Audience involvement in creative media for development: Making sense of the semiotic interface

This article explores the role that semiotic communication plays in the generation of narrative affect. It also draws on Suruchi Sood's concept of audience involvement as being capable of increasing self-efficacy and collective-efficacy, both of which are crucial to behaviour change. It therefore, demonstrates how semiotic tropes are used in creative media narratives to elicit affect and in turn generate authentic audience involvement with the subjects of those narratives, a process which eventually has positive consequences for behaviour change communication. Hence, these narratives fueled by semiotics, become the threshing floor where potential audiences are drawn into pro-social discourses and then motivated to reflect upon what they encounter in those narratives; ``reflection'' being one of the two key factors in Sood's concept of audience involvement. This article also explores the medial spaces between semiotic communication and the creative enterprise. It does this utilising some readings of the concept of semiotics and its corollaries such as; metaphor, allegory, symbolism and vernacular creativity; based on the works of Doreen Innes, Mike Milford and others. Importantly, it seeks to further knowledge on the creative processes within creative industries, using some African narratives as case studies.