Thursday, 17 September 2015

Media Language Theories

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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