Messages, Signs, and Meanings

Reading Summary

Semiotics is the study of what things mean. The thing of which a sign refers to is called the “Referent”. There are two types of referents: concrete and abstract. A concrete referent is something that exists in the real world, while an abstract referent is something that is imaginary or conceptual. The article puts much stress that referents are widely and commonly used in all types of places and that if properly used, signs are a very efficient form of communication. There also exists 66 different types of signs, three of which are the most common: icons, indexes, and symbols. Icons utilize repetition and imitation as a referent. They appeal to the part of the human’s brain that deals with shape, color, and dimension. Indexes work by relating or transferring focus to the another referent. There are three types of indexes: spacial, temporal, and person indexes. Symbols refer to something depending on the specific context it is in and what it is used for.

Outside Example

My first thought of these signs were the app icons. While the look of the apps has changed over the years, they are still very important to convey what the app does from the outside to more easily be user friendly. Instead of using recent technologies to convey what feature resides within the app, it instead uses old, sometimes outdated technology as the icon. Examples of such include the film camera, a manilla file, an old camera, a speech bubble, a traditional telephone, envelope, newspaper, and a compass.

Reading Connection

One thing that’s interesting to note is that the apps’ icons resemble older technologies to convey what they are saying. In this sense they are using a combination of both iconicity and symbolism to tell the user what the app is. For example, FaceTime uses an old film camera in its icon. The idea of a film camera is condensed into simple shapes for the user to understand that is it a camera itself. From there, the brain understands that the film camera is symbolizing the feature to talk to someone over a video chat. I imagine this is the case because the old technology as the icons are a universal symbol already understood by a wide range of generations, and applying a real world object to something entirely digital helps minimize confusion.