Harrell’s piece on Phantasmal Media and semiotics was honestly a pretty confusing read to me. It was a bit dense and difficult to parse through, so it took me a while to get through. I was mostly confused about a lot of the terms, particularly at the beginning, where these words were used with little context.

Near the end of the section, Harrell talks more about basic semiotic concepts, morphic semiotics, and semiotic spaces, which gave me a little more insight into these areas. Semiotics is the study of signs. Harrell also talks about Peirce’s classification and incorporation of interpretants to invoke unlimited semiosis, which I really agree with – the concept of having infinite interpretations of symbols depending on who is viewing them is something we’ve already seen with our self-portraits, for example.

The section on Brawn at the Bazaar was definitely very interesting to me. One question I had was whether epistemic domains contained cultural/ethical/moral beliefs, or if there was any distinction between them, as it seemed the definition just seemed to include those. I found the comparison between Brawn and the Simple Seller Representation really interesting, especially the qualities we use between an in-person and computational seller model. I think there’s a lot of questions to be answered here about how much we allow computational seller models to mimic those in real-life, balancing giving buyers a more realistic experience versus opening the gates for possible discrimination.