Semiotics and decoding meanings

Semiotics is the study of signs, further defined by one of its founders, Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of signs within society.” The concept central to semiotics is that of the signifier and the signified, with the former being that through which something is conveyed to someone, such as an object or a symbol, and the latter comprising of precisely the information conveyed. For example, the use of cash surrounding a character in a movie can convey greed, with cash acting as the signifier and greed being the signified. According to Saussure,  the relationship between the signifier and the signified is essentially arbitrary, defined and motivated only by social convention. Any media, such as film, is encoded with these signs whose meanings are decoded by the consumers. However the decoded meaning isn’t created by the person decoding it, in a vacuum; instead, the meaning has already existed as created by a certain society or culture, which is why the meanings of these signs can be interpreted differently according to the meanings they have been given, encoded with, in different cultures. Thus, as in the example above, cash is a sign of greed because it is viewed in that manner in society. But when a sign occurs in a group, or in a particular context, it becomes a code, and it can suggest or connote extra meaning, and these codes are often used in media to reinforce, subtly, the way audiences should think about certain things or how they should behave.