How we speak when we say things about ourselves in social media : a semiotic analysis of content curation

Curating content is a key part of a social media user's profile"”and recent reports reveal an upward trend in the curating of video, image, and text based content (Meeker). Through "engagement""”in other words, posting content, liking, sharing, or commenting on another's content"”that content becomes part of the user's profile and contributes to their "activity." A user's understanding of another user in the network depends on curation, on what another user posts and their engagement with the content. It is worth while studying content curation in terms of meaning, which involves clarifying how a user makes themselves meaningful depending on what they curate and their engagement with the curated content, and also how other users gain meaning from someone else's curatorial work, determining how they position themselves in relation to others. This essay analyses the structure of meaning underpinning an individual's act of curating content in social media, each time they publish content ("post") or republish content (like, share, and/or comment) on their social media homepage. C.S. Peirce's semiotics is the method for clarifying this structure. Based on an application of Peirce's tripartite structure of semiosis, it becomes clear that curated content is a sign representative of the user who posted the content, the poster, and that, with the range of ways this representation takes place, it is possible to begin a classification of social media signs.