Semiotic Theory Of Signifiers

The world as we know it is about 4.54 billion years and it is found that the first humans have been living from the land 200 000 thousand years ago. The interesting thing about that fact is that we have a void in the knowledge of early human civilization all the way till about 5 000 years ago. The reason for this is, is that until then ancient civilizations have not captured information with they would pass on to the next generation. Once the Bushmen started painting their stories on cave wall and once the Egyptians started creating symbols to reflect an object or idea, we as humans started knowing about our history and so we started to rapidly evolve as a race. The reason why I have started this essay with this short history lesson is to emphasize

One being the signifier, which is the actual material form that is being used to convey a message and the other being the signified which refers to what the message is of the signifier. One can only have one with the other, meaning that if the is a signifier there is something being signified. When we look at figure1 and apply this basic theory, we can establish that there are multiple signifiers which have the own message. The hand with the thumb pointing up is a signifier and what is being signified is that it is a sign of approval. The woman with a child in her arms is another signifier and what can be signified is that she wants to protect her

Like the signifier the denotation is what can be seen. The sign is analyzed on a purely descriptive level and it is taken at face value. So looking at the denotations of Figure 1 one can see a woman sitting on the floor with a younger boy in her arms, the surrounding area is dirty and one can see arms where the fingers are clinched and the thumb is pointing up entering the picture. When looking at the connotations one would extract information and associations from the denotations. Connotations are the feeling, beliefs and ideas attached anything, it could be objects, colours, words. We would also look at how the signifier is presented so in this case the way it’s been pictured with lighting, cropping print style and camera angle. Everything has a connotation attached. Just to mention one of the connotations which could be made from Figure 1 is the way the body is cropped out from the arms in the picture. It refers to some sense of anonymity, even though one feels the presence of the people standing around the woman one does not know who they are. This could have been done maybe to protect them from taking a stand in the