Humans make sense of the world by describing it. A person may describe relationships among the elements of matter or energy that make up a representation to define how it exists, and to differentiate the representation from other information. Generally, a person describes a particular system, set of information, or representation as if it exists in a fixed state, even though the thing described or its surroundings are always changing.This is a pretty useful way to talk about things, because**. Our conceptualizations and descriptions of stillness and motion affect how we interpret information, develop significance, and approximate meaning. This section explores the conditions that allow movement to happen, and the situations that allow us to discern movement. how we use our minds to put things together and tell things apart, and how things are pulled together or pushed apart. It's about?? This section explores how a person knows there's a particular system or set of information, how one discerns amongst the information in a system, and what's necessary to participate in and describe an interpretation. Shift/change lenses. the ability to impose stillness is the ability to limit motion(?)

A system distinguishes a particular set of matter and energy and its behaviors over an interval of time. So a system can be described by its elements and their behavior. This description excludes everything which is not described as an element or behavior of the system from the system.

To discover how significance and meaning relate to representations that exist in a particular communication system, a person must first be able to analyze and describe how information exists and is transformed in that system. Thus, a person needs to be able to do the following things:

1) define the components of the system that carry information to be transformed, and the components of the system that transform that information

2) define how each component of a system exists at any point in time and behaves over an interval of time.

3) define how the rules by which an area of information in the system can exist in relation to any particular component of the system at any given time

Rules limit and organize the different parts of the communication system that produces meanings about fashionable goods. They describe and approximate how each component of the system may exist and behave by expressing the limitations that apply to each type of component of the system, and the rigidity or flexibility of those limitations.

A rule is:

A statement specifying what is permissible under given circumstances... the rules of grammar state which linguistic transformations (e.g., from active into passive sentence construction) are possible ... rules tend to leave a user, whether he be a chess player or a native speaker, alternatives and specify constraints within which he may choose. (Krippendorff) http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/Rule.html

An exhaustive description of a system's components eliminates information and situations that cannot be part of that system by omission. These constraints affect a person's final interpretation of a particular subject because they limit choice to a certain range of possible combinations cantained by the system and its elements.

The information used to create a description is gathered through observation.

When a person looks at a magazine page, she becomes part of a communication system.(and an observer?)

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