What is Semiotics?
The theory and description of sign systems. It's all symbolic systems in a culture function like a second language or text. The description of sign systems from language to visual media and larger human constructions like cities allows an analysis of interpretation, the structure of social values, and the ideological uses of all kinds of information we are surrounded by in daily life. The important point is to see all this meaning-making and symbolic activity as rule-governed, learned, and constructed. Individual people in a culture may have greater or lesser knowledge or access to "the cultural encyclopaedia" of symbolic relationships and contents. The daily use of available signs and symbols in cultural encoding and decoding is an issue of a person's "competence," not a question about the sign system itself.
Multi-medial Semiotics
In the everyday use of languages and signs, we combine several kinds of physical media in communicating and making meaning - from voice and printed texts to mass media images, music, movies, the internet, and digital multimedia. We can talk or write about a movie, watch TV news that interprets an event, watch a TV mass media genre like a sit-com that requires knowledge of the codes for this genre, and listen to music, write email, and read over multimedia web pages all at the same time. We are constantly sending, receiving, and making meaning in various kinds of media, often conveying and interpreting meaning from one medium to another. This practice points to the existence of our larger contemporary and inherited semiotic system, or what some have termed a semiosphere, the whole universe of available and possible meanings in a cultural system. Social Semiotics takes the meaning-making process 'semiosis', to be more fundamental than the system of meaning-relations among signs themselves.. Social semiotics examines semiotic practices, specific to a culture and community.
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