FINAL WORDS ABOUT GETTING STARTED
Kress and van Leeuwen state that
Social semiotics is an attempt to describe and understand
how people produce and communicate meaning
in specific social settings, be they “micro” settings such
as the family or settings in which sign-making is well
institutionalized and hemmed in by habits, conventions
and rules. But social semiotics, sign-making in society,
is so varied an activity that any attempt to capture it in
a general theory must look crude by comparison with
the richness of the actual semiotic world. (1996, p. 264)
Given this caveat, I believe that professional communicators
will find visual social semiotics an effective tool for
understanding many conventions found in Western imagery
that, despite people’s differences in age, ethnicity, gender,
and so on, evoke generally uniform reactions. However,
learning to use the framework en masse is a
formidable, daunting process because it is complex and
introduces a great deal of new terminology. I have found
that the best approach is not to attempt to use the whole
framework immediately, but to focus on one or two aspects
of the framework when starting to analyze images. Here
are my suggestions for getting started.