Social networking
Social networking is the communication among people within a virtual social space.[4] This medium of communication allows insight into the significance of social semiotics. “Millions of people now interact through blogs, collaborate through wikis, play multiplayer games, publish podcasts and video, build relationships through social network sites and evaluate all the above forms of communication through feedback and ranking mechanisms”.[5] Social semiotics “unlike speech, writing necessitates some sort of technology in the form of person device interaction”.[6] Social semiotics functions through the triad of communication or Peircean semiotics in the form of sign, object, interpretant[7] (Chart 1) and “Human, Machine, Tag (Information)”[8] (Chart 2). In Peircean semiotics (Chart 1), "A sign…[in the form of representamen] is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for an object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea which I have something called the ground of the representamen".[1]
This example of the triangle of Human, Machine, Tag is shown when looking at tagging photographs on Facebook (Chart 3).[9] The Human takes the photo on a camera and puts the digital file (information) on the Machine, the Machine is then navigated to Facebook where the file is downloaded. The Human has the Machine Tag the photo with information (e. g., names, places, data) for other Humans to see. This process then can be continued (see Chart 2). “Collaborative tagging has been quickly gaining ground because of its ability to recruit the activity of web users into effectively organizing and sharing large amounts of information”.[10]
