MODULE 1, UNIT 2

Construction of Meaning: Semiotics

The Study of Signs and Symbolic Meaning

Goal: Articulate semiotic principles - the meaning behind media messages.

The next step towards reading mediated messages, both verbal and visual, is to consider the meaning of the various elements inside the message. This unit introduces you to semiotics, or the study of signs.

The Study of Signs

Signs are words, objects, images, or behaviors onto which people assign additional meaning. Signs help people communicate stories, and help people define their world. Signs can have flexible meanings, depending on the context. For example, an apple is a sign that can mean a healthy food, a gift for a teacher, a sign for sin, or a brand of computer. A word is also a type of sign that can have multiple meanings. For example, the word hot can refer to temperature (as in a hot day), popularity (as in a hot vacation destination), legality (as in hot property that is a stolen item), or sexiness (as in hot girl summer).    

Gestures are also signs, and can have different cultural meanings. For example, there are many ways to hail a taxi, depending on what culture you happen to live in. There are also many ways to understand the meaning of spitting in public: it’s considered normal behavior in some parts of the world, and extremely rude in other parts (including the West). But more than one-hundred years ago, Americans – those who chewed tobacco – openly spit into spittoons, a gesture that was highly in fashion until the 1918 influenza epidemic. Today spitting in the West is generally acceptable among baseball players and at wine tastings. These cultural rules – or signs – are learned by spending time within a culture.

Even within a culture, semiotic interpretations are often based in the context of the immediate situation. This letter “A” is the sign of a certain sound. Or, it could be a sign of a good grade on a school project. Or, it could be a sign of the first item of an alphabetical list. As media studies scholar Paul Lester wrote, “For something to be a sign, the viewer must understand its meaning. If you do not understand the meaning behind the orange color of a jacket, it isn’t a sign for you.”^[1] 

The discipline of semiotics (Europeans say “semiology”) – or the study of signs – has its roots in linguistics, the study of language. At the turn of the 20th century, two linguistic theorists, Ferdinand de Saussure from Switzerland and Charles Sanders Peirce from the U.S, independently published works about how we use words to make meaning. Saussure and Peirce analyzed the relationship between signs and the objects they signified, and tried to understand how something comes to stand for something else.

The semiotic approach of Peirce and Saussure rejected the correspondence theory of language, which assumed each symbol refers (or corresponds) to something in the world. Instead of there merely being a sign and a corresponding referent (the word dog corresponds to the domesticated four legged, hairy, member of the family Canidae) semiotics urges people to consider signifying practices.

In a semiotic approach, “a sign is composed of . . . the signifier (the sound/image of the sign or the form it takes) and the signified (the concept referenced by the signifier)”; so, there is the corresponding referent “(the creature wagging its tail), . . . the signifier (the word dog) and the signified (the idea of what a dog is that never perfectly corresponds to the creature wagging its tail, otherwise how can a Great Dane and a teacup Chihuahua both be a dog?”^[2] These signifying practices create codes and unspoken rules that structure the creation and maintenance of meaning. Because words have meaning beyond simply designating a corresponding object, words have power to shape the way people see the world.

Language is a system of signs. For example, people use the word “dog” to stand for the furry, panting animal with four legs and a wagging tail; they could have easily called these creatures something else. Peirce was especially fascinated by the way signs can visually represent (or stand in for) objects,^[3] and identified three different types of visual signs: iconic, indexical, and denotative.

Three different types of visual signs

1. Iconic signs closely resemble the thing they represent and are thus very easy to understand. For example, photographs are iconic signs. This photo of a person’s feet in boots propped up on a fountain is a digital file that represents the very thing that was photographed.

Attribution: Olivia Martin: CC-BY.

This pictorial representation of a road worker is also an iconic sign: one can fully understand that there is a person who is digging in this representation.

Attribution: Mark Konig, Unsplash (Public Domain): mark-konig-Uu5fnOkFAdA-unsplash.jpg

And this little “trashcan’ icon from a computer desktop, which signifies a place to “throw away” digital files, is just as we call it: an icon (or iconic sign).

Attribution: Bettina Fabos, CC-O

Iconic signs are easy to understand, even across most cultures, because they represent something – a thing (chair, book), behavior (dancing, cooking), gesture (a smile, a wave) – that is well known and tangible.

What are some other iconic signs you can think of?

2. Indexical signs are related to human experience, and as such, are usually learned. They are usually caused by the thing they represent. For example, you learn from experience that lightning and a thunderclap is a sign of a storm. When you see blood, we learn, usually from a young age, that this is a sign of an injury. When we sweat, you learn that this is a sign of being hot. When you see yellow marks on the snow, you understand that perhaps a dog has visited there. Index signs can also be sounds: you learn that a tea kettle whistling, a car engine roaring, or a baby crying are sounds that represent the actual thing. Roland Barthes, the literary theorist and semiotician mentioned earlier, aptly described index signs as pointing, but not telling.^[4]

You can apply the study of indexical signs to media messages. For example, you understand black and white film footage as “historical” when you see it in a documentary or advertisement. Most people are aware that color film (Kodachrome) only became widely used in the mid-1930s, so black and white has become our sign for “archival” or “historical.”  With this knowledge, media creators often apply black and white special effects filters to new footage to fool viewers into thinking something is historical.

Here’s another example of indexical signs in media messaging: the social media influencer’s smile when holding up a bottle of skin cleanser or while modeling a particular outfit through a selfie taken in a mirror. They produce this smile, often coupled with an angled, pleased posture, to signify that this product makes them happy and might be worth buying. Particular stances, or ways of holding your body, are signs.

In this vein, it’s helpful to turn to Erving Goffman’s work that identified “codes of gender” in media messages – codes that are still prevalent today and are part of a visual indexical sign vocabulary:^[5] 

Thus, indexical signs in media representations may say more than just the basic fact that “this is a man” or “this is a woman.” Within a culture, media representations of humans may be coded with meanings about gender, or other social stereotypes (e.g., the person wearing horn-rimmed eyeglasses might be coded as a nerd, an intellectual, or a hipster.) How someone is presented physically in the media often can be a narrative short-cut (or stereotype: a common oversimplification or mistaken belief about people or things) to who they are. Stereotypes may have some truth to them (e.g., the person with glasses might actually be an intellectual), but they can also be completely and unfairly inaccurate in how they depict people. With stereotypes, we reduce people to an implied indexical meaning and misunderstand the whole person, oftentimes in damaging ways.

3. Symbolic signs are the hardest signs to interpret because they are not a direct representation nor do they have a causal relationship with the thing represented. For example, there is no necessary reason that the word “tree” symbolizes a tall, single stemmed, woody, leaf-bearing, CO2-consuming, oxygen-producing living plant. Language falls in the category of symbolic signs, and so do musical notes. Cultural indicators, such as socially-defined gestures, dress styles, collective practices, national emblems, cultural innuendos, social media emojis, and even memes, are all learned through family, social groups, school, religious activities, and media messaging. When do you use a “🙃” or a “ 😇“ in a text message? What do the colors orange and black together designate in the U.S.? Or red and green? Or red, pink, and white? You can read and understand these symbolic signs from lived experience, from being part of your particular culture.

The act of showing the bottom of one’s foot to someone is no big deal in Western cultures. But in some Arabic cultures, such as in Iraq, this gesture (or symbolic sign) is highly insulting. In-person greetings also differ culturally throughout the world. In some cultures, a nod or bow is appropriate. In others a handshake; air kisses two or three times on alternating cheeks; a hug (with or without a pat on the back); a handshake that pulls into a hug; or a fist bump. Not knowing what is culturally appropriate can lead to awkward introductions!

Media scholars Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall explain that texts and images are interpreted differently by different people because each reading depends upon a person’s individual interpretation and socio-cultural background.^[6] For more on this idea, turn to Unit 5 (Interpretation).

Denotative and Connotative Meanings

French literary theorist Roland Barthes further refined the work of Pierce and Saussure in the 1960s​​. Remember, words, images, bodies, gestures, and symbols are all signs. Signs can be iconic, indexical, or symbolic. Within each of these types of signs, you can break down their meaning further. Analyzing photographs, Barthes divided the “sign” into two parts: “denotations” and “connotations.”^[7] Any sign, word or image, has both denotative meanings and connotative meanings.

Denotations (or denotative meanings) are simple descriptions of something. Denotation refers to the literal, commonsense, or semantic meaning of a sign; it is ostensibly value-free and objective. If this definition sounds like something you would find in a dictionary, it is because dictionary definitions attempt to provide denotation meanings of things. The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of dog is: “a highly variable domestic mammal (Canis familiaris) closely related to the gray wolf.”^[8]

Connotations (or connotative meanings) involve a more culturally bound level of symbolism. In Barthes’ words, the connotation is “the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it.”^[9] Here, “dog” has many different meanings: a family pet, a hunting animal, a breed of dog (from an enormous Irish Wolfhound to a tiny miniature dachshund), a lap dog, and stray animals that live among people but no one owns. Some people see dogs as friendly creatures, some see them as scary or vicious. Expressions related to dogs are rich in cultures. In the U.S., to dog someone is to follow them relentlessly; to call someone or something a dog is an insult; but, to work like a dog is to do hard work. And, when Willie Mae Thornton sang “You ain't nothin' but a hound dog” in 1953 (in a rock and roll classic later covered by Elvis Presley), she was not describing  (denotatively) a person as a highly variable domestic mammal closely related to the gray wolf, but instead was calling out (connotatively) a cheap, promiscuous man.

Different connotations not only are attached to different terms, but the same term can have different connotations depending on the context of usage. The same sign can carry very distinct meanings in different contexts because a sign does not correspond to a single concept or thing. For example, at U.S. dog shows, different categories of competition exist for each breed, including: puppy dog, American bred dog, open dog, puppy bitch, American bred bitch, and open bitch. In the context of a dog show bitch has a very specific denotative meaning: a female canine. Because it carries no negative connotation, it is common to hear a person comment to another: “Your puppy bitch is gorgeous.” In another context, bitch carries very negative connotations when used as a derogatory term for a woman because it likens a human woman to a vicious and moody female dog, or in gaming, bitch is often used to name a boss about to be fought.

Symbolic Storytelling

Because symbolic signs are so culturally charged, they can communicate an immense amount in a little time and also be highly emotional. Symbolic signs are thus a powerful part of storytelling, and can bring deeper meaning, even irony, to visual communication as viewers are asked to understand the symbolism and make appropriate connections. Both memes and advertising messages are interesting objects of semiotic study – and important cultural influencers in their own right – because they have so little time or only a concentrated space in which to communicate a great deal of messaging. The very point of many memes is to play with and comment on the irony of symbolic signs. Symbolic signs also dominate advertising messages with images of nameless models looking and dressing certain ways to symbolize status, a known cultural practice, or dominant gender relations.

For example, advertisements for beer often connect the drink to male heterosexual conquest and are famously loaded with sexual and often phallic imagery pointing to a highly sexualized beer drinking culture (especially in the United States but in other countries as well - e.g.,  this Mexican commercial for Tecate Light beer). The commercials might allude to the cultural practice of frat and bachelor parties; show one or many sweaty beer bottles (standing in for people); play with the meaning of beer foam; show a male model holding the bottle of beer at a certain angle and direction; and always with women approvingly responding to the man with the beer. All are typical narrative symbols that connect male sexuality to beer.

When celebrities are involved in promoting a product – for example, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial;  Johnny Depp in commercials for Dior Sauvage cologne; or social media influencers Emma Chamberlain or Alix Earl for multiple products – all carry important, intertextual cultural information that offer layers of additional symbolic meaning outside of the immediate message. Intertextuality means that understanding other texts or information helps to aid in the interpretation of the text being considered.

For example, to get the “joke” of the Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, one needs to know some other information: that a) Affleck and Lopez are actors who were married, divorced, and are now remarried, b) Affleck grew up in the Boston area, where Dunkin’ Donuts was founded and still remains popular, and c) Dunkin’ Donuts was a noted brand in the movie Good Will Hunting (1997), which was set in Boston and made Affleck into a major movie star. All of that intertextual information makes it funny that Affleck, now a wealthy Hollywood star, gets caught working at a Dunkin’ Donuts pickup window by his wealthy Hollywood star wife, who was going through the drive-through line to get coffee and donuts for herself. The intertextual information helps the viewer understand why the situation is humorously absurd.^[10] 

Therefore a semiotic analysis of signs, whether visual or verbal, includes the symbols within the message, the social and economic conditions that set the advertisements’s production into motion (producers), the way it circulates (media outlets), and the multiple ways that it could be interpreted by different audiences.

Interpellation

As noted earlier, semiotics is the study of signs – words, objects, images, or behaviors onto which we assign additional meaning. There is another consideration in how people make sense of signs: Each person’s own perspective in meaning-making can be influenced by how they are communicatively situated within a social system.

In each instance of communication between people, or between people and media, the communication asks individuals to adopt a subjective position or role. This happens through the process of interpellation.

The theorist Louis Althusser (1918-1990) noted how all communications demand that individuals take a subjective position, or social role. The interpellation happens in the way the person is “hailed” or identified by those with whom they are communicating. If they accept that role, the relationship is constituted.

For example, interpellation is evident in the way people often address young children: low pitched voices and rougher handling with male babies; high pitched voices and coos for female babies, with comments about how “pretty” their outfits are.^[11] The way children are hailed according to their gender is captured by the Pink and Blue project by artist JeongMee Yoon.

Interpellation continues through life and in every cultural institution of which people are a part. For example, at a university, a professor may request their students call them “Professor” or “Dr.” The hailing makes the power differential between professor and students clear. Students, having less power in the relationship, often can be hesitant to hail a new professor in any manner, for fear of mischaracterizing their relationship. Alternatively, professors might ask students to refer to (or “hail”) them using their first name, minimizing the power differential.

Interpellation also helps explain, as philosopher and gender scholar Judith Butler has observed, why some words can wound, as they reflect the subjective relationship (often with power differentials) formed in the act of communication. The relationship established in the interpellation sets up a relationship on how the communication may be understood. It’s why you may sling an insulting word to a friend, because it hails them in a nonthreatening way, but the same word deployed in a hateful subjective relationship hailed by a stranger, a boss, or a troll on social media can hurt.^[12] 

Media texts also function in a system of interpellation, as TV shows, movies, music, books, and news stories “hail” audiences in a certain way. For example, the long list of Disney theatrical animated films  interpellate their viewers within an ideological framework that identifies people – the cast of characters and those watching the show – as either heterosexual women or men. Another show, such as HGTV’s  Love it or List It, hails its viewers as upwardly mobile middle class consumers who want bigger and better showplace houses.

Interpellation can happen in very subtle ways. For example, notice how NBC News addresses a certain kind of audience in the beginning of this economic report:^[13]

All across the U.S., families are facing unprecedented challenges, economic ones, even as we’re all getting back to work. Inflation is still stubbornly high, and while we’re dealing with that, we have more and more worries that a recession may be coming. So where does that leave everyday Americans?

In just a few sentences, it’s clear that this report is hailing adults (not teenagers or retirees) who have families (no singles in this report), who are working class or middle class, and who are struggling with the economy. These are “everyday Americans,” and ones that NBC wants to identify with (notice that the reporter shifts to using “we” at certain points). Later in the report, viewers learn that the NBC reporter is helping two families with personal financial tips to “navigate an uncertain economy.” This establishes a certain ideological relationship, too, particularly in how “everyday Americans” are expected to respond to the larger economy. In this way, the process of interpellation helps to facilitate the internalization of ideologies (a topic we explore in Unit 4 of this module). For this particular story, it means don’t complain about the economic system or advocate for change, but instead just use NBC News’s handy recommendations to better manage household budgets.

There is another consideration in how media (and others) deploy the term “we.” Harvard political scientist and sociologist Jane Mansbridge explores how the use of the falsely universal we in political discourse can be used to represent some people while simultaneously making others invisible. In the NBC News story above, the reporter hails a certain audience with the collective we, but also excludes many others (single people, young people, retired people, unemployed people, immigrants, the wealthy, and anyone else who is not an “everyday American”). The danger of the falsely universal we, as Mansbridge explained, is that “'we' can easily represent a false universality, as 'mankind' used to."^[14] 

Have you heard politicians use the collective we in addressing Americans, but the way they use it clearly excludes certain people? The word “we” is a symbolic sign that suggests inclusivity – denotatively, it means you and me, and perhaps others –  but, as this unit on semiotics explains, it can have connotatively less inclusive meanings – you and me, and these people, but not those.  It is for this reason that “we” as the authors of this text, have taken pains to avoid the word we, and instead use “you,” “people,” and “audiences.” We aim to avoid the assumption (on our part) that our readers (you) can automatically relate to our experiences, and that we are speaking for you.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1.  What is an iconic sign, and what might be a good example of one?

2. What is an indexical sign, and what might be a good example of one?

3. What is a symbolic sign, what is an example, and why do these signs hold significant power in the construction of media messages?

4. What is the difference between denotation and connotation?

5. What is intertextuality and how does it work in media messaging?

6. What is interpellation? Why does it matter?