The writing on the screen: A meditation on the Virginia Tech shooting spree: Age-appropriate use of violent first-person computer games
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Camilla Benolirao Griggers
Abstract
This article uses general semantics and somatics to evaluate the age-appropriate use of violent first-person shooter computer games. The paper argues that the natural development sequence for children and teens is from physiologic language to natural language, and from somatic-emotional patterning to higher level cognitive abstractions. Reversing this natural sequence can create psychotic breaks in which semantics become separated from somatic reality. References are made to Alfred Korzybski's examples of semantic breakdowns in Science and sanity (1933) and to discussion of the role of mirror neurons in somatic-emotional development (Ramachandran and Oberman, Scientific American 295: 62–69, 2006). Seung-Hui Cho of the Virginia Tech shooting spree, who compulsively played computer games, is used as a case study.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- The sense of the interface: Applying semiotics to HCI research
- Sign, mind, time, space: Contradictory complementary coalescence
- Meanings of communication: Comparative terminological studies of a cultural concept and its variations in the multilingual society of India
- Troubles with trichotomies: Reflections on the utility of Peirce's sign trichotomies for social analysis
- Paleolithic finger flutings as efficient communication: Applying Zipf's Law to two panels in Rouffignac Cave, France
- The pragmatic maxim of the mature Peirce regarding its special normative function
- The writing on the screen: A meditation on the Virginia Tech shooting spree: Age-appropriate use of violent first-person computer games
- Genre as social indexicality: A cross-cultural analysis of English and Chinese love poems
