This study demonstrates how semiotics, which constitutes the “linguistic turn” in human sciences, is a powerful tool for revealing concealed meanings in Internet marketing. Semiotics deals with symbols in the form of text and pictures, and also with their underlying meaning. Hence, since Internet marketing makes extensive use of symbols in order to affect product awareness and cultural meaning,...

Globalization and technology transfer have led to the diffusion of risk communications to users from cultures that were not initially viewed as the target users. This study examined industry and trade workers' overall impressions of symbols used to convey varying degrees of hazardousness. Six symbols, including symbols from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Z535 Standard (ANSI, 1...

This chapter discusses cultures as analogues of actual environments, specifically socially constructed communities and the individuals who compose them. Analogues replace actual environments in human perception. Virtual communities provide context for this discussion. Virtual communities have evolved as analogues of actual communities to the degree that technology permits. Greater technological...

Although culture is central to understanding the nature of human societies, the relationships among culture, behavior and evolution are still controversial. Three approaches to cultural evolution -sociobiology, dual inheritance, and memes -are reviewed and it is shown that each makes use of an incomplete notion of what constitutes culture. None of them adequately takes into account the ideation...

Australian Aboriginal symbols are visual forms of knowledge that express cultural intellect. Being classified by a Western interpretation of “art” devalues thousands of years of generational knowledge systems, where visual information has been respected, appreciated and valued. This article highlights how Aboriginal creativity has little concept of aesthetical value, but is a cultural display o...

This paper focuses on the conflicts that arise in relation to “the place” of religious symbols in the public sphere, and, specifically, in State schools. Such conflicts, I believe, do not only reflect most of the dilemmas that liberal democracies face in the attempt to reconcile constitutionalism and religion through adherence to secularism in the public place—they actually challenge the very l...

This research provides experimental evidence for cultural influence on one of the most basic elements of emotional processing: attention to positive versus negative stimuli. To this end, we focused on Russian culture, which is characterized by brooding and melancholy. In Study 1, Russians spent significantly more time looking at negative than positive pictures, whereas Americans did not show th...