Advantages And Disadvantages Of Semiotics

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What are the strengths and weaknesses of semiotics as a way to analyse culture? There is no easy way to describe semiotics, the dictionary tells you to ‘see: linguistic’ and on the internet there are many different explanations. Umberto Eco, (1976) believes ‘Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all.’ However if we understand…show more content…
Money in Japan, sex in Mexico and homosexuality in Ethiopia. Analysing culture however is a difficult task on its own. Whether using semiology to make this is easy is difficult to foresee. Therefore in this essay I will draw up some advantages and disadvantages of using semiotics to analyse culture and come to a conclusion of what I judge to be best. Firstly, analysing culture is difficult to begin with. There are many different ways in which people, including theorists go about doing this. By using semiotics could either complicate things or make them easier. Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) was one of the first theorists to come up with a definition of a ‘sign.’ He believed that a sign carried two types of meanings within it, the signifier and the signified. When one sees a sign, such as a ‘close’ sign on a shop door, the visual sign on the door would be classed as the signifier. Whereas the signified, which we think in our head, would be that the shop is no longer open for business and the customer would have to return at a later date. This
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