Look at this image. What do you think is going on? Most people assume the man is from a country in the Middle East. His appearance and the background suggest this. But what is he doing?

Now what does it look like he's doing?

Is he wiping his mouth on a large cloth, perhaps after having had lunch?

How has your understanding changed now?

Physically, it's still possible that he was wiping his mouth, but most people don't think that; because he has a flag (and because of the position of his head and expression), most people conclude that he is kissing the flag.

Here's where the image came from: the front page of the weekend edition of USA Today, March 1-3, 1991 -- the end of the Persian Gulf War. Now how do you understand the picture of the man?

The important point here is this: Your different interpretations of the man's actions came not from his image, but from what you assumed based on what surrounded his image. The image of the man did not change, but the context of the image did.

So the reason you now understand the man to be kissing the American flag has little or nothing to do with his image itself.

It has more to do with the relationship between his image and things that surround it, its place in a system of signs.

Assumptions we make based on the image of the flag, and its placement on the front page of a newspaper at a particular time -- not his expression or the position of his lips or anything about the photo of the man himself -- ultimately determine how we understand what he is doing.

What are the connotations of this photo?

Kissing any flag, for most people, would connote respect and gratitude for the nation the flag signifies.

So one connotation of this photo is that this particular man has respect for and gratitude toward the United States because of its part in the Gulf War.

The next question, however, is whether this image is just about this particular man?

What do you actually know about this man, his life, and his relationship to the war?

The caption refers to him simply as "a Kuwaiti." So if the particulars of this man's life are not known or considered newsworthy, why was his image selected for the front page of this national newspaper?

Is the key connotation of the photo that this particular individual kissed the flag out of gratitude to the US?

Or, does it suggest something more?

In actuality, an immensely powerful myth is being invoked here, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The combination of the signs on the page sends a message about the situation being described here.

Many people undoubtedly glanced at this USA Today on March 2, 1991. How do you think it was interpreted?

In that moment of seeing, a lot happens: you make sense of the image and interpret it, by applying your existing knowledge of the connotations of kissing the flag, the narratives of victory, and the entire story of subjected peoples grateful for military intervention.

So the notion that the Kuwaitis were grateful for military intervention at this point in time is invoked in your mind, not because it is stated in so many words, but because it is part of the framework you use to make sense of the image, part of its conditions of intelligibility. The image promotes the myth, not by making an explicit argument for it, but by getting you to fill in the details.

Something peculiar is happening here. In part because of the image, but also because of its context, when you glanced at this picture you were not likely to think you were reading a controversial proposition: after all it is "just" a picture. So the photo seems to be two things at once: on the one hand, an elaborate mythology; on the other, just a picture of a man kissing a flag.

Ideology is the point where semiotic systems and codes intersect with the exercise of power in social life. It is the process whereby codes reinforce or become congruent with structures of power.

What the peculiar character of this image illustrates is how ideology in this sense works, not by persuading people of the value of particular ideas (e.g., an editorial stating that all Kuwaiti people are grateful for military intervention), but largely by creating forms of "common sense," of the taken-for-granted in everyday life.

The preceding analysis of signs in the media suggests that people's attitudes and actions in cases of things like war may not be simply a matter of facts, lies, and distortions in the media, of truths and falsehoods.

It suggests that structures of cultural common sense addressed and reinforced in the media – the "folklore" of the industrial world – operate less on a level of truth and falsehood than on a level of association and imagery.

We should aim to become more aware of, and thus less susceptible to, the forms of common sense these images promote.

This slide show is a combination of slides taken from www.understandingnewmedia.com/slides/semiotics.ppt and from the Powerpoint presentation of Tom Streeter, University of Vermont.