semiotics and purposive communication

meaning, through the interplay of signs conveyed by the various semiotic resources
can be constructed, by the participants themselves.
when we communicate, we should be concious of how meanings can vary according to
one's culture and context,
how can these be reinforced or subverted by the signs that we use and by the
semiotic resources that we utilize to convey such meanings.

semiotics and social media

language is characterized by conventionality.

language will have meaning and be meaningful when it is shared and used by a group
of people (speech communities)
signs also have levels of conventionality
pictures, portraits, cartoons have high levels of conventionality - because they
are direct representation of the images they evoke
symbols (flags, morse codes, traffic lights, colors) have low level of
conventionality - because their meanings needs to be agrred upon by the speech
community.

the internet has opened a new discourse on the communication process.

social media such as Facebook, twitter and instragram

social media have evolved into speech communities where members (called netizen)
use language which they convetionalized
example of these are "emojis" which are pictorial representations of various
emotions.

social media do not only change the way we communicate but also change meanings and
concepts because of the potentiality of the various modes to
transmit meaning and how we bring our background in reading the signs

according to an undergraduate student of the Department of English of MSU-IIT, Mia

Roa,
did a research on how grief, caused by suicide, is expressed differently in
Facebook.

Roa claims that expressions of grief are perceived differently when different modes
of communication are used.
virtual communication which takes place in social media, heavily manipulates
nonlingustics (such as emojis) and
linguistics (punctuation marks, letter cae, prolonged words) resources to amplify
grief.

denial and anger are expressed through reflective messages, interrogative sentences
and imperative methods combined with emojis and other pictorial representations.
in the reading of the signs, roa established a system that enables her to define
the expressions of grief precisely because
the domain is social media and signs are manipulated to express such emtions
different from face-to-face communication