There is a discipline in academics called Semiotics, which is defined as:
the study of meaning-making, the philosophical theory of signs and symbols. This includes the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.
One of the core elements of a successful DLE involves capturing the imagination, which includes narrative, story, plot, characters, roles, and gamification etc and depends for it’s effectiveness on the underlying semiotics being “done well”. To a certain extent, the study of semiotics is partly what McLuhan said we needed to do when he called for “Understanding Media”.
In other words, when it comes to signs, and symbols, and stories, what you see isn’t necessarily all that you get, because there’s a lot of processing and reference in human perception going on. A lot of semiotics taking place behind the “scenes”.
According to Göran Sonesson, a Swedish semiotician, pictures can be analyzed by three models:
the narrative model, which concentrates on the relationship between pictures and time in a chronological manner as in a comic strip;
the rhetoric model, which compares pictures with different devices as in a metaphor;
and the laokoon (or laocoon) model which considers the limits and constraints of pictorial expressions by comparing textual mediums that utilize time with visual mediums that utilize space.
… a wide variety of possibilities for pictorial semiotics. Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, structuralist and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology and sociology.
Semiotics is closely associated with linguistics, the study of both help us understand where and how “meaning” occurs. Meaning being a core element of motivation…and of how we organize experience into “learned elements or packages”...so, it’s not easy to create a DLE that “works” in intended ways, and accomplishes all that it could accomplish, or that the “media can bear”.
Studies have shown that semiotics may make or break a brand. Culture codes strongly influence whether a population likes or dislikes a brand’s marketing, especially internationally. If the company is unaware of a culture’s codes, it runs the risk of failing in its marketing.
Fortunately, one doesn’t have to have a fully explicit understanding of semiotics to create DLE and media for use in DLE. It can be safely said that the kids doing Vine clips are not experts in the study of semiotics as a academic discipline, nor are the video game makers, and most or almost all of the filmmakers in the world. Or the novelists, and dramatists either.
Rather, their tools are based in whatever we mean by the words “intuitive”. Which we generally mean a process going on in the brain that we have no clue how it works, but we can see it does work by the results.
Some people have a strong intuition of how semiotics work, and use that awareness to create media that has “hooks” or “appeal” or “captures our imaginations”. We see it happening, even if we or they can’t exactly explain how they know it will “work”: i.e. grab the intended audience’s attention and involvement, and not let go.
The seminal French new wave Film-maker, Jean-Luc Godard, used a full package of tools when creating films. He had an understanding of semiotics, having studied that at the Sorbonne, along with the tools of film reviewers, having written for Cahiers du Cinema, but he also had that intuitive feel for how to make film work.
Not to say he was ever really interested in being a mass media film maker, and he wasn’t. But he could have been. Cited here as an example of someone who brought all the frames of reference for film making together; which isn’t that far from what a good DLE creative team needs in their toolbox.
Just for a fun exercise and reward for those who made it all the way down here to the end, here’s a link to an assemblage of downloadable signs and symbols sets. This is one part of semiotics, but we can ponder why some symbols and signs can be used universally, and some can’t. Among other puzzles.