Developing an Integrative Semiotic Framework

This chapter argues that semiotics—the theory of signs and symbols—is at the heart of the representation and transmission of information and meaning, and is thus central to communication and information systems, but especially in their contemporary, more virtualised forms. The chapter is distinctive in eschewing post-structuralist uses of Saussurian semiotics, and recent theorisations of sociomateriality. Instead, it develops an integrative framework grounded in Habermasian concepts, Peirceian semiotics and an underlying, integrating critical realist philosophy. We develop a semiotic framework to help analyse the complex interactions between three different worlds—the personal, the social and the material. Here semiosis relates to the personal world through the generation and interpretation of signs and messages. It relates to the material world in that all signs must have some form of physical embodiment in order to be signs, and must also be transmitted through some form of physical media. Semiosis relates to the social world in that the connotative aspects of sign systems are social rather than individual—they exist before and beyond the individual’s use of signs. The personal, social and material worlds between them bear relationships of sociation, sociomateriality and embodiment. The framework draws on fundamental concepts of information, meaning and embodied cognition.