MEDIA, MESSAGES AND MEANINGS: Semiotics, form and content
Globally, our media consumption is increasingly relentless, visual, mobile, and interactive. We live in an ‘Electronic Age’ of simultaneous information and in a Global Village arguably ‘as wide as the planet’. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan – who was a professor at the University of Toronto – introduced these notions way back in the 1960s. Author of the phrase, “The Medium is the Message”, McLuhan may not have been an “official” semiotician, but his discussion of the “meaning structures” produced by the media reflects an intrinsically semiotic view of the world.
Semiofest 2017 will use McLuhan’s “semiotic” approach as a jumping-off point to explore some of the most perplexing and salient issues in the field.
We invite you to share your experiences working with semiotics and semiotic inspired approaches and methodologies to understand media touch points. We would particularly welcome contributions in the following areas:
Brand Touchpoints: Branding has become increasingly predominant as a way of packaging up content. How do you use semiotics to analyse brands across media and geography? How do different touch points convey different meanings? How in your work have you accounted for meanings within logos, brand narratives, sound design, social media?
New Media: modern communication technologies use semiotic sign systems to convey connotative meanings? Share with us your latest approaches to understanding the messages received through online, digital, GIFs and ‘social media’ media – in previous Semiofests, we have had presentations on wordless books, microtexts and emoticons?
Intermediation: Semiofest gives us a precious opportunity to talk about how to demonstrate the relevance of semiotic thinking to paying clients. Our medium is that of academia, commercial clients speak the idiom of financial results. So what medium should we use to best deliver the value of semiotics message? And what, exactly, is that message?
But as in all Semiofests, we also welcome exceptional contributions on any aspect of commercial semiotics from the realms of design, advertising, and all aspects of brand communication.
Let’s create together an atmosphere of sharing and learning, July 19-22, 2017!
About Semiofest:
Semiofest was first established in 2012 to share semiotic thinking internationally and to allow those who apply semiotics in their business to connect with like-minded people.
Today, Semiofest is the world’s only annual conference focused specifically on applied semiotics. Semiofest brings together leading practitioners from both industry and academia to share, collaborate, and develop understanding and capabilities around semiotics as an applied discipline.
