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However, this is not the take that most comparisons of the verbals and visual forms take. Rather, they often try to make direct superficial analogies between specific types of structures. For example, "such and such" is the equivalent of a "word" or "sentence." This is often why many want to claim that single images have "grammar" — because a single image has lots of information in it, like a "sentence" and unlike a "word" — even though composition within single images behaves nothing like a grammar. (...nor should we expect it to given the differences between sound and light!)A similar endeavor has tried to find "minimal units" of the structure of the forms, following the school of Structuralism (most popular in American linguistics from around 1920-1960ish). However, again, just knowing minimal units doesn't tell you about the broader structure, and units larger than minimal units might also be useful and insightful. It also gives no beneficial comparison other than that "minimal units" exist in both domains.All of this is an argument for looking beyond the superficial understandings of "language" and to look for comparisons in deeper, more fundamental aspects of structuring.

clothes are as loaded with meaning as language. Visual semantics matter too.

In Tudor homes, where bedrooms were often pathways to other rooms or shared by several people, where there was no heating except open fires and fuel was scarce, well-to-do people usually dressed for bed in a nightgown, a nightcap and stockings. Even with a fire burning in  the hearth, glass or horn in the windows, and heavy bed-curtains, Tudor bedrooms could be chilly places. The modern viewer doesn’t take all this into account and expects to see near-total nudity in sex scenes.

Calling this historical drama, its clothes historical costumes, is like calling comics made by non-Japanese people in their own countries ‘manga’.

The prevalence of such curious language use led me to think that fan-writers must have influenced one another’s diction because they read so much of one another’s writing, with the result that they incorporated the idiosyncratic as the norm.

These are only surface manifestations.  There are deeper phenomena.  The foremost is that the world inhabited by the characters in some fan fiction reflects the limited experiences of the writers. 

There is nothing wrong with this if the characters are from the American middle class.  Unfortunately, many popular shows feature people not acculturated in such a milieu—Methos, Duncan MacCleod of the Clan MacCleod, Benton Fraser, Harry Potter, Snape, Tom Paris, Chakotay, Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon. . . .  Consequently, the specter of these characters spouting psychobabble is disconcerting, to say the very least.

Teachers sometimes complain that popular culture competes for the attention of their students, a claim that starts from the assumption that what kids learn from media is less valuable than what schools teach. Here, however, much of what is being mastered are things that schools try-and too often fail-to teach their students. (It has been said that if schools taught sex education the same way they taught writing, the human race would die out in a generation.)

such informal teaching occurs across a range of other online communities.

we could talk about young anime fans who are teaching each other Japanese language and culture in order to do underground subtitling of their favorite shows.

She identifies Pokémon as a media form that has defined the current framework, laying the groundwork for peer-to-peer communication and creation of media. While the current generation has outgrown Pokémon, the game franchise shaped how global youth think about culture and gaming. It linked analog and digital media, she proposes, by creating an electronic game that later manifested as a collectible card game, manga, anime, toys and other media. It put portability at the center of the media mix, and helped establish Japanese media content as a transnational source of cultural capital

She sees a generation of kids engaging in a set of cultural practices - cutting, pasting, linking and forwarding in spaces like MySpace

Individual identity is no longer consumer or producer - there’s a middle ground that includes connoisseur and amateur.

Linguistic violence is never so manifest as in all the corrections, momentary or long-lasting, to which dominated speakers, in a desperate effort towards correction, consciously or unconsciously subject the stigmatized aspects of their pronunciation, their vocabulary (with all the forms of euphemism) and their syntax; or in the confusion which makes them `lose their means', rendering them incapable of `finding their words', as if they had been suddenly dispossessed of their own language.(bolding mine)This is exactly what happens to Snape.

According to Bourdieu (from the same source as the quote above):Quote:Symbolic domination really begins when the misrecognition (méconnaissance) implied by recognition (reconnaissance) leads those who are dominated to apply the dominant criteria of evaluation to their own practices(bolding mine)Snape succumbs.

As far as one can make out from the current squabble in other fandoms, it is not academics as such who are disregarded or disdained by other fen.  It is, almost exclusively, the Faculty of English Language and Literature who have made themselves unwelcome.  This seems to me significant.  It seems to me more significant still that it is, so far as I can determine, primarily American dons of Frenchified theoretical leanings who are making themselves unpopular with the mass of fandom.  I mean, if the academic fen in question were, say, Womersley of St Catz, Shrimpton of LMH, or Turner of Jesus, let alone Jenkyns of LMH, I shouldn’t expect the same quarrel to have arisen. My primary point is simply that this seems not to be a case in other fandoms of something I’ve never seen and don’t anticipate seeing in mine: of ‘the revolting peasants rising against their intellectual superiors’ or of ‘all academics sucking the soul out of fandom like so many Dementors’, which appear to be the two rallying cries here.  One simply doesn’t observe this sort of anger’s attaching to historians or those who read Law at university or even to wild-eyed, Balliol-Wadham-and-Grauniadista sociologists and anthropologists, at least not in my fandom.  Therefore, I submit that it is misleading and contrary to resolution of the quarrel to cast it in terms of all fen in all fandoms against all academics of all schools of thought.