Semiotics

So Thursday was lecture time again, this week on Semiotics. Frankly there was an entire room full of people who had no clue what this is/was about, but from what I could gather I think it was basically about communication, and the ways in which we can do this. The most interesting part of the lecture was a bit about iconic and arbitrary signifiers, which sort of described how easily we can take something and attach meaning to it. For instance, a picture of a cat is highly iconic, and anyone in the world attaches the same meaning to that picture (i.e. picture of cat = cat). Therefore its highly iconic. An arbitrary signifier might be the word "CAT" which is more random, as it has no relation to an actual cat other than the fact that it has been randomly chosen to be the sequence of letters in the English language to denote a cat.

I found myself linking this particular aspect back to last week's lecture on realism, because the ideas of semiotics seem to have ideas about realism tied in. I must admit though, I felt far more engaged last week compared to this week.