ABSTRACT
Social semiotics is an approach to the analysis of popular culture which distinctively emphasizes social dimensions of meaning, systematically crossing major boundaries that are often taken to constitute different forms of popular culture. It sees popular culture as a set of social and cultural facts in a system of differences. It can refer primarily to the main genres of contemporary mass culture, film, TV and now other digital media, or it can refer to traditional popular forms of culture and cultural practices, in themselves, or displaced or cannibalized by mass culture. For social semiotics, these differences do not have the status of definitions, but describe a single complex landscape whose flows and blockages of meaning across these boundaries are themselves major objects for analysis.
