. Until then, most theorists assumed that a sentence must have a fixed set of metaphorical meanings, if it had any at all. Often, they also assumed that metaphoricity was the product of grammatical deviance, in the form of a category mistake. To compensate for this ...