Social Semiotics
Hi everyone! Happy December! This week's topic focuses on the idea of Social Semiotics. According to Jeff Bezemer of the University College London, "Social semiotics is concerned with meaning makers and meaning making. It studies the media of dissemination and the modes of communication that people use and develop to represent their understanding of the world and to shape power relations with others. It draws on qualitative, fine-grained analysis of records of meaning making, such as ‘artifacts’, ‘texts’, and ‘transcripts’, to examine the production and dissemination of discourse across the variety of social and cultural contexts within which meaning is made." To translate that into something much easier to understand, social semiotics is the study of the multiple ways people can communicate in social settings. The specific term was first coined by Michael Halliday in 1978, though the field of semiotics had existed long before then. The rules associated with the methodol...
