3.2: Semiotics - Classroom Activity

Semiotics | Classroom Activity | 'Semiotics in the Round'

How To Use This Material [Instructor Note]

• The following is a whole-class activity designed to help students gain comfortability thinking in the language and framework of semiotics, as well as showcase how such thinking—while a bit clunky at first—can offer a vital frame to better understand and intervene upon the tactics, strategies, and successes of mediated messaging. A link to the full Google Slides activity can be found here, as well as at the bottom of this page.
  • I have provided additional instructor guidance in the ‘speaker notes’ section of each example, to ensure that those with less comfortability with the concept can still lead the activity
• The primary focus is on advertising, but there are additional examples towards the end that delve into strategies for/of semiotics within other mediated disciplines, too: film, news, web design, and sonic logo curation
• This activity is meant to follow a homework assignment of Tom Streeter’s exceptional ‘Semiotics and Advertising’ hypertext essay, but was designed with enough scaffolding to act as a stand-alone activity if need be
• You are welcome to make a copy of this material to edit and remix as you wish; please be sure to credit and follow CC license mandates when doing so

• Right away, I like to start with a semiotic reading of this opening slide. The AI image is a fun way to lead into the classic Magritte example (what is the central image? Is it a pipe? What about the objects on the desk?), as well as offer other entry points for the more important cultural aspects (for instance: gender cues, age, profession, mood)

• Magritte’s famed example acts as a perfect introduction to semiotics: it is not a pipe, but a painting of a pipe (and, in this case, a digital replication of a painting of a pipe... and so on and so forth).

Semiotics - An Introduction to Study

• “Magritte's point is a simple one, so simple that we usually don't think about it. But precisely because we don't think about it, because we forget that the signs and symbols all around us are just that, signs and symbols, and not things themselves, we can come to take for granted, take as "natural," aspects of life that are anything but. And this may have important social implications” (Streeter)
• Semiotics is all about signs: how the words, images, sounds all around us come to ‘make sense’
• Semiotics, in other words, is a field of study that “seeks to explain and explore what happens when we look at a word or image or hear a certain sound, and how that word or image or sound creates meaning” (Benshoff 43)
• Semiotics, or semiology, can be traced back to both Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and, as Streeter notes, “has its proponents, detractors, and scholarly disputes. But, whatever else you can say about it, these days semiotics serves as a very useful set of tools for identifying many of the formal patterns that work to make meaning in many aspects of our culture, particularly the media.”
• A sign itself can be just about anything: a word, an image, a sound, or a symbol… anything in the world that may create meaning in the mind of whomever hPappens to encounter it
• Each sign has a dual nature, every sign made up of two parts: the signifier and the signified
  • Signifier: the part of the sign that exists in the material world
    • AKA: ‘what you see’
  • Signified: the ‘mental meaning’ that is derived from the sign
    • AKA: ‘interpretation’
• This can be broken down even further, by sign type, but you'll notice the same core framework remains
  • Symbolic sign: a sign based in language, wherein there is a system of agreed relation to give meaning to otherwise arbitrary signifiers
    • ‘dog’ = dog, ‘perro’ = dog, ‘tjkw’ ≠ dog
  • Iconic sign, or icon: a sign where the signifier resembles the thing it signifies, a sign that can be understood outside the realm of language
    • Sketch of a dog, a shadow puppet dog
    • Color, pitch, volume in cinema a kind of icon sign—making meaning without language
  • Indexical sign, or index: a sign that is produced by evidence of the signifiers presence
    • A paw print, evidence of dog hair
    • But, more important for our purposes, also photo/video of a dog: the camera captured a past event, is a mechanical reproduction of a past event
• Roland Barthes furthered the study of semiotics with his work around denotation and connotation; denotation is what ‘first’ arises in the mind when encountering a sign, whereas connotation refers to all the other significations that can inevitably arise from the encounter with the sign
  • Take a picture of Scooby-Doo, for example: on the denotative level, it’s a dog, and perhaps, even, a named dog (Scooby-Doo); but, of course, the image will set off a wide variety of other meanings—connotations—which will necessarily vary from person to person, but will inevitably be derived from larger cultural contexts
    • One might think of solving mysteries, then true crime, then Law and Order: SVU; another may think of Cartoon Network, and then a childhood memory of watching the channel; another may think of ghosts, then Halloween, then Michael Meyers—it could go on and on and on
  • You could think of what you're wearing, too: on the denotative level, nothing but various clothing items, but—as you likely don't need me to remind—on the connotative level, what you wear comes with larger associations about who you are, how you see yourself, what communities you belong to, etc.
  • The important point is that connotation is almost immediately cultural
    • Skin color a way to make this phenomena more critical: on denotative level, simply a pigmentation difference; but when one moves beyond the denotative color, we stumble into a whole bunch of cultural-inscribed connotations

But enough talk! Let's get into some examples, which you can find here

 

© J. F. Lindsay, CC BY-NC-SA