Traditionally, says Blonsky, semiotics has done little about such reverses of its theory, tending to try only to "deconstruct" each ads to show why they are attractive. Books like Gadvich's Gender Advertising have picked apart such ads to show what kinds of needs the ads are addressing. For example, ads in which women are playfully sprayed at with hoses, or hit with pillows, have, according to Godvich, emphasized a cultural tendency to want to see women babied. However, new kinds of advertisements have shifted away from cultural tendencies like these to take on newer, more diverse ones.

For example, Godvich notes, MTV, among the largest and most well-known fads in America today, uses completely contradiction methods of association. Songs The Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney's recent hit Say Say Say" are coupled with imaginative relevant narrative that in turn gives a structure to the song that was not there before. Another example that Blonsky cites is that of the old "Grape Nuts" television ad which associated with the idea of the cereal, the study of an old man and his grandson walking through the woods, the old man teaching the child to avoid bears with a grape nut clenched firmly in his hand. According to Blonsky, the otherwise irrelevant ideas of the hand of God, generational change and adventure are associated with generation. The ability to make such a link, asserts Blonsky, means a new kind of applicability of semiotics, from the point of view not of the contestor, but of the contestee.

But critics of the semiotic field say that nothing the semioticians are doing is actually very new. Jane Fitzgibbon, a researcher at the advertising first of Young and Rubicam says she "was not convinced that [the discipline] was more than a formalization of knowledge [her firm] already [uses]." Her sense of the subject, even after taking Blonsky's course, was that it not only seemed a sure formalization, but it also was always caucused in the term of a mysterious" conspiracy," as if there was someone using the plan against the public. Her firm, she says, merely caters to the "certain things that all human beings associated," and she gives the example of baked goods as always tapping into one's traditional vision of childhood, adding that, as awful as some symbols are, the red cross is always a hopeful symbol that can mean good things to people. Others, however, like Director of Production Sam Shahib of Calvin Klein, are openly critical. "It was just a great visual," he says, of the controversial ad. No way.

But despite Shahib, Fitzgibbon and others, Godvich, Blonsky and Jardine all agree that change is imminent in the semiotic field. Yet while Jardine sees that change as purely academic, Blonsky, Godvich and the Brown are noting with increasing interest what new organizations are taking an interest in the field.

Michael Silverman, director of the semiotics department at Brown notes that this year he received several calls from English ad agencies looking to interview graduates in the next few years. Godvich also cites interest on behalf of the CIA, as well as other government agencies. And Blonsky in particular, from the standpoint of running one of the few companies in the country actively researching on a semiotic basis. Says not only has there been an increase of interest in companies, but also among of the government and the military.

A recent Blonsky study looked into the RCA videodisc. The videodisc is a product that actively involves the viewer in choosing among 54 places in a program to start, but the video disc falied because it involved the viewer too much in a product that he or she had become to used to using as a drug. Blonsky and his colleague Edmundo Des Noes studied the product and made an offer to the ocmpany of a video program that would use the ability of the machine to involve the viewer to actively engage their semiotic interest. They wrote up a script which included several different symbolic choices as part of what was essentially a video game except that the viewer would make choices between turning down a street to follow a flying dollar bill or stopping into an exciting-looking disco where love seems to await.

RCA was not interested in the product and declined says Blonsky for much the same reasons that the America public decline to pick up on video discs, but Blonsky and Des Noes continued their study and concluded ironically that their product would be of greater interest to organizations like the military, which uses machines to train recruits to make the right kinds of choice. A product like the RCA modification could be used in helping to construct reactions.

But what about mind control How likely is that semiotics could be turned around on the members of the culture that invented at Despite studies of places like Castro's Cuba there researchers seem fairly certain that the possible ends of the project are not nefarious. Blonsky and Des Noes contend that there are mostly hopeful possibilities for the ideas in semiotics helpful ideas for ways in which businesses can encourage new and important already accepted social trends. Since all of the analysts agree that the systems which semiotic advertising tap into have to exist-before the tapping can go on, they feel that semiotics is most likely only a positive study. And although Jardine notes that she can see a "grey area" where the discipline might be turned towards mind control, she concludes the person would have to be really twisted to do it.

If by chance you have read this far in the article looking for how to fall in love you have just seen how a semiotic effect works.