Assignment 7

In this week’s lecture we discussed the concept of the “symbolic universe” as a cultural “structure of legitimation” capable of organizing the social world as comprehensible and connected. The structure of the symbolic universe then, places the individual in a known and knowable space. Such social structures are critical for societies in transition. Can you identify the creation of any “symbolic universe” today (or in recent years)? How might media and design be implicated in the construction of these social universes today?

An example of a “symbolic universe” today (or in recent years) is the search engine. Like Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in internet search, cloud computing, advertising technologies, and search engines. Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. By 1996 usage of the word internet had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its use as a synecdoche in reference to the World Wide Web. “Symbolic universes are created to provide legitimation to the created institutional structure. Symbolic universes are a set of beliefs “everybody knows” that aim at making the institutionalized structure plausible for the individual”(The social construction of reality, P.Berger,T.Luckmann, 1966)

I believe that this is an example of a “symbolic universe” because it’s creating a new way of people thinking. People used to learn by someone else or reading book to get knowledge if they do not know something. The search engine give us great opportunity to get using it. The future will be the internet. The internet, this new media has affected this social universe

Reference: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Reality