Semiotics: Or Why TV Tropes Will Enhance Your Life

The “54 Most Central Pages on TV Tropes” by Elijah Meeks, A map of a small part of TV Tropes.

There exists a concept in academia that an integral part of making any map is the acknowledgement of words as a shaper of geography.
The language used in a maps creation grants an incomparable sense of the purpose for the map, but it also imparts an impression of the ideas and personal connection to the mapped subject itself revealing the map for what it is: a symbol used to effectively perceive a reality.

This concept of reality formed by communication and symbolism is not a purely theoretical concept however, adherents of traditional Australian Aboriginal culture and members of a virtual networks alike embrace this concept in their everyday lives.
The Aboriginal creation story is one of totemic demiurges that sang into existence everything that has ever been or indeed, ever will be.
All things are both the perceived and the perceiver, a dear relative and the story of the relative, the singer and the song perpetually creating and recreating the world; “By singing the world into existence, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning 'creation'” (Chatwin, 1987, pp 14).

Cyberspace exists by similar rules, while it obviously didn’t create itself, the virtual world is a reality composed utterly of numbers, language and human intent; the most literal possible incarnation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that states that “reality” is a construct of language in different social groups (Sapir, 1958, pp. 69).

TV Tropes is an excellent case study for this idea, the basic premise of the site is the definition and naming of the recurring tropes within stories.
To make it even more ideal the network has long since begun providing examples of narrative patterns in the real world.
If one is willing to acknowledge tropes as symbols, TV Tropes becomes a map of the link between the three realms spoken of by Jacques Lacan: The Imaginary, Symbolic and Real (Kuttainen, 2016).
These three realms are distinct in their definition, but TV Tropes demonstrates that they simply could not exist independently within the Human experience.
If all maps are symbolic representations of the imagined or real, then one could argue that a map of TV Tropes is a symbolic representation of the symbolic realm itself, a filter through which we can more clearly perceive the filter itself.

References:

Meeks, Elijah., 21/12/2011, TVTropes Pt 1: The Weird Geometry of the Internet, Stanford University Libraries.

Chatwin, Bruce., 1987, The Songlines, Robert Hartnoll ltd, pp 14.

Sapir E., (1958): Culture, Language and Personality (ed. D. G. Mandelbaum), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press

TV Tropes: The Theory of Narrative Causality, Main Page, (Viewed 26^th August 2016)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheoryOfNarrativeCausality?from=Main.NarrativeCausality

TV Tropes: Real Life, Main Page, (Viewed 26^th August 2016)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealLife

Kuttainen, V., 2016, BA1002 Lecture 5, James Cook University.
https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/webapps/blackboard/content/listContent.jsp?course_id=_76323_1&content_id=_2422311_1

GEXFJS Library: Traversable Network Map of the Core of TV Tropes, (Viewed 26^th August 2016)
http://dhs.stanford.edu/demos/tvtropes/