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3.1: “Semiotics and Advertising - Hypertext Essay” | Tom Streeter

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    Semiotics is all about signs: how the words, images, sounds all around us come to ‘make sense.’ At first, it may seem like the tell-tale signs of academia gone too far, but—if you’re willing to stick with it—you’ll come to find that the framework provides crucial language to better analyze the visual, cultural, and sonic landscape all around us with far more nuance, detail, and critical insight.

    Think about it this way: You've just sat down for a movie you know nothing about. First few minutes in, character is walking home at night, they're dancing to some hit song, everything is great, you're vibing. Every once and awhile, though, the the camera like... wobbles a bit. The music starts to get a bit more... off too—it's atonal, off-beat, moving from the major into the minor key. If you had to wager—based on this description of the opening few minutes alone—what genre do you think this made-up movie is? A. Comedy B. Romance or C. Horror?

    If you guessed horror, it's because you correctly read the signs provided by the scene description: the shaky camera, the 'creepy' music—these are some standard media 'signs' of horror films. But, of course, semiotics and the study of signs goes far beyond the world of film alone.

    A sign itself can be just about anything: a word (like ‘cat’), an image (like a picture of a cat), a sound (like a meow), a symbol (like the heart in an 'i <3 my cat' bumper sticker)… anything and everything in the entire world might be thought of as a sign: a visual or sonic ‘thing’ which triggers some kind of larger, more significant meaning for whomever encounters it.

    Every sign is made up of two parts: the signifier and the signified.

    • Signified: the ‘mental meaning’ that is derived from the sign
      • AKA: the interpretation, what the mind makes of the data

    So, the return to that movie clip: the signifier would be, say, the camera starting to shake, or the music changing; the signified would be you thinking something along the lines of "hmm... maybe something's not right." As you may already begin to see, we engage in this semiotic process all the time—the whole point of the field is to slow down this rapid-fire mental meaning-making and better understand how the mediated experiences work.

    But, as much as I’m sure you’d love to hear me babble on about it, semiotics is best approached with visual aid. So, without further ado, I encourage you to head on over to Tom Streeter’s “Semiotics and Advertising” hypertext essay (linked here), which is the real star of the show this week. Be sure to navigate through all the sections of the essay.

    (Introduction written by J. F. Lindsay)

    This page titled 3.1: “Semiotics and Advertising - Hypertext Essay” | Tom Streeter is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by J. F. Lindsay.