Semiotics

Semiotics or semiology is the study of signs, sign systems, and the way meaning is derived from them. The life of signs in society. Here are some images from google when I typed in the word “semiotics”.

What I got from semiotics is that it's quite complicated and that a same image/photo can mean different things to different people. The first semiotic definition of “sign” came from by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course on General Linguistics (1915).

The sign (or word) is made up of two parts, a signifier which is the image itself and a signified which is the mental concept. In other words The signifier is the pointing finger, the word, the sound-image. It is in the interpretation of the signifier that meaning is created. On the other hand, the signified is the concept, the meaning, the object indicated by the signifier. It need not be a “real object” but some kind of referent to which the signifier refers.

So I guess in conclusion semiotics seeks to describe how meaning arises from a set of differential relations specific to a given sign system (language), and it assumes that there are no "positive" meanings.

Sources:

-Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes.

-http://faculty.smu.edu/mhouseho/Teaching/ENGL2311/Semiotics.htm

-http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02.html