Beauty, DA, Message Propagation and everything in Between.....

After an extensive absence....I'm back, in black!!!...hahaha....'nways I was reading Dr. Wachanga's post and several point resonated within me but it also raised some questions. I generated some insight as to what beauty really is. I believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. With this said, there are many beholders on earth.... there's different perspectives, too many to keep track but they can be grouped when they reach a consensus of what beauty really is. I agree there is different people and different beauty according to culture, generation, race, age, etc. but before that we need to define what is beauty? Is there a universal standard of beauty? Is beauty measured inside or outside the person? This interpretation of beauty is purely subjective. Beauty depends on a person's views and morals. I was watching a documentary on human sexual evolution and it explained how human genitals evolve to where they are now. For the first time, I understood natural selection because they proceed to explain that women preferred muscular guys because they would be better providers and that guys preferred women with wide hip for child rearing. In all of this, beauty was in the ability to survive and move the species forward. What is the beauty of our time? Girls worry about being skinny like the women on TV and movies, but I read that those skinny women only constitute a small percentage of the population so they are not correctly representing the image of beauty or perhaps by us allowing ourselves to idolize these skinny women, we are responsible for the distorted view of beauty.

Moreover, Discourse Analysis I thinks has changed with time and the generations. Now with all this technology, we find things to say in the simplest ways that we think but in reality they complicate us even more. For example, people don't even talk to each other anymore. I rather text someone than quickly phone them and speak. The language has also changed, in a way changing they way we interact. Now the less words to a conversation, the better but we are failing to realize that this new way of communication is sometime alienating to older generations. I feel that sometimes the way we say things can alter profoundly they way a person reacts to something spoken. Therefore, even though two phrases are literally identical, they have no relation in the meaning when they are spoken.

All of this would then take us to Message Propagation. Back a few years in a communication class, I learnt about the process of communicating and in the diagram there was something called noise. If I remember correctly, noise was everything that was around the intended message. Well, message propagation is not about meaning but disseminating information, wouldn't the noise be part of the message given that it doesn't require any translation? For example, animals communicate differently than humans. To us the sounds they make might seem like noise but to their species is information. Another thing, if message propagation doesn't rely on meaning then How can we have understanding without meaning? or viceversa, how can make sense of something if we don't know what it is? if it's not clearly defined?.Who defines it? by what criteria? age, sex, race?...Once again, I think this life is just a *bit* subjective......