Be critical.

Look at the issue from as many sides as possible.

Try to find the meaning in the signs and signals you’re receiving.

These are very abridged versions of things I was taught in my Communications coursework. The idea behind a lot of the work, especially in higher-level courses, was to learn how signs are made, coded, and interpreted. Once you’ve got a grasp on those concepts, the next big step is applying and contextualizing them across disciplines. The common colloquialism was lenses. “How does that register through a rhetorical lens?” “Looking through a semiotic lens, what can you ascertain?” “Looking through your PR lens, what was the goal?”

After years of that, it becomes difficult to look at something and say that it just is. Nothing just is, not even on the trick questions. Everything communicates something. And on the off chance something just is, we can apply the magic of semiotics and ascribe our own meaning to it anyway (Semiotics is its own can of worms, which I’ll get into on a day I’m feeling extra cynical).

There’s a lot more to it than that, but for the crashest of crash courses, it’ll do. In the future, I’ll break into some examples of looking through these lenses and explain some of these symbols I’ll even grab my texts and notes, so I can come at this in a format that isn’t a stream-of-consciousness ramble. At least one of my presentation engagements has fallen through, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, Instead of getting too flustered about it, I decided a better use of my time was making sure I set this blog up correctly, while letting myself get stuck in the past a bit.

Provided this all goes smoothly, the next post will be some background narrative on my latest D&D character, a Changeling intentionally crib swapped into a noble family. See you then.