BINARY OPOSITIONS

Structuralism aims to…

• ‘uncover the conceptual structures by which various cultures organize their perception and understanding of the world’ 

•  ‘Structuralism’s enterprise is to discover how people make sense of the world, not what the world is…’

Binary opposition In structuralism, a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language. In the community of philosophers and scholars, most believe that "unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn't really a distinction. Binary opposition divides the understanding of the world in two :

The most common biblical example of the binary division: 

And this division makes the two groups reassuring, helpful, convenient…

 The other obvious binary opposition is in every heroic comic book:

It is helpful for a good super hero to refer to a bad super hero, because it implies that he is good.

Another good example for that is also recognized in some video games:

‘Ideologies like to draw rigid boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not, between self and non-self, truth and falsity, sense and nonsense, reason and madness, central and marginal, surface and depth.’

Terry Eagleton

The game creates your character as a normal person in real life, just in fast forward mode. Based on your every decision you become good or evil.

My personal opinion is that most of the time in media, binary opposition is used to show the audience which is bad or wrong to do and which is right. I understand it as some kind of a lesson.

Structuralism is an intellectual movement that developed in France in the 1950s and 1960s, in which human culture is analyzed semiotically (i.e., as a system of signs). Today structuralism is less popular than approaches such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. There are many reasons for this. Structuralism has often been criticized for being historical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of people to act.

Post-structuralism : The author's intended meaning, such as it is (for the author's identity as a stable "self" with a single, discernible "intent" is also a fictional construct), is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text. Nowadays with the development of film visual effects, the image of what we are supposed to bake in our brains is already created for us, ready in front of us. This limits the different understandings to minimum. The disadvantage is that our imagination is not being developed, but on the other hand we receive tons of information in an hour and a half.