Media Language creates meaning in texts
Evert medium has its own language or
combinations of languages to communicate meaning
They’re called languages because they use
familiar codes and conventions.
Formal codes and conventions: the codes and
conventions of form (the shape they’re presented to an audience)
Media messages are constructed using a
creative language with its own rules.
Each form of communication has its own
creative language.
Generic conventions: Conventions of the
genre
Understanding the grammar, syntax, and
metaphor system of media language,
Increases our enjoyment and appreciation of
media texts as well as helps us to be less susceptible to manipulation.
Understanding how media texts are
communicated and how they’re manipulating an audiences
Charles Sanders Pierce (1931)
“We think only in signs”
Signs take the form of words, images,
sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic
meaning and only become signs when we give them meaning.
Audiences creating meaning from signs.
“Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted
as a sign.”
Anything can be a sign as long as an
audience interprets it as ‘signifying’ something.
There are three different signs:
-Icon, the signifier is perceived as
resembling or imitating the signified
-Index, the signifier is not arbitrary but
is directly connected to the signified, can be observed or inferred.
-Symbolic, signifier does not resemble the
signified but is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional, so that the
relationship must be learnt.
Roland Barthes (1950’s)
Rise in mass media
Used Pierce’s and Saussure’s ideas and
using them to analyze visual texts.
Death of the author:
-idea no matter what meaning, the author of
the media text invests in the text, the creator for the meaning of any media
text is the audience.
In semiotics, denotation and connotation
are terms describing relationship between signifier and signified.
He noted that Saussure’s model focused on
denotation but not connotation, later theorists like Barthes’ to account the
important dimension of the meaning.
Cultural ideas about what visual signs mean
is myth.
Photography connotation can be
distinguished from denotation.
For Barthes myths were the dominant
ideologies.
The 1st and 2nd
orders of signification called denotation and connotation to produce ideology –
described as a third order of signification by Fiske and Hartley (1982)
Audiences interpret signs subconsciously by
relating them to familiar systems of conventions.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1974)
He defined a sign as being composed of two
things:
-A signifier – The form that a sign takes
-The signified – The concept it represents
John Fiske (1982)
“Denotation is what is photographed,
connotation is how it is photographed”
What is included and left out.
Roman Jakobson (1956) – Paradigms and
Syntagms
(and later Claude Levi-Strauss)
Emphasizes that meaning arises from the differences
between signifiers, these differences are
-Syntagmatic – Concerning Position – how audience
is positioned in relation to media text, (camera angles etc)
-Paradigmatic - Concerning Substitution – Genre MES +
Narrative – Paradigm = A model, change things to create different texts
Paradigms
include ways of changing shot (cut, fade ,dissolve, wipe etc) The medium and
genre are also paradigms. Media texts derive meaning from the way the medium
and genre used differs from the alternatives.
Media language is an evaluation of micro
elements (MES, Cinematography, Editing, Sound) Therefore we’re required to
denotate and conotate meanings
Must discuss preferred meaning for audience
to decode based on what is encoded (reasons things are chosen).
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