Signs, symbols, and youth culture as a meaning system

A sign, the essay says, is the joining of a signifier and a signified. Saussure looked at that relation, or at the relations among signs in a text, but not at the social and cultural relation between signs and a reader. Barthes widens the idea and divides signification into two stages. Denotation is the first, generally accepted dictionary sense. Connotation grows from that literal sense; it is not fixed in the same way, and it extends or brings forward another meaning. Connotative signifiers are made of denotative signs. A symbol is an arbitrary, conventional link between a sign and an object, read by a rule or by habit; without learning it, the link cannot be understood. Letters are named as the most representative case. In Peirce’s wording, as the essay reads it, a symbol cannot point to an individual thing; it designates a kind, and the symbol itself is a kind. A symbol is not a habitual concept; it is habit itself, the custom a community shares.

Youth culture is culture shared by young people — patterns of conduct, ways of thinking, and styles that set them apart from children or adults — though personal tastes still differ. Culture does not appear in only one form; each society has a culture of its own, and cultures should not be ranked. Inside youth culture there is further variety by gender, school level, region, interest, and age. Young people learn culture in everyday life; new content is added as it passes from one generation to the next, and clubs and circles store a collective culture as rules or practices. The parts of a group’s culture hold together as a system, and the educational and social setting around it should be taken as a whole. Youth culture is always changing. Because young people are sensitive to social change and take up new fads first, the look of that change can be called more dynamic than change in other cultures.

Han in everyday Korean life, and youth game culture after COVID-19

For a case in everyday Korean life, the essay turns to han, often named as the most Korean of sentiments. It brings into the open a heavy pain hidden deep in Korean people, a deep sorrow shaped, through a slow repeating expression, as the beautiful tragedy of a life. It does not name life and death, meeting and parting, love and hate, or success and failure themselves, but the inner movement of the person who faces them — a piteous beauty, or a dazzling compassion for beings whose fate is to perish. Han accumulates over a long span of living together, through a shared fate, a caring heart, an unreserved closeness, a going beyond calculation, and a long staying-together. The path of living without being wounded is compared to water, meeting what is strong softly. Because han carries the image of tears, rain that falls on a sad day is often taken as if even the sky were not indifferent.

With the growth of communications technology, and with smartphones now widespread, games have become a part of daily life for Korean youth. After COVID-19, left as the essay places that period, the number of people who play rose sharply, and young people make up a large share. Content and form can bear on taste, worldview, and values. Survey findings, left undated, place frequent sensational or violent scenes as later tied to copycat crime and a confusion of ethics. Games can offer a wish to imitate, and one undated survey places more frequent exposure to such scenes with a stronger related impulse. In the COVID-19 period, addiction, including to online gambling games, is placed as more serious, with a confused line between reality and the virtual, and a rise in attempts to take money or valuables for a game; addiction is still often judged only as a personal pathology. The educational task is to admit that games can bear on negative conduct, but not to assume that long hours of play unconditionally cause it, to study the effects over a long term, to look into domestic and foreign norms, and to approach games also as an industry, a sport, and a culture. This page stays with the COVID-19 period and with those undated findings as they are placed, and does not add later official tallies of youth culture or of play. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A sign is the joining of a signifier and a signified, and that joining means a signification. Signification of this kind has two large sorts. Saussure considered signification by centering on the relation of signifier and signified in a sign, or on the relations among signs in a text, but that view has a definite limit: it does not consider at all the social and cultural relation between signs and a reader. Barthes, extending Saussure’s idea, adds a cultural dimension to Saussure’s term signification and divides the process of signification clearly into two stages. From this, denotative meaning and connotative meaning can be known. Denotative meaning is the first meaning that arises in a sign from the relation of signifier and signified, that is, the meaning generally accepted by everyone, as it appears in a dictionary. It can therefore be called the literal meaning, the lexical meaning. There would be many words as examples of denotative meaning. The word “word,” which this report itself uses often, is also used only in the dictionary sense of “word,” only in the literal sense of “word.” Connotative meaning, by contrast, is generally a meaning that arises from the literal meaning of a sign; unlike denotative meaning, it is not in principle fixed, but means the extending or bringing forward of another meaning on top of the denotative meaning. That producing words interpreted in a connotative sense has a positive effect on the side of communication is certain. The difference between denotative and connotative meaning appears in the signifier among signs, and connotative signifiers are composed of denotative signs. Several fragments of denotative meaning can be seen as being made into a systemic unit of connotative meaning. Generally, a symbol means that there is an arbitrary relation between a sign and an object. Between the two there is no similar quality at all, and the relation is fundamentally arbitrary and conventional. Unless one learns it, the relation between the two cannot be understood. A symbol can be seen as a sign that designates an object on the basis of a rule. A rule is “a set of general concepts that cause a symbol to be interpreted as designating an object.” We interpret such symbols according to a rule or a habitual association. Simply put, “a symbol is a conventional sign, a sign that depends on habit (innate or acquired).” The most representative example of a symbol among signs can be seen as letters. Here a symbol can be seen as one type among signs. Yet Peirce’s statement implies that a symbol goes beyond a type of sign and is habit and convention themselves. “A symbol cannot point to any individual thing. It designates a kind of thing. The symbol itself is a kind, not a singular thing.” A sign without agreement on habit or convention is not a symbol among signs. So it designates only a universal concept and cannot designate an individual thing. It is the way of thinking that, as a general concept, everyone thinks that way, and on the world it is precisely the habit and the custom that a community in some one place shares with one another. A symbol is not a habitual concept; it is habit itself. Youth culture has several traits. Youth culture is culture shared by the members of a youth society. Of course those members will have unusual personal tastes. But, unlike that, they have common leanings that can distinguish them from other groups. When it is related to youth culture, youth culture is culture shared by youth. That is, unlike children or adults, the patterns of conduct and ways of thinking, and the various styles, shared among young people can be seen as youth culture. Just as a way of adapting to an environment differs according to the social situation, culture too does not exist in only one form but appears in various ways. That is, cultural relativism, that each society has a unique culture, should be admitted, and an evaluation of superiority among cultures should not be made. In this light, youth culture too can be seen as one among the various cultures of a society. If one looks inside youth culture, one can see that there are various cultures here as well. That is, the single category “youth” can be subdivided by various criteria such as gender, school level, region, area of interest, and age, and the youth cultures that appear accordingly will also appear in various ways. Young people learn culture through everyday life. Youth culture, as culture goes through generations to the next generation, has new content added to the existing culture and accumulated. It has the trait that, as time passes, the storehouse of culture expands. When youth culture is understood, this trait that culture is newly accumulated should also be considered. That is, youth groups and clubs and circles that young people enter will share a collective culture in their own way, and such a culture is accumulated in the form of a group’s rules or practices. In youth culture, the culture of one social group is composed of a great many parts, and these various parts do not exist at random or each independently; they maintain close mutual relations and form one whole or system. In understanding youth culture as well, in order to understand such types and traits, the complex context surrounding youth culture should be understood. The educational systems that affect young people’s lives should also be considered, and various social and cultural environments, institutions, and practices should be grasped as a whole. Youth culture is not standing still; it is always changing. Culture is accumulated, and through learning it is continually inherited, but in that process it has the trait of always involving change. That youth culture too is continually changing should be kept in mind. In conclusion, because young people are sensitive to social change and play a pioneering role in accepting new fads, the appearance of change in youth culture can be called more dynamic than change in other cultures. As a representative case of the concept of culture as a system of symbols and meanings, found in the everyday life of Korean young people, Korean culture has various sentiments, and among them the idea of “han” is well known. Not only people from elsewhere but people in this country also most often name han as the most Korean sentiment. Han brings into the open a heavy pain hidden deep in Korean people. Han can be called a “deep sorrow,” and from that pain, through an expression distinctive to this country, slow and repeating, it shows itself outwardly in the form of a fine painting, and is shaped as the beautiful tragedy of a life. In this there is a tension that makes the familiar strange, and a slow reversal. “Han” does not speak of life and death, or of the meeting and parting of lovers, of love and hate, or of success and failure themselves; it speaks of the inner movement of the person who has faced these. “Han” is the “piteous beauty” stirred by a longed-for scene that beckons to us, or the “dazzling compassion” stirred by beings whose fate is that they must perish; perhaps this is the common atmosphere that surrounds us. Han is a state of feeling felt as it has been accumulated while Korean people have lived over a long period. For Korean people, han arises, first, through a shared fate when people suffer together and share joy together; second, through a caring heart when one does not want something from the other and cherishes and considers the other; third, through an unreserved closeness when one feels intimacy without formality toward the other and the mutual boundary has disappeared; fourth, through a going beyond calculation when one understands the other and transcends the distinction between each other; and last, through a long staying-together when one has spent a long time or many years with the other. “Han” is that the path of living without being wounded is only the path of dealing softly, without standing up against, like water, and of invisibly rinsing and wiping and seeping into the things that are strong. Han is also thought of as stimulating sadness. Because han has the image of tears and of sorrow, when one has met a sad matter and rain happens to fall, people say even the sky is not indifferent and has sent rain, and the sadness is heightened. People have a tendency, according to their own mental state, to identify the natural phenomena around them as if they were their own situation. Next, the present state of youth game culture appearing in Korean society, its problems, and its educational tasks are taken up. Recently, with the development of information and communications technology, young people have grown up on the basis of a cultural environment formed by games, and at present the spread of smartphones has become general, so that games have taken a place as a part of life. Yet social traits such as rapid economic growth and fast industrialization and computerization have the possibility of easily exposing young people to a harmful environment, and they show the possibility of a negative effect. Because the content and form of the games young people encounter can have a negative effect on their cultural tastes and on the forming of a worldview and of values, the significance is large. After COVID-19, the number of people who enjoy games rose sharply. Among them, young people occupy a large share. That games have an effect on young people is a matter that has steadily received interest from various people, including parents, teachers, and civic groups. Through games, young people show a look of uncritically accepting the content they encounter. It is not that a game itself, because it includes sensational or violent content, is unconditionally harmful to a person; regulatory measures should be prepared with the effects on people in view, yet through the social environment in the COVID era in which people can be exposed to games, and through the sharp increase in internet use, a need for those regulatory measures to be further strengthened is being raised. That games have an effect on young people is a matter that has steadily received interest from various people, including parents, teachers, and civic groups. Among these, young people show a look of uncritically accepting the content they encounter through games and the like, and survey findings have also come out that if the sensationalism and violence appearing on television and in games occur frequently, they later give young people negative effects such as copycat crime and a confusion of ethics. The most important problem of games that affect young people is the point that games can be a medium that can have sensationalism, violence, and the like. It is not that a game itself, because it includes sensational or violent content, is unconditionally harmful to young people; restriction measures are being prepared with the effects on them in view. But a need for those regulatory measures to be further strengthened through the social environment in which young people can be exposed to games, and through the sharp increase in internet use, is being raised. The youth period is a period in which a human being establishes a sense of self, and it is called a “period of storm and stress.” Various developmental tasks are accomplished, but various problem behaviors or negative feelings are also expressed. The effects that games have on young people can be seen as very various. First, a game expresses online the actions, wants, and so on that one cannot accomplish in reality. Young people show a look of wanting to imitate the figures who appear in a game, and they decorate or manipulate a game character into the ideal appearance they themselves want. And what they are not superior at in reality they express easily online, and while playing a game for long hours they show a look of trying to make the game and reality one, and they also show a look of trying to imitate the actions, wants, and so on in the game and to show them as they are in reality. Therefore it can be said that games provide young people with a wish to imitate. Also, through the violence, sensationalism, and the like that games possess, they can be seen as promoting negative impulses in young people. As a result of one research survey, among young people exposed to games for long hours, it was revealed that the more frequently they were exposed to a violent or sensational particular scene, the more they felt a related impulse. This means that, as access to negative scenes through the game medium becomes easier, what students feel about a negative act, and the impulse that arises from this, are related. Therefore it can be seen that games cause young people to have an imitative psychology and have an effect in arousing an impulse so that they resolve a want or a discontent they could not express in everyday life. And as violent or sensational scenes are easily exposed, they have an effect in causing young people to feel a negative act and an impulse and to express this in conduct. Recently, in the COVID-19 era, a serious game-addiction problem has become still more of a problem, and when activity outside became impossible because of COVID-19, people who had fallen into addiction to online gambling games became unable to distinguish reality and the virtual and became unable to distinguish whether it was gambling or a game, and a tendency to attempt taking money or valuables and the like for a game is said to have increased. Such conduct can also be a cause that gives rise to various problems occurring in society and to other crime. Among the causes of coming to such conduct there were online games, and in this way online game addiction has taken a place as a main cause that makes people become violent, yet this indicates that addiction to games itself is judged merely as a personal pathological phenomenon and that proper measures have not been devised. Social traits such as rapid economic growth and fast industrialization and computerization have the possibility of easily exposing people to a harmful environment, and they show the possibility of a negative effect. As for the educational task, one should admit that games can have an effect on people’s negative conduct, but one should leave the thought that, just because a person plays a game for long hours, people’s negative conduct will unconditionally appear, and one should admit that other factors that give a negative effect also exist. A game is only a game, and one should not be caught in the prejudice that the whole industry related to games brings people a negative effect and arouses impulse. Rather, there is a need to grasp these problems and the present situation properly and to carry out systematic, long-term research on how games give people a negative effect. And because the game industry is widening not only in this country but around the world, there is a need to investigate effective norms or regulations and the like for domestic and foreign games and, in relation to this, to search for effective ways that will weaken the negative functions of games and strengthen the useful functions. Also, there is a need not to treat games unconditionally as a harmful medium, but to approach them in the dimension of an industry, a sport, and a culture, and, in order to resolve the negative conduct of people that appears because of game addiction, the game-addiction problem should be understood at the root and dealt with. This page stays with the COVID-19 period and with the undated survey findings as the essay places them, and does not add later official tallies of youth culture or of play.

Last updated: 14 November 2026