Semiotics of New Media Literacy Melda N. Yildiz William Paterson University [email_address]
Construction of Meaning Sign Experience Meaning Construction Time/ era Context/ place
The factors that create meaning
The meaning of signs or representations is dependent on social, cultural, and historical contexts
Time/ era you live in
Context/ place it occurs
Previous personal and cultural experience
The physical appearance
The discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie , …. Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. Umberto Eco
In political Washington, Statistics are weapons of war . That’s why they get manipulated, massaged, and twisted until any connection to reality is strictly coincidental.
The Truth but not the Whole Truth
The V Sign
V for Victory Winston Churchill gives the victory sign at a political rally, Liverpool, 1951
The "V" for victory that Winston Churchill used (with the palm facing outward, same as the American sign for "peace"), when the palm is reversed, it means something else... If a person used two fingers to order two beers in a British pub.. it has insulting connotations…
# 2 the two fingers in a 1st grade math class may refer to the number "two"
OK (okay) vs. 0K (zero kilobyte)
This sign might mean
"OK" in the United States
"money" in Japan
"sex" in Mexico
"homosexual" in Ethiopia
an obscenity in Brazil
“Zero” in Southern France
James Mangan , 1981 Learning through pictures Yogi Bear Tsimshian Bear
Marguerite de Valois Queen Margot 1553-1615
Advantages of semiotics
Allows us to break down a message into its component parts and examine them separately and in relationship to one another.
Allows us to look for patterns across different forms of communication.
Helps us understand how our cultural and social conventions relate to the communication we create and consume.
Helps us get beyond “the obvious,” which may not be all that obvious after all.
Pronunciation: (kom"y u -t A 'sh u n),
1. the act of substituting one thing for another; substitution; exchange. 2. the substitution of one kind of payment for another. 3. Also called commuta'tion test". Ling. the technique, esp. in phonological analysis, of substituting one linguistic item for another while keeping the surrounding elements constant, used as a means of determining the constituent units in a sequence and their contrasts with other units.