Signifiance is not and cannot be contained within an image itself, instead it draws upon our cultural backgrounds and other information, often far outside of the image.
The example from Barthes is an old picture of a family, and he notices their fashion and how it helps date the image (44). Here's a more modern example.
The feeling you get when you see this picture and go "Oh, the 90s!" is part of the studium of the signifiance, which is the name that Barthes gives to the different interpretable meanings of the image.
Also in the image can be a punctum (44), which is what Barthes calls the more individualized version of the third meaning - one that has a basis in personal memories, held solely by you and not in the public trust like the idea of the 90s. An example of this could be an image of something you owned or experienced in childhood, such as Cinderella's Castle in Disneyworld, or the pokemon Pikachu.
While the studium may exist as an expansion of an image, the power of expansion truly lies with the punctum. You can look at an image and draw on the public culture to have some idea of its signifiance, but a personal signifiance can make an image mean the whole world to you.
Barthes compares this idea of the image's powerful hidden meaning to the poetic form of the haiku - by taking to simple images and carefully juxtaposing them, there is created a third image, submerged beneath the other two but perhaps far more powerful than both. (45)
Controlling the images and the cultural background is an important part of the haiku, and Ulmer also points out that this is critical for the widesite. The widesite, then, can quickly be analogized as some kind of imagistic poetry - each image must be carefully selected for the ideas and emotions that it evokes, in the way that a poet may choose "collapsed" over "fell." A thing which collapses is a thing that falls, but the denotive associations made with that word relate to exhaustion and internal failure, while "fell" conveys some kind of basic balance issue - similar, but entirely different for the purposes of poetry, and for the purposes of the widesite. (46-47)
