This essay should be about "contested meaning", a discussion of what the true meaning of something, of someone, is. The only problem is that meaning is simply something humans make up. All this “meaning” that humans talk about is just a set of connections we have created through knowing other connections we have created. If we step back far enough in time we can take the example of a non-sentient creature. This creature was imbued with certain patterns that its ancestors saw not change over the generations, and we called these instincts. But how (draw a good example perhaps from a tiger cub learning and playing). Wrapped up in this meaning of the word, we often attach a value that goes along with this meaning. It is very difficult and very rare for a single person or a small faction to create value in a single thing or concept. Instead, these meanings are passed down to people by those higher up the political ladder. This political scale is the same one that MacDonald writes about, referring more to the “broad sense of the functioning of power” (190) and the hierarchy of that system rather than electoral systems, etc. It is in this way that the "haves" exercise their hegemonic power over the "have-nots". This hegemony is fueled, supported and guided by the media and by a certain control they exercise and give. As a result of media control, the “haves,” through the media's selling of identity rather than product, create the ideal person that consumers strive to be. Kline states this in his documentary “No Logo”. By creating something that the consumer strives to be, he has invisibly shown his controlling arm; if one fights for something, it's f...... middle of paper......a revolution. Would overthrowing this hegemony be possible or even advantageous? Could there be a movement towards a completely “Open source” language system, as has happened with computer operating systems? Don't you see the need for change since we don't pay for language like we do with operating systems? Well, we don't pay with money. Language is just meaning and this meaning consists of nothing more than random connections that man has made to try to bring order to the chaos of the world. This assembly of the signifier (the word) and the signified (what the word describes) has no other foundation than that inherited from tradition. Would the world be worse if a cow's name was "duck"? Most of the human population is forced only into a certain set of actions by the media, by man, by their own language. There is some escape from this??