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The sign is entirely invented by human beings, and it is arbitrary constructed which is a reflection to reality. Signs do not have a meaning or make sense in itself. Their meaning is only created by their cultural context. Signs are generally not interesting themselves, but what they are standing for is the most important part. In other words, signs are not information to be verified whether they are true or not, but instead are clues about what various things could mean. This process of signification, the “translation” from the sign to its meaning, might be called meaning making.
2.2 The Signifier and Cultural Borders
According to semiotics, each sign or everything that is taken as a sign by anyone consists of two parts. This model was founded by Ferdinand de Saussure. The “signifier” is the form of a sign; the “signified” is the concept that the sign stands for. The picture below illustrates this concept.
The interpretation of signs is closely related to the culture. Here is an easier example to explain this point. If a Finn writes “joulupukki”, this is a signifier standing for Santa Claus. But even though Santa Claus might be well known in most other countries in this world, only Finnish people will be able to decode this sign. For others, it might just be a nice combination of letters.
To sum up: signs are an man-made constructs which are used to express meaning. But most signs can only be interpreted correctly in the culture context. The author of this thesis would like to use Erving Goffman‘s “framing” concept (Goffman 1974) to explain the process of signification in a less abstract way. He describes a cultural system where individuals are framing situations in a certain way to make sure that the recipient can reinterpret the situation and understand it in the same way. This is exactly what is going on in the process of meaning-making regarding communication by signs.
2.3 Internet Emoticons
The author of this thesis will take the most basic form :) as our study object. Although the often used word “smileys” is better known than the word “emoticons”, it is not hard to understand what the author of this thesis is talking about: icons composed of typographic symbols to express feelings and emotions.
Just as the term “emoticons” itself shows, that this is an interesting field to apply semiotics on analysing this phenomenon in computer-mediated communication. It includes the words “emotion” and “icon”, and the latter is one of the basic terms in semitoical analysis. So, if an emoticon is decoded, an iconically encoded emotion will appear.
2.4 The Denotation of :)
From the outside, the sign :) represents a smiling face. There are two eyes and a smiling mouth. In communication networks, this sign is used to add some positive emotion to a sentence.
What interesting is, whether this sign also can be interpreted as a smiling face by people who have never seen it before? Because it’s nothing else than a double dot and a closing bracket. While according to Chandler’s study about “signs” (Chandler, sem02.html), :) might be not purely iconic, but also symbolic.
British linguist Guy Cook asks whether the iconic sign on the door of a public lavatory for men actually looks more like a man than like a woman. “For a sign to be truly iconic, it would have to be transparent to someone who had never seen it before - and it seems unlikely that this is as much the case as is sometimes supposed.” (Cook 1992: 70).
In brief, as to the understanding of the :) as a smiling face, the combination of : and ) have to be decoded as a face first. The meaning of the sign is not always necessarily clear to people that do not often use text-based, network communication. While in the “network culture” it’s common sense among people, and users of these online services will also easily understand any variations of the icon, like ;), :( or :P.