Subjectivity and Semiotic Discourse

James Paul Gee in his book What Video Games can Teach Us about Learning and Literacy spends a lot of time talking about the semiotic discourses of video games-- how gammers have a vocabulary onto themselves and how different games create different discourses, but that video games are extremely collaborative-- more than might initially meet the eye.

Robyn McCullum in her book Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction addresses subjectivity and intersubjectivity while looking at psychological theory. She says, "BakhtinÂ’s ideas about language acquisition are pertinent to the analysis of novels which represent the movement out of solipsism as taking place within a context which is culturally and/or linguistically alien and which depict characters appropriating and assimilating the discourses of others" (104).

McCullum's quote brings me back to Gee and semiotic discourse. Adolescents understand one another--whether in books or in real life-- but they do so by developing their own discourse. They don't need academic discourse or their parent's discourse-- they use the discourse of video games, of instant messenger, of... Being an adolescent has always had an element of adapting to someone else's discourse. Now though, the discourse often results from new media rather than traditional media-- however, we know the language of technology is lasting, while constantly evolving, because it does appear in print.