Please take a look at Part I here — it’s not necessary, but it will give you a good background on the sign-making theory of Charles Sanders Pierce.
Part II: Over-interpreting the digital
A groundhog, emerging from a long winter, peeps out of its burrow, seeking — seemingly — to detect the weather. The climate it finds will determine the weather for the weeks to come. Should it be sunny out, this new trend will continue. But should it be cloudy (somehow cloudy enough for a groundhog to see it’s shadow mind you) the groundhog will scurry back into its burrow and winter will persist for 6 more weeks.
I don’t claim to be an expert on a groundhog’s meteorological acumen or general behaviour, but it certainly seems suspect that a groundhog will:
- check the weather at a particular time
- at a particular place
- and that these actions will be definitively predictive of the forthcoming climate.
Absurd, comical, whimsical — fine, “literal” isn’t one of the adjectives you would use to describe Groundhog Day’s rituals. But the holiday is built from our ritualistic approach to our interpretation of signs. It’s an example of how threadbare we can make the association of a sign to it’s object.
We are so insistent in inserting signs into the phenomena around us that we actually layer semiotic behaviour on top of itself: the groundhog sees a sign, which then becomes a sign for us to interpret.
Needless to say, we are susceptible to over-interpreting our world.
This is damaging, because sometimes a sign actually isn’t a sign for anything at all, and other times it is a sign for something wildly different that what we think. But, more than either of these:
We far to often create an erroneous chain of meaning from a single sign
This is caused in no small part to our insatiable appetite for interpretation.
One of the founders of semiotics — Charles Sanders Pierce — saw us as actors who would inexorably see all the phenomena around us as a series of signs. He felt this way during his lifetime — and he lived the better part of his life in the 1800's.
How would he feel now, with the utter saturation of our mental space with information from every conceivable angle about every conceivable topic?
Take this picture:
It was paraded around after the recent London attacks as evidence of Muslims’ general disinterest in the plight of those terrorised. For the purposes of this article, I’m unconcerned with the politics or truth of this statement. What I am concerned with is the poor sign-making process that a conclusion like this results from.
Initially, this was just seen as a photo of the event itself— Pierce would classify this as a type of index because it indicates (or points) to an actual event that happened. However, it is by no means just an index. Commentators began to see this as a visual metaphor — what Pierce would term as a type of icon (think of a folder icon as a visual metaphor for a folder). In this case, each aspect of the picture had a metaphorical correlate: the woman is a visual representation of the Muslim population as a whole, the fallen man represents the effects of terrorism, and the other people represent the Western public. Hence, the overall metaphor would be one of Muslim indifference toward the terrorist attack.
However, over time, as this gained more and more views, and accrued more and more meaning through discussion of what it “means” writ large, it took on a new form.
People began to no longer seen this image primarily as an index of an event that happened, or as a visual metaphor, but as an object within the socio-political landscape than has an affective meaning. It became a cultural artifact embodying a dialectical entity within the zeitgeist; in plain English: a collection of pixels that represent a current topic in society. It had become a symbol. A symbol, if you’ll recall bears no visual resemblance to what it represents, but rather represents its object through cultural consensus.
Depending on your viewpoint, the entire picture may be a symbol of anti-immigration, of the racism of the West, or in my case, our over-eagerness to treat individual pieces of digital media as representative of society as a whole.
The above screenshot of a video— not even necessarily the full video — is a sign as well. Very likely, you have seen the video. A professor being interviewed via Skype on the BBC is interrupted by his children. Quite comical, yes, but it began to accrue semiotic content.
Again, a basic interpretation would be that is a video of an event that happened — an index. However, it gathered steam as people identified individual elements as representative of a greater whole: a visual metaphor (an icon, as noted earlier). The man’s actions in the video were construed as a metaphor for his indifference toward children. But again, as it gained meaning through exposure and discourse, it became a symbol. Pictures of it, indeed it’s very mention, gained particular meaning.
Some the video as a whole as a sign for how men and women may differently treat children. Others saw it as a sign of how our work/private lives are no longer separate and what we should do to prepare. Once again, it inexorably became a symbol. This act of semiosis— while generally not nearly as toxic as that of the Muslim woman walking on London Bridge, still merits us examining the accuracy of our interpretations.
But why are we so keen to so infinitely interpret all that we see?
Famed, late semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco would call this unlimited semiosis, meaning that what we interpret always leads to further interpretants. Philosopher Jacques Lacan would argue that this successive chain of interpretants would accrue until we reached a final interpretant called the master signifier, that is, a deep concept that a person identifies with. Rather than seeing each sign as just a simple index of an event, or even a metaphor for an event, each sign accrues meaning — becomes a sign for further meaning (or interpretants) — through constant discussion and overwrought semiosis. At each step each sign bears less and less resemblance to the actual indexical object of the sign. Of course, as they stray further are further away from the initial objects, the signs usually take the form of a symbol.
Then, these final interpretants that reflect our most closely held beliefs are used to structure our ontological assumptions and our orientation in the world. These final interpretants allow us to see the world through the structures that we know, that we think of as important. It saves us cognitive labour of building a new ontological structure with which to understand the world, and thus provides us with actionable outcomes as these interpretations build towards or against our most important beliefs.
Building on this is the media, social media, and the various other appendages of the digital that all seek to reinforce this semiotic/ontological structure. The media follows and encourages these semiotic chains, never letting us forget that what we are looking at is anything less than the master signifier.
The problems with this, of course, cannot be overstated. Every mob, every pointed finger, and every reductive argument is borne from seeing something that isn’t there. The lingering question, of course, is what can we do about this, and can we do anything that won’t inhibit otherwise useful semiotic interpretation.
The battle’s a tough one — there’s not doubt about it. But there are some activities we can do.
Balance is the required tool against our unlimited semiosis as a guard against find meaning in specious contexts. It’s a personal tool that requires us to consider — to ask — for if this is truly representative. What if an image, video, or other piece of media went viral that represented the opposite of our beliefs? Would we feel that it was still representative? Carefully considering whether we would feel the same if the semiotic activity was working against us allows us to be removed from our interpretations.
Context is a vital tool in our fight against our over interpretation. It’s far too easy to look at any piece of media and assume conclusions. But what about the context? What were the people feeling? Who else was there? What didn’t we see/hear? Reserving our impulse to impose meaning until we understand context means that we can see the world for what it is: connected, ambiguous and something we can only understand through the appropriate context-sensitive perspectives.
There’s an automatic, active workflow that works for us, but that also against us. It’s the mechanisms of our brain which seek to automatically find meanin. We often don’t actively try to make meanings, rather it is a learned (what Daniel Kahneman would called system 1) behaviour that triggers without our conscious knowledge. Much like reading, it’s often an activity that fires within our brain that doesn’t require an active will to do. We have to use the more logical part of our brain (what Kahneman would call system 2) to understand whether these often automatic interpretations are indeed valid.
It’s work, it’s tough, but it’s more important than it’s ever been.
