Semiotics

Semiotics can be defined as "the study of signs and symbols and their use of interpretation". They play a key role in society and are used everywhere, however looking closely into them you can get to understand how easy it can be to get manipulated by them and how they can shift our perspective on how we see things.

During our lesson we would be shown a lot of interesting images from Sean Hall's "This Means This, This Means That" guide which play with our mind in all sorts of different ways. Take this image as an example:

At first this image didn't make too much sense to me, I was too focused on trying to see a pattern within the dots that I completely overlooked what the dots actually represented: they were braille characters. Once I got told it made sense to me straight away, however because my mind was too busy trying to connect the dots it didn't even cross my mind to think about analysing it logically.

We also looked into Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" book which talks about how icons can make us infer the meaning of things. Take this page as an example:

Although our brain tells us that when we see an icon we immediately think what it is, but in reality it's simply a drawing in a book. "This is not food" for example might make us question it at first, but it obviously can't be food because we can't eat it, or "This is not a car" because we can't drive it. Just from simple shapes on a piece of paper we can infer what McCloud wants us to realise how much we rely on symbolism to make ourselves aware with whats around us.

The topic itself is very fascinating and it's a good way to open out our minds a little bit more and see how we represent things differently.