Social Semiotics

Social Semiotics is the method of creating signs that give significant meaning to all different types of people. There is a methodology that is used for each and every advertisement, company billboard, magazine or article. You may see photos attached to all of these items which bring social semiotics into place. It is when one shows communication through a picture and shows minimal words. The picture/sign has many words in itself. This method was thought of in the 17th century by John Locke but actually was created and used by Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Pierce.  (Briannica, 2024) This is an important form of communication because it provides us with another faucet rather than only speaking. In a book, “Social Semiotics” Robert Ian Vere Hodge states, “Semiotics has been defined as ‘the science of the life of signs in society.’ (Saussure 1974).

It is so fascinating, and it does come with a few rules within the method. Hodge also states, “It stresses system and product, rather than speakers and writers or other participants in semiotic activity as connected and interacting in a variety of ways in concrete social contexts. It attributes power of meaning, instead of meaning to power. It dissolves boundaries within the field of semiotics, but tacitly accepts an impenetrable wall cutting off semiosis from society, and semiotics from social and political thought.” 

You can depict certain images by looking at the bottom, the left, the right, and the center to gain certain details. In the article, “Visual Social Semiotics” Matt Roads states, “Information value provides a guide for the layout of information. the top holding the ‘ideal’ information, through to the bottom of the image holding the ‘real’ information. the left holds information that is given or known and the right holds information that is new.” And by going off of these rules you will be able to identify Social Semiotics in images as well! 

      In this image above you can see the keys look like a gun. This is to show that if you’re not driving safe and driving recklessly then you could die. And then below the keys is the statement, “Takes one life every 25 seconds.” This can communicate the dangers of driving to many different types of people because we all understand what it is trying to communicate without a lot of words being communicated. 

    In this picture you can see that the bottle is actually made out of real tomatoes to show that HEINZ ketchup is real and not chemically built. It has a healthier narrative to it which appeals to a lot of people. And the sentence below states that Heinz grows their ketchup so it shows people can trust it isn’t a factory chemically built substance but actually has real ingredients.

References: 

Google. (n.d.). Social Semiotics. Google Books. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wk427pgr8xAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=Social%2BSemiotics%2Band%2Bcommunication&ots=yWW4BMHLlc&sig=Nk8fpcj-ECSkR-B5B7gR26soeMo#v=onepage&q&f=false

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (2024, January 19). Semiotics. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/semiotics 

Visual social semiotics. Theories of Visual Communication. (2016, September 2). https://theoriesofviscomblog.wordpress.com/visual-social-semiotics/#:~:text=Information%20value%20provides%20a%20guide%20for%20the%20layout,and%20the%20right%20holds%20information%20that%20is%20new.