Sociosemiotics is a term coined by Algirdas Julien Greimas‘s School of Thought.
Sociosemiotics is a term, needed to designate socially significant semiotic systems. While acknowledging that all communication is essentially social, it is proposed that sociosemiotics encompass those systems that have an organizing social function, such as political semiotics, legal semiotics, media semiotics, and others. This field of social semiotics is entirely focused on socially significant communications.
The Russian school in this field directs sociosemiotics toward social psychology (as also viewed by Saussure) and toward Leontiev’s activity theory.
Tamara Driže, the founder of Russian social semiotics, defines it as
not just an analytical system with its own unit of analysis—the sign—but also a theory for the motivated and purposeful generation and social functioning of signs (sign systems); a socio-psychological theory of sign activity.
The elementary unit of semiotics—the sign as a construct—does not exist outside the program of activity and behavior of its interpreter. The sign is communicative by both nature and function, and this distinguishing feature forms the basis of its model”
Russian social semiotics places the text at the center of its interests, as a message through which communication is carried out.
The Australian school, represented by Michael Halliday, Robert Hodge, and Gunther Kress, directs social semiotics toward the semiotic nature of social communications.
Social semiotics deals primarily with human semiosis as inherent in social phenomena in their sources, functions, contexts, and effects. It also deals with social meaning, constructed through the entire series of semiotic forms, through semiotic texts and semiotic practices, in all human societies and throughout all periods of human history.
Social semiotics studies all human semiotic systems, to the extent that they are inherently social in both conditions and content.
Semiotics outside social semiotics would include communication between inanimate units (e.g., the study of genetic codes or energy exchange in physical systems).
However, communication exchange between machines (e.g., computer-to-computer communication) falls within the scope of social semiotics, as machines are products of human intention and serve social functions.
