Research: Communication theory - books

How culture conditions the colours we see
Umberto Eco, 'The Communication Theory Reader' Edited by Paul Cobley
1996, Routledge, London

pg 159
Perception occupies a puzzling position, somewhere midway between semiotic categorization and discrimination based upon mere sensory processes.

pg 167
Human societies do not only speak of colours, but also with colours. We frequently use colours as semiotic devices: we communicate with flags, traffic lights, road signs, various kinds of emblems.

pg 169
The colours of national flags are not colours: physical pigments; they are expressions correlated to cultural units, and as such are strongly categorised.

pg 170
In everyday life, our reactivity to colour demonstrates a sort of inner and profound solidarity between semiotic systems. Just as language is determined by the way in which society sets up systems of values, things and ideas, so our chromatic perception is determined by language.


The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan
pg 26
All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. 

Understanding Media
Marshall McLuhan

The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, "What is the content of speech?," it is necessary to say, "It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal." An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs.

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Semiotics: The Basics by Daniel Chandler
Published by Routledge, 2001
Models of the Sign
pg 13
We seem as a species to be driven by a desire to make meanings: above all, we are surely homo significans - meaning-makers. Distinctively, we make meanings through our creation and interpretation of 'signs'. Indeed, according to Peirce, 'we think only in signs' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.302). Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning. 'Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign', declares Peirce (ibid., 2.172). Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as 'signifying' something - referring to or standing for something other than itself. We interpret things as signs largely unconsciously by relating them to familiar systems of conventions. It is this meaningful use of signs which is at the heart of the concerns of semiotics.

pg 17
Saussure stressed that sound and thought (or the signifier and the signified) were as inseperable as the two sides of a piece of paper (Saussure 1983, 111). They were 'intimately linked' in the mind 'by an associative link' - 'each triggers the other' (ibid., 66). Saussure presented these elements as wholly interdependent, neither pre-existing the other.

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Visible Signs
by David Crow
AVA Publishing SA 2003, Switzerland

pg 24
on Charles Sanders Peirce theory -
Charles Sanders Peirce is the philosopher who is recognised as the founder of the American tradition of semiotics. Whereas Saussure was primarily interested in language, Peirce was more interested in how we make sense of the world around us.
[...] This is not merely the user of the sign but a mental concept of the sign which is based on the user's cultural experience of the sign. The interpretant is not fixed. It does not have a single definable meaning, but its meaning can vary depending on the reader of the sign. The emotional response to the word 'book' will vary depending on the reader's experience of books. [...]

pg 33
Peirce defined three categories of signs;
Icon - this resembles the sign. A photograph of someone could be described as an iconic sign in that it resembles physically the thing that is represents. [...]
Index - there is a direct link between the sign and the object. In this category smoke is an index of fire and a tail is an index of a dog. Traffic signs in the street are index signs as they have a direct link to the physical reality of where they are placed such as at a junction or at the brow of a hill.
Symbol - these signs have no logical connection between the sign and what it means. They rely excusively on the reader having learnt the connection between the sign and its meaning.

pg 34
Peirce also identified three levels of properties for signs which can be mapped on to his triangular model. He labelled these properties firstness, secondness, and thirdness.
Firstness - This is a sense of something. It could be described as a feeling or a mood.
Secondness - This is the level of fact. The physical relation of one thing to another.
Thirdness - You could think of this level as the mental level. It is the level of general rules which bring the other two together in a relationship. It relates the sign to the object as a convention.

pg 57
(Roland Barthes) Denotation - what is pictured
This first order of signification is straightforward. It refers to the physical reality of the object which is signified. [...]
Connotation - how it is pictured
[...] The reader is playing a part in this process by applying their knowledge of the systematic coding of the image. In doing this the meaning is affected by the background of the viewer. [...]
Connotation is arbitrary in that the meanings brought to the image at this stage are based on rules or conventions which the reader has learnt.

pg 58
Convention
This is an agreement about how we should respond to a sign. [...] So much of the meaning comes from convention that signs with little convention need to be very iconic in order to communicate to a wide audience.