Semiotic Analysis
A Semiotic Analysis: “There’s A Soldier In All Of Us”
In today’s society, people are significantly influenced by the media. Mediated messages are often deliberate and appeal to specific audiences based on race, gender, ethnicity, social status, education level, political views, and much more. By applying semiotics to everyday life, we can decipher meaning within texts, film, and photography in a more constructive way. Here, it becomes evident that semiotics is a fundamental concept that enables better communication. Through a semiotic analysis of the 2010 Call of Duty (COD): Black Ops “There’s A Soldier In All Of Us” commercial, it becomes obvious how and why this advertisement was so successful toward various audiences. In order to understand how and why companies are so successful in their marketing techniques, it is important to understand semiotics and its concepts in its simplest form. Although there is a long history concerning the importance and curiosity of signs and the way they communicate meaning, modern semiotic analysis can be credited to two men: Swiss linguist Ferinand de Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Saussure’s approach deals with many concepts of semiotic analysis that can be applied to signs. “Saussure’s division of the sign into two components, the signifier, or ‘sound-image’, and the signified, or ‘concept,’ and his suggestion that the relationship between signifiers and signified is arbitrary were of crucial importance for the development of semiotics” (Berger 4). In contrast, Peirce focused on three dimensions of signs: iconic, symbolic, and indexical. Although Saussure and Pierce may differ in their ideas about how signs function, they both have made significant contributions to the modern science of semiology. Another important figure in semiotics is philosopher-critic Roland Barthes who describes semiology as a science of forms, since it studies significations apart from their content. In his essay, Myth
In today’s society, people are significantly influenced by the media. Mediated messages are often deliberate and appeal to specific audiences based on race, gender, ethnicity, social status, education level, political views, and much more. By applying semiotics to everyday life, we can decipher meaning within texts, film, and photography in a more constructive way. Here, it becomes evident that semiotics is a fundamental concept that enables better communication. Through a semiotic analysis of the 2010 Call of Duty (COD): Black Ops “There’s A Soldier In All Of Us” commercial, it becomes obvious how and why this advertisement was so successful toward various audiences. In order to understand how and why companies are so successful in their marketing techniques, it is important to understand semiotics and its concepts in its simplest form. Although there is a long history concerning the importance and curiosity of signs and the way they communicate meaning, modern semiotic analysis can be credited to two men: Swiss linguist Ferinand de Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Saussure’s approach deals with many concepts of semiotic analysis that can be applied to signs. “Saussure’s division of the sign into two components, the signifier, or ‘sound-image’, and the signified, or ‘concept,’ and his suggestion that the relationship between signifiers and signified is arbitrary were of crucial importance for the development of semiotics” (Berger 4). In contrast, Peirce focused on three dimensions of signs: iconic, symbolic, and indexical. Although Saussure and Pierce may differ in their ideas about how signs function, they both have made significant contributions to the modern science of semiology. Another important figure in semiotics is philosopher-critic Roland Barthes who describes semiology as a science of forms, since it studies significations apart from their content. In his essay, Myth