Youth Breaking New “Ground”: Iconicity and Meaning Making in Social Media

Abstract

This chapter argues for a semiotic approach to understanding and productively facilitating the interaction and learning that young people do via social media. As an organizing analogy for what follows, we first call forth the enduring Indian parable of The Blind Men and the Elephant. This story, many will know, describes the initial encounter between six unsighted sages and a pachyderm, an exotic creature of which none of the men have any prior knowledge. The essential premise is that each of the men differently identifies the beast, based only upon his particular tactile experience of it. Touching the elephant’s flank, one man explains it as “very like a wall,” as nineteenth-century poet John Godfrey Saxe’s version has it. The man who feels the trunk recognizes the elephant’s snake-like quality; a tusk is perceived to be a “spear”; and so forth. The important lessons, for present purposes, are that 1) what an unknown something seems like can fundamentally shape a person’s interpretation of what that thing itself is, and that 2) a thing and that which it resembles are really more subjectively and partially related than one might otherwise believe. These are ideas that resonate closely with C. S. Peirce’s (1935, 1940/1955) influential theory of “iconicity” in human meaning making, which this chapter engages and operationalizes as a critical lens through which to look afresh at learning, literacies, and global digital media.