We may think of semiotics as far too dense and abstract a concept for a child to have any hope of understanding, but Umberto Eco didn’t seem to think this was the case at all. In 1966, he partnered with abstract artist Eugenio Carmi to write the children’s book “The Three Astronauts,” turning dense and esoteric media theory into a simple children’s story. Eco and Carmi’s story can tell us all sorts of things about how we learn, how we can spread ideas, the power of story, and why it may be absolutely vital that we think like a child.

Much of the experience of learning media theory is the feeling of unraveling, unearthing or unlearning a set of assumptions we’ve taken for granted. But perhaps, if someone grew up with some awareness of these different understandings of the world, these perspectives might not have to be so difficult to unearth. If the insights of media theory are truly valuable and have real implications for how we live and conceive of the world, shouldn’t we then consider how to help these ideas grow and take root? We may have begun to understand these concepts in our young adulthood, by directly reading the writings of philosophers and thinkers. But is that how it ought to be for the next generation? What is the point of this thinking about the world if it only reaches a single cultural and economic in-group late in our youth? Is it true that these concepts can only exist in their most dense and esoteric forms, or could they be refitted for a general, or perhaps younger audience? Should we instead think of how to build an understanding from the ground up for the next generation, so they might consider these ways of looking at the world while they are first experiencing the world? How could we possibly make ideas like semiotics digestible to a child?

It is hard to shake the perception that academic, technical, philosophical literature is more important, prestigious and effective than simple stories. However, this could not be further from the truth. Stories are the most powerful tool human beings have ever created. As much as we may like to think of ourselves as empirical, rational thinkers, it is undeniable that we see the world in stories. History, as any historian would tell you, is not objective; it contains objective facts, but those are not what we call history – history are the stories we tell about that information- how we string it together. Politics are the narratives, stories, we build around societal information. Religion is a set of stories that inform everything we believe about the universe. For millennia, we used oral stories to remember our history and knowledge of the world. Every conversation we have in our lives is simply an exchange of stories. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes: “culture is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”

There is one more thing that stories can do for us as media theorists that we may have overlooked. As Ingold argues, any attempt to have an idea truly take root cannot be done by teaching it; simply spitting the information at the learner. It must be done with experiential learning; learning with; learning by doing. This may have a clear application for material subjects like craftsmanship, but how do we learn an abstract philosophical concept experientially? The answer, you might have guessed, is in stories.

Let’s return to Eco’s The Three Astronauts. Eco puts an enormous amount of trust in the children that are reading his book. He hopes that, through the book, they will learn the concept of semiotics but, strangely, he does not teach them a single thing about semiotics.

This sleight-of-hand begins with Carmi’s illustrations, which are entirely abstract – scraps of newspapers in different languages that are supposed to signify Russian, Chinese and American astronauts. Some may argue that the children would get confused, making the book an utter failure at teaching. Umberto, however, does not talk down to the child. He does not explain everything to them and answer every question before they arise. He wants the child to wonder, because wondering is an active exercise – it is experiential learning. The experience of wondering and wrestling with an idea is much like the experience of feeling and working with a piece of clay. The child may ask themselves, “why is he calling that scrap of newspaper an astronaut?” But by the end of the book, the child has answered that question for themselves. Wondering, and therefore experiential learning, is inherent to experiencing a story, because a story is always about what happens next.

“It so happened that the American didn’t like the Russian, and the Russian didn’t like the Chinese, and the Chinese was suspicious of the other two.

This was because the American, to greet somebody, said “How do you do?”

and the Russian said “Здравствуйте”

and the Chinese said〝你們好…” “

In this passage, the child is presented with three different sets of symbols, and three different systems of meaning. They aren’t taught what systems of meaning are, or even given the language – “symbol,” “semiology,” “system of meaning.” Regardless, through wondering what happens next in the story, they learn experientially that different signifiers can refer to the same signified thing, that different cultures have different systems of meaning, and also, by the end of the story, how we can reconcile those differences compassionately.

We might think that this is a ‘dumbed down’ way of explaining semiology, but in fact, it is a way that cuts out any of the esoteric, in-group language that has to be learned, gives active, relevant examples of how this concept will actually play out in the world, and allows the reader to learn experientially – all without the reader even realizing they are learning. This is the power of explaining an idea through story, as if we were explaining to a child. But in the process of explaining this way, we gain even more – by stripping out the arbitrary, context-dependent language with which semiotics is usually explained, we avoid a common pitfall in the way we learn language.

We acquire language not as individual words, but as whole ‘chunks’ of language. This is what linguist Michael Lewis calls “the lexical approach.” We learn these ‘chunks’ – pre-set phrases – like “give me that” or “what’s the magic word?” from our parents, teachers, and the media around us. We then repeat them back, and ingrain them in our minds. This is why you may be able to finish the sentence “we’ll cross that bridge when…” or “all’s well that ends…” Often, however, we only get a general idea of what these phrases mean, we don’t think about why we use them over other ways we could choose to say something, and we don’t think about what their individual parts mean out of context. We can find proof of this in “fossil words” – words that stay frozen only in specific phrases long after we’ve stopped using them in any other context. We repeat these words inside the chunks in which we learned them without ever noticing that we don’t know what they mean anymore, like fro in “to and fro”  or amok in “running amok.”

The way we learn ideas is much the same. If we think of our learning and understanding as building a house, we are not neat builders. We do not carefully lay new ideas down brick by brick in sequential order. We instead grab and throw down messy chunks of ideas full of things we’ve never considered properly, unchecked assumptions, and arbitrary cultural biases. This is a tendency not at all remedied by academia. We learn to ‘sound smart’ – to repeat the terms and ways of speaking we hear from academics, often without really thinking about what they mean. This is made worse when we are forced to take in massive amounts of input of ideas and produce huge amounts of output in a tremendously short amount of time. Though this allows us exposure to more ideas, it often does not give us the space to sit with concepts, interrogate them, think about them like a child; ask all the ‘why’ ‘where’ and ‘how’ questions.

We do all sorts of things without quite knowing why, we use all sorts of things without knowing quite what they are or where they come from, and we say all sorts of things without knowing quite what they mean. We have a dangerous tendency to forget that this is the way we learn language, and also the way we learn ideas in media theory. If you cannot explain an idea to a child, if you cannot conceive of it or express it without repeating the chunks of esoteric, academic language in which you read it, perhaps you don’t understand it as well as you must to help it spread beyond your academic in-group or cultural system of meaning. Perhaps you don’t understand it like a child. To think like a child is to question everything, to take nothing for granted, and to build your understanding from the ground up. In stripping his idea down until it was simple enough to be understood in a children’s book, and explaining it experientially through a story, Eco was able to think about semiotics in the best way we can – like a child.

Eco, Umberto & Carmi, Eugenio. The Three Astronauts. Secker & Warburg, 1966.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 1973.

Lewis, Michael. The Lexical Approach. Heinle, 1993.