Social Semiotics is a way to analyze popular culture by emphasizing dimensions of meaning, like the way mass media influences meaning in our lives and in turn, society at large (Hodge, 2016). In our world of mass media, the media plays a major role in shaping society and has largely outweighed traditional cultural practices and the meaning of people’s lives they previously derived from those practices. Developed by Michael Halliday in the late 1970s, social semiotics is the study of how people interpret meanings. This idea is incredibly important considering the effect of the media on our society. The media has a profound ability to influence the thinking, priorities, wants and needs of entire generations. Through the media society can be controlled, just like society was controlled by cultural beliefs and practices for all human history. Halliday saw language as a product of social processes; Hodge and others later took it further to describe how societies develop and shape these resources to fulfil given social functions, express a cultural group’s values, structures, and power roles (Jewitt & Henriksen, 2019).
The first stage of a social semiotic analysis is to examine
the use of modes, like images, color, text; Second, we examine the modal design
of the images, their emphasis and layout; The third stage is to analyze the
image through the sign maker’s interest (Jewitt & Henriksen, 2019). Specifically,
imagery is classified into three categories/functions: icon, index, and symbol.
For example, let’s check out these photos.
The first image of a person sitting near a lake observing the landscape offers several insights. First, the person in the photo is front and center, a medium distance away from the camera, and is facing away from the shot; these details could mean that the subject in the photo wants to communicate the feeling of awe or appreciation of beauty that they themselves feel when observing the scene. The landscape is a snowy mountain range with trees along the bank of the river or lake that possibly suggest isolation in a remote area, and perhaps signal the longer journey of arriving at this place. The colors are cool and suggest an evening sunset time of day, perfect for this subject’s rest and reflection. The choices to have no motion or action in the photo also reinforce the idea of calmness. The color palette itself might communicate the cold indifference of nature, something people take comfort in when escaping the stress of society and their own minds.
In the second image of a woman smiling, it is immediately obvious
we are meant to acknowledge her happiness. The bright colors of her red dress
and lipstick signify vibrancy and liveliness. The neutral background of solid
color further emphasizes the subject by not offering any other visual
information or distraction. The subject is close to the camera, as we are only
able to see from her chest up. Her hands touched to her face signify a
universal expression of happiness (with a smile, with a frown the pose is more
akin to The Scream by Munch). Sunglasses imply a bright, outdoor setting, in
line with the vibrancy and happiness of her expression.
References
Hodge, B.
(2015). Designing Affective Consumers: Emotion Analysis in Market Research. In The
Routledge companion to global popular culture. essay, Routledge, Taylor
& Francis Group.
Jewitt, C.,
& Henriksen, B. (2016). 6. social semiotic multimodality. Handbuch
Sprache Im Multimodalen Kontext, 145–164.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110296099-007
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