COMM 390: Semiotics and ads / A COUPLE OF BASIC CONCEPTS

D R A F T

One of the basic theoretical underpinnings of what we're going to do in Communications 390 is what is known as semiotics -- i.e. the study of signs, which means (sort of) the study of texts and the way we create meaning from texts. As you read up on Arthur Berger (and we will, sooner or later), you'll discover he's written widely about the subject. Including this introductory essay posted to the Internet as "Cultural Criticism: Semiotics and Cultural Criticism." Read it for class Wednesday. It'll give us some analytical tools to use as we look at ads, along with the checklists in Chapters 8 and 9 of "Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture."

We started to get into semiotics a little bit in class Friday, and Katie emailed me afterward:

Doc,

I found some cool stuff on semiotics. Thought you might want to check it out:

http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/powerpose/index.html
http://www.uvm.edu/%7Etstreete/semiotics_and_ads/introduction.html

Thanks,Katie

She's right. The stuff is cool! It was new to me, and it explained the subject in a way I'd never understood before. (OK, I'll admit it. Very little of this theoretical stuff had made sense to me before.) It's part of a semiotics, advertising and media website created by communications prof Tom Streeter for his students at the University of Vermont.

We'll start today by looking at a picture of a pipe that's not a pipe and click through Streeter's introduction till we can wrap our heads around that idea. Along the way, we'll pick up several concepts we can use. Including:

signs
symbols
semiotics
signs (again)
signifier
signified
connotations (of a word)
paradigms
codes

Then we'll see what Berger has to say, in "Ads, Fads ..." about the Fidji ad we looked at Friday. After which, if we still have time (and we'll try to make sure we do), we'll take another look at the Macintosh 1984 ad and the Hillary Clinton mashup we watched Friday in light of what we now know about semiotic theory.

Below is some really draft-y stuff we may come back to later (if I can get it worked out to my satisfaction). Remember, I'm just learning a lot of this stuff as we go along.

* * *
Is this a sign?

'Semiotics for beginners av Daniel Chandler er en grei og kortfattet innføring til de fleste aspekter ved semiotikken. Mange forslag til videre lesning' - Espen Østli, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway

I found it on the table of contents of the HTML version of Chandler's book. Doesn't mean much, does it? (Unless you speak Norwegian.) But let's keep going. We'll come back to it.

Refresh the page (or reload it if you're driving a Mac), and see what you get in the quote field at the bottom. It changes every time you refresh the screen. I've been trying it tonight, and I got quotes from Florida Gulf Coast University, Monmouth College (in Illinois, hooray for us!) and LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Do signs add up to codes? If the quote from Norway is a sign, so's this:

'A very highly recommended site, offering an accessible and useful introduction to semiotics' - B G Woolland, Department of Film & Drama, University of Reading

That's Reading in England, by the way, not Pennsylvania. (And it's pronounced "redding." Does the meaning of the name change in your mind when you know that? Remember: The signified is in your mind.) Another quote, this one from Ireland:

'This guide is a very good introduction to the world of semiotics, written in a very straightforward manner. Dr Chandler succeeds in demysifying many of the more difficult elements involved.' - Michele Neylon, postgraduate research student, University of Limerick

Let's take these three quotes together, and remember a sign consists of a signifier and a signified. So what's the signifier here? What's the signified? How does it change in our mind when we keep refreshing the screen and see people are saying the same things about Chandler's book in Florida, in Monmouth, Ireland and Australia? And what about Espen Østli in Norway? Now we understand how these quotes fit together on Chandler's TOC page, now we can guess he's also saying it's a good book. There's another code here, too, by the way. Chandler put the quotes in red type. What does that mean? Pretty important, huh?

Martin Irvine, founding director of the graduate Communication, Culture, and Technology Program at Georgetown University, has an in-depth glossary of key terms in semiotics.