Social Semiotics

Taking Socio-semiotics as an analysis tool, this research endeavors to ponder on the dynamics of discursive construction and its communication in the New Media Events. It is found that Transitivity and Intertextuality assume the responsibility of the discursive constructions, which effectively establish the domain interpretative rules of the meanings in the Semiotics Plane, while unite the individual discourses for their contending against the existed domain discourse in the Mimetic Plane.

"The realities of new technological and social conditions since the 1990s demand a new approach to literacy teaching. Looking onward from the original statement of aims of the multiliteracies movement in 1996, this volume brings together top-quality scholarship and research that has embraced the notion and features new contributions by many of the originators of this approach to literacy.

Drawing on large research projects and empirical evidence, the authors explore practical and educational issues that relate to multiliteracies, such as assessment, pedagogy and curriculum. The viewpoint taken is that multiliteracies is a complementary socio-cultural approach to the new literacies that includes pedagogy and learning. The differences are addressed from a multiliteracies perspective – one that does not discount or undermine the new literacies, but shows new ways in which they are complementary.

Computers and the internet are transforming the way we work and communicate and the very notion of literacy itself. This volume offers frontline information and a vital update for those wishing to understand the evolution of multiliteracies and the current state of literacy theory in relation to it."

The paper investigates sign-making through selection and recontextualization of (snippets of) previous texts, i.e., copy-and-paste; it discusses the underlying semiotic mechanism and the resulting practices, namely forwarding and remix. It further considers the rhetorical effects of these forms of text production and their impact on old and new genres and generic conventions. When representation is produced through selection, (assemblage) and recontextualization, cohesion is no longer a necessary device for coherence, while texts are characterized by fragmentation and modular combination of topics, voices, modes and genres, together with increased intertextuality, implicitness and multi-layered meanings. This holds not only for the single texts we produce, but also for the semiotic environments we interpret and the interactions we participate in. In turn, long, linear and cohesive, mono-thematic, mono-voice, mono-modal and mono-generic texts seem essentially confined to a few formal, educational and academic genres which rely mainly on writing – and even these, although linear and cohesive in their final form, are frequently produced modularly, and are also increasingly read this way. All this opens new challenges for educational contexts. Consequently, the conclusions offer insights on the implications for the learning and teaching of (written) genres.

In this chapter we explore communication and learning in the contemporary social world. Taking the textbook as a ‘case study’ we identify changes in multimodal text making – in the use of writing, image, layout and typography – and highlight their social pedagogic significance. The theoretical frame of our account is social semiotics. Drawing on a corpus of English, Science and Maths textbooks and digital learning resources published between 1930 and now we render visible profound shifts in the semiotic landscape of education. Teachers and designers of learning resources have always drawn on a range of different ‘modes’ – writing and image foremost among them, yet a combination of social change and new technologies have given rise to the possibilities for an increase in the use of more modes than these, in new ‘ensembles’ of modes, and with differently distributed functions. The chapter explores what the implications of these changes are for what and how students learn.

Un'analisi dell'anteprima di 10 puntate della famosa serie Peppa Pig al cinema. Ciò che, però, emerge davvero è che il format, rispetto alla versione televisiva, non ha subito nessun adattamento, nessuna riscrittura. Al contrario degli altri suoi predecessori di cartone (innumerevoli gli esempi, dai classici di Hanna&Barbera fino a Wallace & Gromit), la serie di Peppa Pig, al suo esordio al cinema, per motivi eminentemente commerciali, non subisce alcuna traduzione del proprio plot dentro un modello specificatamente cinematografico, costituendo una vera e propria aberrazione per certi versi e anticipando un futuro mediatico che verrà.

"The power of iconic media content promulgated through the linked auspices of converged media may be stronger than any single media creation/distribution point. This may be producing a gestalt effect: rendering its final, repetitive, digital ubiquity more exponential in consequences from the sum of its parts than from any individual medium on its own. Apart from a handful of philosophers and media theorists focused on the effects of violence on television, there is little consideration being given to the integrated study of information access and the effects of incessant media play of repetitious media iconics, which are most often highly-charged artifacts of symbolic and transcendent elements that act as agents of strong psychosocial influence and impact.

These media iconics are huge audience generators, and springboards for access and subscription. The space occupied by the global media as multinational conglomerates is the binary opposite of the space occupied by terrorists as rogue, rhizomic wanderers, and the rest of the globe’s inhabitants are caught in between the two. We are caught between their oppositional ideologies, between their tactical methods, and between an extreme proposition that the two are in collusion: between their parasitic, symbiotic relationship and between their dependence upon one another.

While icons of war have played an extremely important role in media propaganda strategies (McLuhan, 1964), media iconics recently generated from terrorism have also officially established their ground in mainstream global media but with much stronger force. And it is not just the news media that terrorists use as new media for their free propaganda distribution, but the entire domain of mass media (Tuman, 2003). McLuhan dedicated an essay to the power of icons expressed through electronic media and claimed that the power of the East in warfare was rooted in the ancient culture of the mosaic, which was a concept that children of electronic cultures cannot comprehend.

For McLuhan, Russia carried out the threat of global war with little more than iconic symbols that spoke to its people -- and the global village -- as those symbols emboldened an electrifying persona on the video screen. The West struggled to do likewise. News is economically and digitally being transformed into converged media as an eventual determinant and evangelical source for profitable media iconics usage.

Today iconic power is shifting between electronic and digital media, from the realm of the real to the virtual. Religious cultures rooted in iconography are primarily digitally empowered, unified, and validated through a virtual ‘hypericon’ as it globally resonates with ubiquity across televisions and computer screens worldwide.

This research provides rhetorical comparison and analysis of three separate, select past iconic media events that crossed between television and the Internet through primary media conglomerate channels and are now relegated to the digital archives. It considers power and efficacy of these media iconics: when they occurred vs. their remaining, sustainment today. Its contribution to the STS field is its relevance in understanding some of the psychosocial cultural impacts that converging global iconic media put on viewer and audience."

Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, flyers, video recordings made by demonstrators and songs written by them. Our findings show that participants cumulatively produced a pyramid-like structure of social power that is anchored in the enterprise of organizing the protest. Our findings explicate how the non-legalistic and even anti-legalistic discourse of the protest was formed, shaped and generated within the power relations of the protest, and how a pyramid of power produced a new poetics of protest that rejected the traditional poetics of state law. The power relations that generated the discourse regarding state law were embedded in socioeconomic stratification along the divide of center and periphery in Israel.

""DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES IN THE BULGARIAN COMMUNITY IN BUDAPEST FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH TO THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Original title in Bulgarian "Демографски промени в будапещенската българска общност от края на XIX до края на XX век"

Penka Peykovska

The object of this study are the changes in the demographic profile of the Bulgarian community in Budapest from 1880 to 2001. It is based on the analysis of the results of population censuses in Hungary in 1880-1930, 1960, 1990 and 2001, and in particular on the database including all those who defined their mother tongue as Bulgarian, which is taken (albeit condi¬tionally) as a marker of ethnicity. The current statistics from “Budapest székesfőváros statisztikai és közigazgatási évkönyve” [Statistical and administrative yearbook of Budapest] is used as additional source. The author traces the dynamics of the number, migration and resettlement of Bulgarians in Budapest, their regional distribution, their characteristics by age and sex, marital status, religion, socio-occupational structure, educational status. The article examines some demographic indicators about their ethnic and cultural identity in the late twentieth century, the processes of integration and natural assimilation, using for example statistical data by ethnic attributes; Bulgarian citizenship and “proficiency in Hungarian” for the population in Budapest with Bulgarian mother tongue.
The major demographic changes in the Bulgarian community in Budapest in the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century arc summarized as follows: 1) from a male community made up by immigrated men-working abroad, it became a settled community with predominant, although slightly prevailing, female element. 2) the community aged increasingly in the second half of the twentieth century due to the change in the way it is replenished through individual immigration. 3) After the First World War formation of a stratum of intellectuals began among local Bulgarian gardeners and merchants, repatriated Banal Bulgarian intellectuals lived along with that intelligentsia and in the second half of the twentieth century its ranks included new immigrant intellectuals. 4) The professional pattern of the Bulgarian community in Budapest changed dramatically - from a community of gardeners, it became a community of intellectuals, 90 percent (1990) of which was bilingual, and 44% - with Hungarian citizenship (2001).

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"Summary. This introductory essay sketches the areas of agreement between sociological systems theory and semiotics and presents concepts of systems theory which are relevant in the context of sign theory. It examines the competing claims of these two approaches to the explanation of communication and asks the question which positive impulses systems theory and semiotics can expect from one another. Trying to outsmart a semiotic approach with systems theoretical concepts seems less productive than responding to the shortcomings of systems-theoretical communication models with semiotic concepts. At the appropriate places, this essay indicates how the questions asked here are answered by the other articles of this journal issue.
"

"In the Norwegian national strategy plan Equal Education in Practice it is stated that
“To ensure proper subject and linguistic learning outcomes, it is also important that
multicultural reality should be reflected in the teaching materials” (2007:16). This
means that the multicultural society should also be reflected in textbooks for music.
This article deals with my own uneasiness when encountering pictures and text
about non-western culture and music in some music textbooks. I will explore how
otherness and exoticism can be said to represent an imaginary nation, a particular
geographical place corresponding to a Western fantasy, which I will call Ethnia. I will
use some of the pictures and a small passage of text from Tempo (Hjertaas and
Johansen, 2000) and Opus – Musikk for ungdomstrinnet  (Opus - Music for
contemporary schools) (Andreassen, 2006), which are two music textbook series
used in Norwegian schools (8th – 10th  grade), to reveal how an educational discourse
manifests itself when constructing and representing cultural otherness.
Music is traditionally one of the school subjects that uses textbooks less often, so it is
important to look more closely at the praxis in classrooms if one wants to say more
about the way these texts are experienced by the pupils. Nevertheless, I believe a
textbook, containing a type of distilled knowledge, does tell us something; as
monuments in a society’s discourse about ethnicity, youth culture, music and school.
The aim is therefore more to investigate certain discursive formations within the
Norwegian society, than to be specific in terms of what the textbook’s influence are
or could be in the schools.
Key words: Music, textbooks, exoticism, praxis, multicultural education, educational
discourse"