Symbols and Representation within Culture, Media, and Literature - Essay Example

An indisputable fact about the current world is the fact that symbols are used as a means of making sense of the world around us. Whereas the age-old quote that a picture is worth 1000 words is taken rather lightly, the fact of the matter is that the picture, and/or the symbol, is ultimately the means through which individuals seek to attribute meaning to the things they integrate within life. Although these symbols are in fact indicative of many parts of the world, they had been juxtaposed with regards to an interpretation of India; thereby referencing these three symbols to be distinctly part of the viewer’s interpretation of this particular geographic location.

Another powerful symbol is indicated with regards to the open commercialism that is referenced with respect to the Merk sponsorship that provided funding for the video itself. In seeking to represent Merk as a firm that was truly concerned with the healthcare outlook of the patients that it provides medicines for, individuals from all walks of life were brought in to provide a level of each post to the message. This powerful symbology sought to integrate an understanding on the part of the viewer that Merk was truly concerned with the individual and not merely the aggregation of a profit; something that could not be further from the truth.

The final symbols that this analysis will discuss with regards to the imagery of the Muslim man who was illiterate and foolish. Whereas any number of individuals could have been chosen as indicative of a religious bias towards vaccination, this particular individual, paraphrased in angry sentences and combated by nature, helped to reinforce the expectation that the viewer might have with regards to the typical Islamic response to Western and modern attempts at performing acts of kindness and goodness with regards to the poorest regions of the globe.

Likewise, with respect to a particular article that utilizes and discusses symbolic representations within the literature, the article that was chosen was represented within USA TODAY in late 2006. As such, the article discusses the means through which individuals, represented within some of the more well-known literature of our era, have come to live something of a separate life; even though they in fact never lived. What is meant by this is that the symbology and impacts that these individuals have had in the references to culture and the way through which individuals have come to identify with the world so demonstrably been impacted by such characters as George Orwell’s Winston Smith, that an alter ego and redefinition of our own society based around an Orwellian concept of what Winston Smith would experience, say, or how he would react with regards to a given situation have been evidenced. This is of course not to say the symbology within literature is meant to impact upon the choices, consciousness, and decisions that our own time integrates with. Rather, what can be understood, at least with regards to Orwell’s Winston Smith, is the fact that this individual was so perfectly cast and so indicative of a world gone mad, that he is continually evoked as the definition of a man seeking to make sense of the ridiculous system. The mere fact that such symbolic representations can take on a life of their own and redefine the way through which society integrates with the concept of reality and a definition thereof, points to the far-reaching and effective level of impact that such symbols represent to the reader, and to the informed individual (Deirdre, 2006). Naturally, such symbols take on such a life of their own that reversing them or seeking to interpret and through a different mechanism is oftentimes the story of how stereotypes are born and how difficult they are to race from the minds of individuals who have already incorporated into their worldview. Within such construct, symbols must be understood as a powerful mechanism through which understanding and identification take place.