ABSTRACT
Exercise 2.6 shows something of the complexity involved in trying to decipher the meaning that representations have to their audiences. Your answers to this exercise rely on judgements made at the present day, whereas this picture comes from a guidebook first printed in the 1950s and withdrawn from circulation in the early 1970s. Understandably, it is now difficult to ask people whether the picture was effective or not. It relates to a time many years ago and, even if it were possible to find people who used this guidebook, there is no guarantee that their recollections would accurately reflect how they felt at the time. The comments reproduced above also relate to the series of guidebooks as a whole, not to the specific picture shown in Figure 2.5. Moreover, although the author notes that his conclusions are based on independently commissioned survey work, it is unclear to what extent these particular conclusions were based on any specific research, such as survey questions, or were just the writer’s independent judgements. We certainly need to know more about how these conclusions were reached before accepting the author’s conclusions at face value. The conceptual and methodological issues involved are studied in the next chapter, where we examine issues raised by the wider social context of environmental representations.
