The Icon Is Broken

In a globalized world saturated with electronic and print media, image gains a considerable prominence in the process of communication. The image, however, is primarily connotative, rather than denotative. Images have primarily been able to signify through iconography. They now must primarily depend upon indexical signification, and therefore be reduced to denotation. The icon is broken. Indeed, many icons are made and broken each day -- they have no holding power, an authority that used to depend upon a stable, continuous, cultural backdrop. One of the instrinsic differences between the citizen and the tourist used to be their ability to 'read' their environment, understand the many invisible signifiers by which they are constantly surrounded. Now we are all becoming tourists in our own environs -- there is indeed, as Odo Marquand put it, a feeling of “strangeness before the world”.