Ethnography Gerhard Friedrich Mller developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the Second Kamchatka

Expedition (173343) as a professor of history and geography. Whilst involved in the expedition, he differentiated VlkerBeschreibung as a distinct area of study. This then became known as Ethnography.[8] However it was August Ludwig von Schlzer and Christoph Wilhelm Jacob Gatterer of the University of Gottingen who introduced the term into academic discourse in an attempt to reform the contemporary understanding of world history.[8] Communication studies is an academic field that deals with processes of human communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols to create meaning. The discipline encompasses a range of topics, from face-to-face conversation to mass media outlets such as television broadcasting. Communication studies also examines how messages are interpreted through the political, cultural, economic, semiotic, hermeneutic, and social dimensions of their contexts. Semiotics, also called semiotic studies and including (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. However, as different from linguistics, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:

Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures Pragmatics: Relation between signs and sign-using agents

Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication.[1] However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the life sciences such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics (including zoosemiotics). Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols.[2] More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences".[3] Charles Morris adds that semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects which they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.
Semiotics of social networking

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Semiotics of Social Networking) Jump to: navigation, search Social media gives humans an instant connection to communicate with others. Social media is "used to describe the type of media that is based on conversation and interaction between people online. Where media means digital words, sounds & pictures which are typically shared via the internet and the value can be cultural, societal or even financial" [1] One important way to explore this form of communication as social networking is through semiotics. Semiotics Semiotics[2] is looking for signs meaning[3] Semiotic structuralism looks for the signs meaning in social interaction involved[4] However, post-structuralist theories take tools from (structuralism) semiotics combined with social interaction.[5] This is called social semiotics.[6] Social semiotics is a branch of the field of semiotics which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain meaning-making as a social practice.[7] Social semiotics also examines semiotic practices, specific to a culture and community, for the making of various kinds of texts and meanings in various situational contexts and contexts of culturally meaningful activity. [8] Social Networking Social networking is communication of one person with another person in a virtual social space using a computer.[9] Social media gives humans instant connection to communicate with others. This new area of communication allows new insight into social semiotics. Social semiotics is studying human interactions through situations.[10] Millions of people now interact through blogs, collaborate through wikis, play multiplayer games, publish podcasts and video, build relationships through social network sites, and evaluate all the above forms of communication through feedback and ranking mechanisms. [11] Social semiotics unlike speech, writing necessitates some sort of technology in the for m of person device interaction.[12] Social semiotics function through the triad of communication or Peircean Semiotic (Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)) [13] in the form of sign,object, interpretant[14] (Chart 1), and Human, Machine, Tag (Information)[15] (Chart 2). In Peircean semiotics (Chart 1), "A sign[in the form of representamen] is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea which I have something called the ground of the representamen".[16]

Sign, Object, Interpretant

Human, Machine, Tag Social Semiotics Social Semiotics (Chart 2) Human-Social interacting.[17] MachineComputers are created by humans and now have social applications. [18] Tag Picture/information tagging on social networks has changed the traditional online communication process.[19] This example of the triangle of Human, Machine, Tag is shown when looking at tagging photographs on Facebook (Chart 3).[20] The Human takes the photo on a camera and puts the digital file (information) on the Machine, the Machine is then navigated to Facebook where the file is downloaded. The Human has the Machine Tag the photo with information (names, places, data) for other Humans to see. This process then can be continued (see Chart 2). Collaborative tagging has been quickly gaining ground because of its ability to recruit the activity of web users into effectively organizing and sharing vast amounts of information.[21] Semiotics of Social Networking (Chart 3)

Sign as Human: "the form which the sign takes (not necessarily material, though usually interpreted as such".[22] Photo of Human is the Sign/Human. Object as Machine: "something beyond the sign to which it refers (a referent)". [23] Computer, digital file, social media is the Object/Machine. Interpretant as Tag: "not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign". [24] Names, places, dates is the Interpretanat/Tag. References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Jump up ^ Social Media. May 3, 2010. Internet on-line. Available from Social media Jump up ^ Semiotics. March 6, 2010. Internet on-line. Available from Semiotics Jump up ^ Chandler, D. 2007. The Basics: Semiotics 2nd ed.. New York, NY: Routledge. Jump up ^ Structuralism. April 25, 2010. Internet on-line. Available from Structuralism. Jump up ^ Post-structuralism. April 25th, 2010. Internet on-line. Available from Poststructuralist Jump up ^ Chandler, D. 2007. The Basics: Semiotics 2nd ed.. New York, NY: Routledge. Jump up ^ Social Semiotics. March 6, 2010. Internet on-line. Available from Social semiotics Jump up ^ Lemke, J. L. Important Theories for Research Topics. 2002. Internet on-line. Available from academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu Jump up ^ Artsnooze. Social Networking (Semiotics, Phenomenology, Epistemology, Ontology, Culture studies). 2009. Internet on-line. Available from scribd.com Jump up ^ Hodge, R., and G. Kress. 1988. Social Semiotics. Polity: Cambridge. Jump up ^ Warschauer, Mark, Douglas Grimes. 2007. Audience, Authorship, and Artifact: The Emergent Semiotics of Web 2.0. Cambridge Journal 27, no. Annual Review of Applied Linguistic: 1-1-23. Jump up ^ Noy, Chaim. 2008. Mediation materialized: The Semiotics of a Visitor Book at an Israeli Commemoration Site. Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 2: 175(21). Jump up ^ Semiotic elements and classes of sign (Pierce. May 7, 2010. Internet on-line. Available from Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce) Jump up ^ Mules, Warwick. 1997. The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication. Journal of Communication 47 p166(4). Jump up ^ Social Tagging, Online Communication, and Peircean Semiotics. 2008. Internet online. Available from http://www.slideshare.net/andreasinica/social-tagging-online-communicationand-peircean-semiotics-presentation Jump up ^ Chandler, D. 2007. The Basics: Semiotics 2nd ed.. New York, NY: Routledge Jump up ^ Thibault, P. J. 1991. Social Semiotics as Praxis: Text, Social Meaning Making, and Nabokov's Ada. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jump up ^ Hodge, R., and G. Kress. 1988. Social Semiotics. Polity: Cambridge. Jump up ^ Huang, Andrea W., Tyng-Ruey Chuang. 2009. Social Tagging, Online Communication, and Peircean Semiotics: A Conceptual Framework (report). Journal of Information Science 35, no. 3: 340(18). Jump up ^ White, L. 2010. Facebook, Friends and Photos: A Snapshot into Social Networking for Generating Travel Ideas (Chapter 7). In Tourism Informatics: Visual Travel Recommender Systems, Social Communities, and User Interface Design. Edited by N. Sharda. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Jump up ^ Cattuto, Ciro, Vittorio Loreto, and Luciano Pietronero. 2007. Semiotic Dynamics and Collaborative Tagging. (Applied Physical Sciences) (author abstract)(report). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 104, no. 5: 1461(4). Jump up ^ Chandler, D. 2007. The Basics: Semiotics 2nd ed.. New York, NY: Routledge Jump up ^ Chandler, D. 2007. The Basics: Semiotics 2nd ed.. New York, NY: Routledge. Jump up ^ Chandler, D. 2007. The Basics: Semiotics 2nd ed.. New York, NY: Routledge

21. 22. 23. 24.