A Question of Semiotics

Again and again I experience in my entire life of the person or the other person does not always understand with which images I like to convey content and this has often led to misunderstandings.

I can still remember very well how I drew an animated film with a good, no with my best friend for a hobby project it was about a cinema for cuddly toys, so we were still very young and in this cinema should run an animated film.

Now I had drawn the film almost in individual pictures and thought about a story of cowboys who had made a robbery and were convicted for it and finally were dragged after Verden I know something cruel.

But it turned out that my best friend at the time could not see the connection of the story in any way, even if I commented on the pictures he meant to me and I really quote now that this is difficult to understand.

Now I experience this over and over again in my entire life that people, even if I tell anecdotes and use a pictorial language for it, never understand the connection, which for me is clearly logical.

Now I don't know if it's because I can always remember past events very well in certain areas and so I can use these pictures be it movies, books or other sources I can just remember it as if it was yesterday and so I have these vivid pictures in my head and can link them well with stories.

However, this does not seem so easy to others, even within my family, these misunderstandings keep popping up as I have memories of events that others have long forgotten and they are still very much alive in my memory.

Even in my recent past, these misunderstandings occur again and again on the images that I take for granted or self-explanatory are simply not understood by others or the context or the sense to these images is made.

In the course of my development, I have repeatedly dealt with the teaching of symbols and signs, i.e. semantics and semiotics, which both describe the effect and meaning of symbols, but they are also sub-areas of linguistics, philosophy and even cultural studies.

As you can see, this is a really wide area because symbols are all around us we are surrounded by them alone in road traffic we have a multitude of symbols, which are to show us unequivocally what we are allowed or what we have to pay attention to, since it would be more than devastating if a symbol were not clear.

Also elsewhere there are pictograms so simple pictures to find e.g. when going to the toilet there we have a male symbol and a female symbol and immediately we know that it is the men's toilet and that is the women's toilet, there are countless examples where these simple symbols help us to find our way.

So if we have it so easy to decipher these symbols, why are the images I use always so complicated to understand, these are too complex or I just think around too many corners.

I simply cannot answer this question because whenever I think about it, the examples that come to my mind are for me and I stress for myself now, always a glowing and self-explanatory, because I can make the reference to it.

So these pictures are these simple pictograms so unmistakable, because everyone can make the reference to it for himself, a simply depicted person with a skirt must be a female and without a skirt must be a male.

If everything is so easy to assign and you always need a reference, everyone else would have to make the same move with my things but then we come back to my memories or my good ability to remember certain things very well and if someone can not connect the same memories with these simple pictures that I use.

These images are not self-explanatory to someone else.

I am always surprised that things that seem totally self-evident to me and really very simple are simply not understood by others and I have to explain myself again and again, best examples are that the video and the blog entry on ‘no success on the Internet’ no one understood that there was a sense behind it that was not obvious.

I wanted to express in a simple and ironic way how hopelessly many try to earn with something like a block or another project on the Internet, because only a minority manages to do so.

The feedback comments received were mostly insults or accusations of how horny I would be because I talked about making money on the Internet and complained about how little money or how unsuccessful I am.

But no one had understood that this was meant ironically, I did not in any way make any assumption anywhere that I would like to earn money myself or would like to have donated.

I then added these options of donations with pleasure and until today I have only once received a donation of a larger sum for me, which I am still very pleased about today, but also amazed.

This example should only show how I caused a completely different effect with a actually funny text and provoked almost evil reactions.

And this happens to me again and again on every corner when I publish something.

I have not yet found a solution to this problem because no matter how I think about it or what approach I find for myself, the situation does not improve in any way.

So I have no choice but to explain to them the context that was simple and obvious to me and hope that the others will understand it and that this context will then also be revealed.

How do you deal with such misunderstandings and what experiences have you had?

Your Sasha

Watch this video on YouTube.