Semiotics Case

Semiotics

People everywhere see, hear, or think ideas that use semiotics. In other words, people use semiotics, the study of signs, everywhere to understand the specific meaning of a sign (Silverman and Rader 5). The articles from Clarie Zulkey and Roland Barthes are perfect examples of how semiotics are used. They both have specific rules that involve recognizable media to distract or to entertain people. For instance, Zulkey takes well known entertainment like Saturday Night Live and Us magazine to distract Americans from real identifiable events like the September 11th attacks. However, Barthes uses each wrestler's acting role to describe how people notice "signs" to determine what is taking place during a match. Nevertheless, Zulkey and Barthes both use semiotics by using these and other recognizable characteristics to compare views.

The concept of semiotics is easy to describe. However, the signs are somewhat difficult to find in articles. Semiotics describes how everything is a sign. A sign can be defined as "an object or idea or combination of the two that refers to something besides itself, and it depends on others to recognize that it's a sign" (Silverman and Rader 5). In other words, if people look at something, and it does not mean anything to them, then it is not a sign. People recognize a sign by two important concepts. First, people see if a sign is an image, an object, a word, or a sound that is called a signifier. Then, when people connect the meaning in their minds, it is called a signified. These two concepts put together are defined as a sign. A perfect example is from The World Is a Text. Silverman and Rader write, "The stop sign as we know it carries a meaning beyond a simple combination of word, color, and shape. It carries the weight and force of history, law, and ubiquity" (5). We understand that the stop sign is a sign because we recognize it as a traffic symbol that tells us to stop at a specific point. However, when there are many signs, it is called a text (Eco 36). Umberto Eco describes how texts limit their meanings and how people interpret those texts (35-37). He says this by saying that texts are "lazy machinery which forces [their] possible readers to do a part of [their] textual work, but the modalities of the interpretive operations-albeit multiple, and possibly infinite-are by no means indefinite and must be recognized as imposed by the semiotics strategies displayed by the [texts]" Eco 36). In other words, the process of analyzing texts all depends on what the person's past knowledge is. Furthermore, in his own terms, Eco says, "A text can be used as criminal or psychoanalytical evidence, as hallucinatory device, or as stimulus for free association" (36). Eco tells us that the meaning of signs can change if one puts them in a different context. Zulkey does this when she is "Blaming JLo," and Barthes does this when he describes "The World of Wrestling."

Claire Zulkey uses semiotics all throughout her article to prove that Americans are self-serving and never learn from their mistakes. For example, Zulkey uses September 11th as a sign because we distinctly remember the horror, sadness, and confusion that day brought to us. She focused on September 11th because the reader can picture how Americans adjusted before, during, and after the attacks. Zulkey also uses semiotics to describe how Americans never really open their eyes to "real" events that were affecting the world before, during, and after the attacks. She does this by comparing a well-known celebrity like "[JLo's] opulent, ridiculous life, marriages, diamonds, cars, divorces, and bad movies" to an American that only focus on "unreal" events (Zulkey 1). According to Eco, he says that the reader "plays an active role in textual interpretation because signs

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