Semiotics

This week we revisited semiotics from first year and then looked at it in a bit more detail also. Semiotics can be defined as the study of signs but it can be applied to paintings, advertisements, posters, films, songs, etc. We use semiotics everyday without even thinking about it by using gestures, e.g. tapping your wrist with your finger where a watch should be could signify to someone that they are late. As a media student I need to be able to look at semiotics within texts as the construction of meaning, whether this is a preferred meaning or an authored meaning. Semiotics relies on a shared societal and cultural understanding of conventions. For example if we see a film trailer that shows us funny clips we go to see that film expecting it to be funny. If we went to see it and the film was scary, people would get a shock because this is not the accepted semiotic conventions. This is communicated through arrangements of music, lighting and camera shots. Here are two examples of comedy film trailers made to look like thrillers.

The Hangover

Dumb and Dumber

Margritte makes the point that we forget that signs and symbols are all around us because we see them as 'things'. He states that an image or a sign of a 'thing' is not the 'thing' itself. We generally don't take the time to look at the signs and symbols for a deeper meaning or understanding.

There are different levels of meaning:
Denotation is the most immediate level of meaning, the basic or literal meaning.
Connotation is the second order of meaning. It reflects values that are attached to a sign. Likely to be culturally specific.

According to de Saussure signs are organsied into codes in two ways:
A Paradigm is a vertical set of units from with the required sign is selected.
A Syntagm is the horizontal chain into which units are linked to make it meaningful.

Advertisements use culturally desirable paradigms to get people to buy their product. Viewers know that if you buy a product you will not be like the person portrayed in the image so advertisers need to be clever with their use of signs to make the product look desirable to the audience. They also have to ensure that these signs adhere to the cultural conventions of the audience. In my next blog I will look at a specific advertisement in more detail.