Communicating Online: Social Semiotics
Hello classmates! This week, we are discussing the concept of social semiotics, and how to analyze images through this methodology. To begin, what exactly is social semiotics? According to Jeff Bezemer and Carey Jewitt of the University College London, "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" (Bezemer, Jewitt, 2015). Basically, social semiotics is a branch of the field of semiotics which amalyzes what humans signify as important and meaningful within social and cultural circumstances, or "meaning-making." The concept of social semiotics was discovered by Michael
