Significance of Social Semiotic Research

A social semiotic approach is central to the analysis of visual imagery drawn from a given community. To provide a fine-grained social semiotic account, the social context of meaning making is crucial in making sense of the visual texts in relation to the wider discourse environment and its ideological underpinnings. It has been demonstrated that a multidisciplinary approach to social semiotic empirical research is extremely helpful in analysing socially shaped semiotic artefacts and unpacking the multiplicity of meanings attached to them. As will be outlined shortly in this chapter, further research could possibly explore the synergy between social semiotics and theoretical constructs from cognitive blending theory and the new semiotic regimes created by the advances in computer technologies in virtual reality in which realistic visual images are employed to replicate a real environment as well as the agency of its user and the semiotic choices made by software designers.