In this episode, we journey into the fascinating field of semiotics — the study of how meaning is created, communicated, and interpreted through signs. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model of signifier and signified and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic categories of icon, index, and symbol, we explore how signs shape how we understand language, literature, culture, and even the subtle logics of everyday life. We also examine Roland Barthes’s influential extension of semiotics into mass media and ideology, revealing how images and cultural representations carry deeper mythic structures that appear “natural” but are historically and socially constructed.

Whether we are reading a poem, interpreting a national emblem, analysing a corporate logo, or even decoding the emotional nuance of an emoji, semiotics equips us with tools for uncovering layers of sense-making that most people never consciously recognise. Join us as we reveal how signs operate across disciplines — from verbal communication to visual media — and why, although we can analyse the logic of computer programs using semiotic reasoning, such systems are not themselves semiotic in essence. This episode invites you to see the world as an intricate network of signs — and to become a more attentive and imaginative interpreter of the cultural and linguistic codes that surround us.