Monday, July 25, 2011

Effect of Semiotic System on Human Behaviour

A quick recap on two things important in semiotic studies is the

Signifier
(an object/gesture/signs in general)

and

Signified
(an idea/concept/a connotative suggestion).

We conceive an idea based on our experience, our environment, norms, lifestyle, and the way we perceive things. Thus, it's highly dependent on one's idea of a signifier to be able to interpret its meaning. In other words, the way we perceive things are influence by culture and may vary in many other places with different culture.

In most adverts, we are forced (mostly curiosity) to determine its connotative values by evaluating its relations between words, graphics and gestures on the ad. Some works well while some not so much.

Say Marlboro for instance, it depicts a western cowboy and associates it with freedom and the sort of lifestyle of the wild wild west. While it may be effective to a certain group of people, it may also be the complete opposite. It all comes down to how people view such lifestyle and relate them to their own.

In design sense, certain symbols or elements incorporated in the design embeds connotative values which are appropriate to its theme. Take this for example



It depicts a stylize version of a bun. It stimulates the idea that the place is a bakery and sells buns. The point is, semiotic has its job of hinting as well as nudging a person to come into a conclusion of what signs meant. After all, signs are so much simpler and delivers the message without clogging too much information.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Text and Media


Text is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. It is one of the signs of semiotics which understood as a discrete unit of meaning in semiotics. Text can be presented in several forms, written and spoken, verbal and non-verbal. Base on the variable usage and composition of text, it can be used to define "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity." Heinrich Plett pointed out that, as a linguistic sign, the text has an arbitrary nature and is based on social conventions.( Text Science and Text Analysis/ Stiinta textului si analiza de text, 1975 )In 1966, the Poststructuralist Julia Kristeva coined the term Intertextuality” No text has its meaning alone; all texts have their meaning in relation to other texts. Intertextuality refers to far more than the 'influences' of writers on each other. For example, the word, “Chicken”, as a semiotic sign, may refer to bird chicks, chicken meat, or coward for some culture. The meaning of the text is defined the other text it is with, or the way it represented to the audience but att the same time, the signification of the text will also be affected by the acknowledgement of the audience, if the audience have never seen or heard of chicken, or knowing chicken and another verb, or do not know English language, the text “chicken” can be meaningless arrangement of alphabets to them.






"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived which contemporary semioticians refer to the creation and interpretation of media as 'encoding' and 'decoding' respectively. The use of these terms is of course intended to emphasize the importance of the semiotic codes involved, and thus to highlight social factors. The process of communicate via media is the process of encoding our own memory which we received from our sensory information into a medium or linguistic form which can be received by the audience via sensory system and decode the information according to the memory they had. For example, we know lemons, the sour taste of it, the physical appearance of it, the texture, and the texts which form the name of it, LEMON. so, when we want to transfer the message of it, triggering the related memory of the other people, we use media to present, such as, spoken language, "lemon", painting, the media will only works when both presenter and audience have the similar understanding of lemon. When the audience receive the message of "lemon", such as looking at the picture or painting of a lemon, if the person know "Lemon" in English, the word "Lemon" will come to his mind and if he tried the taste of lemon before, his brain will start to remind him of the sour taste and his mouth will start to secret saliva. In other hand, for a person who had never seen lemon, the media presented can be meaningless.