Semiotics, Authorship And Viewers Are All Producers Of Meaning

Semiotics can be defined as the study of symbols and signs particularly with regard to how they are used to create meaning and communicate it to others. Semiotics also offers tools that make it possible to uncover the cultural conventions and codes that highlight the period to which a setting was placed and interpret meanings behind the symbols (Berger, 2014). In the pilot episode of “That 70s Show”, it is possible to apply semiotic analysis since there are various signs and symbols that reveal different elements of the show. Different signifiers in the episode and what they portray helps the audience to interpret the message that the producer is trying to convey. That 70s Show has a large presence of signs, signifiers, codes and ideologies that relate to teenage relationships and their lives in general during the 1970s. Additionally, it is important to highlight character placement and the semiotics involved pertaining to the viewers.

First, they point out that “practices of looking are never neutral; rather, they are both selective and biased.” (Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson, 2015, p. 217). Furthermore, the way CFM presents their exhibition after the glass limited the sense of the visitors, because just looking means “to not touch, to not hear,

6) A person may "see" not with the eyes, if they were to feel something deep within themselves that could not be attributed to any of the senses. Seeing in this case means to understand what the view means to the individual.

The first two chapters of “The Practice of Looking” touch upon the idea of interpretation of images. For the purposes of this essay, an image is a piece of media that has a tangible visual effect, such as a picture, book, or TV series. The authors talk about how many people can have different interpretations of the same image and the idea that the audience gives an image meaning, which are valid arguments, but they fail to recognize that a single person’s interpretation of an image can change over time. Interpretation can change constantly, whether it’s many people looking at the same image or one person looking at the same image repeatedly over time; sometimes, the author’s intended meaning is more easily interpreted than at other times.

In this particular text, Osman asks her audience to reflect on their everyday gaze and how it aligns with their actions. Throughout a majority of the text,

This is something that everyone does when looking at any piece of artwork, but Sherman made this key in her collection, allowing the viewer to analyse the image and come to their own conclusion on the narrative. It gives the viewer freedom to find their own connection with the images, only knowing that they were about feminist identity. All of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills have a haunting emotion to them as if the subject is fighting off their own demons, especially in Untitled Film Still #3 (figure 8). The gaze opens the mind up to all narratives and almost gives the viewer a piece of the emotion from the persona to analyse and give back. This is one of the key points to Sherman’s work, the connection between the persona and the viewer, how they interrupt the narrative and emotion from the images.

Semiotics, also known as semiology, is the study of signs, symbols, and signification. Signs and symbols are hidden throughout television shows and movies, especially in crime dramas like NCIS. Shows like this are notorious for having discreet connections between different points of the story.

As Laura Mulvey states in her article "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema", the cinema operates as an "advanced representation system" that offers pleasure in the act of looking, what she classifies as scopophilia or voyeurism (Mulvey 484). Through the cinematic experience, one may sit in a dark theatre and derive pleasure from looking without being seen. As E. Ann Kaplan describes in the introduction to her book Women and Film, within this act of gazing there are three looks: "(i) within the film text itself, men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; (ii) the spectator, in turn is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on screen; and (iii) the camera's original 'gaze' comes into play in the very

This is a topic of discussion for all psychologists. Being watched or observed changes you and can also change your behaviour without you even knowing. This fact has been demonstrated in many different experiments involving children, adults, and even criminals. In an article published in 2014 by Dr. Jason G. Goldman, a researcher, writer, and cognitive scientist, stated “we’re so sensitive to being watched that even just a drawing or photograph of a pair of eyes influences our decisions” (Goldman). I believe this statement is proven through many experiments. Especially, one held on halloween night of 1976. Psychologists placed themselves in eighteen different homes to observe 360 unknowing participants. As children knocked on the door and

When solely looking at the

Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost. (Foucault) ”

This highlight area of his eye is the part of the frame which has the greatest contrast, so naturally the audience is drawn directly into this man’s stare,

Semiotics is the study of meaning. There are many aspects that go into developing a semiotic analysis. They include signs, a signifier and signified, codes, opposition, code confusion, intertexuality, paradigms, and syntagyms. Before delving into the analysis, the meaning of each of these terms and their relation to semiotics must be made clear. A sign could be anything that stands for something else. A signifier is the physical object that represents something else, while the signified is the image the object relays. Codes are a set of rules that govern everything. Opposition, or binary opposition, which is used in this analysis, is when two things or people are used as opposites

This article Modernity: Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge is collected from the book Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture written by Marita Sturken, and Lisa Cartwright, published by Oxford University Press, 2001. In modern world an image is not a unleavened embodiment of reality, it is more than that, an image also combines power relations between individuals and institutions. The authors also claim that "the concept of spectatorship allows us to talk about this broader context in which looking is enacted in an interactive, multimodal, and rational field" (p-93). The notion of spectatorship also includes the concept of gaze, a rational activity of looking. In this article, the authors bring different ideas to query the

The basics of Semiotics were laid down by a Swiss linguist, Ferdinand De Saussure (1857-1913). “He used the word to describe a new science which he saw as ‘a science, which studies the life of signs at the heart of social life’ [Saussure cited in Underwood] He considered that a sign had two essential elements: the signifier and the signified. A signifier is any material thing that