Semiotics

This article was interesting to me because I didn't realize just how much I was using semiotics already, particularly in classes here at temple. I just finished learning about Television in the 1950's. Looking back almost everything I learned was based in semiotics. The TV shows at the time were utilizing semiotics to portray a certain image of America in order to turn us all into consumers, and sell that lifestyle. The author says in the article "But often the ideological interests that guide our social behavior remain concealed behind images that don't look political at all. Consider, for example, the depiction of the "typical" American family in the classic TV sitcoms of the fifties and sixties, particularly all those images of happy, docile housewives. To most contemporary viewers, those images looked "normal" or natural at the time that they were first broadcast--the way families and women were supposed to be. The shows didn't seem at all ideological." What I've been learning in my class is how all of those images were extremely ideological. We've been using semiotics for weeks now to analyze that style of TV, I just never knew it.