It’s obvious that things in the world shape our minds, but some things are more powerful than others, which brings me to semiotics, which is described as:

The study of signs and symbols. It focuses on how meaning is created and communicated through these signs. This field examines the relationships between signs, their meanings, and how individuals interpret them in various contexts

These signs and symbols enter our thoughts most of our everyday lives and can have a profound effect on our world views, theologically, politically, philosophically, and socially. I’ve written about it here.

Movies and TV are rife in semiotics, as well as other visual media including musical lyrics (I’ve written about it here: A Long Night’s Journey into the Dark Side of AI | Mind Matters). The grandfathers of semiotics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries were Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce, and it became popularised in the early 1970s when John Berger’s book, Ways of Seeing, was published.

But I want to focus on the current aspects of semiotics and where human psychology is profoundly affected. One example are internet memes. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Within culture, memes can take a variety of forms, such as an idea, a skill, a behaviour, a phrase, or a particular fashion. The replication and transmission of a meme occurs when one person copies a unit of cultural information comprising a meme from another person. The process of transmission is carried out primarily by means of verbal, visual, or electronic communication, ranging from books and conversation to TV, email, or the internet. Meme | Definition, Meaning, History, & Facts | Britannica

On the dark side of semiotics is TV/Movie propaganda. It’s not just consumerism that a TV advert is trying to seduce the viewer with, but shaping one’s world view, which is closer to Left-leaning culture than Christian moral values and duties.

In Hollywood movies, think of how powerful the imagery of Top Gun would have had on a young, alienated man in terms of American Airforce conscription. A movie where war is clean, with clean-faced handsome pilots strutting around the locker room, towels hanging from their waists, and a beautiful woman riding on the back of Tom Cruise’s Kawasaki motorbike: Semiotics on steroids.

Semiotics is infused with psychology and its effect on the subliminal mind is profound and goes beyond words and visuals to reach into the subconscious mind, featuring symbols to create messages that connects the viewer by resonating him/her to a particular world view, and by doing it in a covert way.

This is also used in the hidden grammar of many famous novels, some of which manipulate a reader’s emotions, or have a positive effect. The ethics of semiotics is a double-edged sword.

What to make of it today in a rapidly changing hi-tech world of AI and geopolitical chaos of wars, street riots, and anarchy? Notice footage from any disaster-struck region where a baby’s shoe is below the rubble. Coincidental? Never.

And in a growing multiculture world, mainstream media propaganda pumps out visuals of the benefits of change and the positives of interaction amongst tribes who have generally nothing in common. It’s only a matter of time when a TV advert will feature an Inuit and an Amazonian Yanomami sitting at the dinner table with a white conservative family on Thanksgiving Day. In his 1928 book, Propaganda, Edward Bernays said:

Engineering consent of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

Hollywood made good use of Bernays’s tips on seducing the mind, as is evident in many of the greatest movies ever made (the word ‘great’ doesn’t always mean morally great).

Bernays, the father of public relations, who was a nephew of Sigmund Freud (the bad apple didn’t ‘fall far from the tree’), was no friend of Christianity, with many of his ideas symbolically and phallically meaning that sometimes a cigar not being just a cigar.

As for the future of semiotics, according to journalist Stephen Gossett, if marketers can decipher [connections], they can understand what drives consumers to make certain decisions and adjust their marketing strategies, campaigns and overall brands accordingly: 

This process opens the door for marketers to make more accurate predictions about consumer behaviour. Knowing how specific associations impact consumers’ emotions give marketers insights into how to sway individual purchasing decisions and even anticipate how consumers could react to larger industry trends.What Is Semiotics? 6 Semiotics Examples in Marketing. | Built In 

Whatever the future brings regarding semiotics, consider a spell some volunteers were under when magician Derren Brown asked them to illustrate ‘Animal Heaven’. All the illustrations resembled each other because, on the way by taxi to the building to draw the pictures, the men were subliminally subjected to visuals they saw on the streets. Check it out here: Derren Brown Mind Control | Animal Heaven | Channel 4