Note: The idea of semiotic democracy - the collaborative public definition of cultural signs (semeîon in Greek) - is gaining popularity, particularly as it applies the the Internet. Here's a passage on semiotic democracy from my case study on the citizen journalism web site OhmyNews. Please feel free to correct my interpretations.

Citizen reporters take part in the semiotic process of creating meaning within a culture. They cease to be a passive audience for the culture products which reflect the priorities of others and instead create their own cultural products which reflect their own priorities. Given wide enough exposure, citizen-generated news can shift the attention of a population, changing the values and priorities of that society.

This process of individuals collectively altering society by changing the meaning of cultural signs is known as “semiotic democracy.” The term was coined by media studies professor John Fiske in his 1987 book Television Culture. In that book, Fiske noted that television treats its viewers as members of semiotic democracy capable of assigning their own meaning to images they see on the screen. In this interpretation, semiotic democracy is defined as engaging with, altering, and re-shaping cultural products.

In the years since Fiske, the meaning of semiotic democracy has expanded to include not only cultural products like television shows but more discrete parts of culture, such as words and ideas. These changes occur through a process called “ideological drift,” a term coined by Yale law professor Jack Balkin. According to Balkin, the meaning of concepts drifts over time as they are used in different contexts. This drift occurs through the expression of an idea by different individuals and groups over time.

Balkin was particularly interested in the drift of political ideologies and as an example asked in a paper whether “the conception of free speech or racial equality championed by liberals in 1960 is really the same as that was defended by conservatives in 1990.” In Balkin's expansion of Fiske's idea, the democratic potential of semiotic meaning is expanded from concrete cultural products to the very ideas and norms that give culture meaning.

The Internet was also extremely important in the rise of semiotic democracy. According to Terry Fisher, a professor of intellectual property at Harvard University, the Internet has made it much easier for ordinary people to make and share cultural products in the form of audio, video, and publishing. The Internet has led to “a dramatic increase in the number of persons who participate in the making of culture”, that is, a dramatic increase in semiotic democracy.

The implication of these three strands is that the Internet allows people not only to redefine culture but also to create culture. By creating culture, people take a more active role in defining cultural meaning because they have the capacity to create their own ideas and products rather than simply re-imagining, subverting, and recoding the cultural products of others. This grassroots creation of culture has powerful implications for the democratization of society as a whole.

photo credit: Altus