Visual Online Communication

     Social semiotics is a method, an approach, an analytical perspective, and research strategy that enables researchers to investigate the systematic relationships between social reality and signs, texts, and discourses. It is the study of the signs that people make in order to communicate and the sign markers and their motivations. It is an approach to human communication studying meaning making as a social practice. It is also the way someone's cultural influence allows them to make meaning of the world around them. This method was defined by one of its founders named Ferdinand de Saussure and he called the study "the life of signs within society", the study only emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the work of Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Social semiotics is important because is can shape social relations and society itself. 

    Some of the rules associated with the methodology in social semiotics are that context matters, multimodality, semiosis is a social practice, intertextuality, and agency and power. The meaning of any sign is shaped by the context in which it is used. Social semiotics recognizes that meaning is conveyed through multiple modes of communication including language, images, sound, and gesture. Social semiotics emphasizes the importance of analyzing the social and cultural factors. It also encourages the analysis of intertextuality and the ways in which texts are connected with each other as well as the analysis of power dynamics and the ways in which social groups use signs to exert and resist power. 

Images I pulled and analyzed using the Social Semiotics method;

                                                                        

 

                                                             

                                                                                          

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (2023, February 24). Semiotics. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved March 19, 2023, from https://www.britannica.com/science/semiotics

What is social semiotics. IGI Global. (n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2023, from https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/social-semiotics/27488