Semiotic democracy is a phrase first coined by
John Fiske, a
media studies professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...
, in his seminal media studies book ''Television Culture'' (1987).
[John Fiske, ''Television Culture'' (Routledge, 1987).] Fiske defined the term as the "delegation of the production of meanings and pleasures to
elevision'sviewers."
Fiske discussed how rather than being passive couch potatoes that absorbed information in an unmediated way, viewers actually gave their own meanings to the shows they watched that often differed substantially from the meaning intended by the show's producer.
Subsequently, this term was appropriated by the technical and legal community in the context of any re-working of
cultural imagery by someone who is not the original author. Examples include
fan fiction and
slash fiction
Slash fiction (also known as "m/m slash") is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex.Bacon-Smith, Camille. "Spock Among the Women." New York Times Sunday Book Review, ...
.
Legal scholars are concerned that just as technology eases the process of cheaply making and distributing derivative works imbued with new cultural meanings available to wide public,
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
and
right-to-publicity law is clamping down on and limiting these works, thus reducing their promulgation, and limiting semiotic democracy.
Prof.
Terry Fisher of
Harvard Law School has written about semiotic democracy in the context of the crisis facing the entertainment industry and in terms of the ability of people to use the Internet in creative new ways.
[William W Fisher, ''Promises to Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment'' (Stanford University Press, 2004).]
See also
*
Détournement
*''
Textual Poachers''
*
Reader-response criticism
Reader-response criticism is a School of thought, school of literary theory that focuses on Reading (process), the reader (or "audience") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primar ...
*
Reception theory
Reception theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes each particular reader's reception or interpretation in making meaning from a literary text. Reception theory is generally referred to as audience reception in the an ...
*
Encoding/decoding model of communication
References
Further reading
*
Sonia KatyalSemiotic Disobedience 84 Washington U. L. Rev. (2006)
Media studies
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