Media Language Flashcards
BARTHES SEMIOTICS
Concept 1 outline
The media constructs meaning through a process of denotation and connotation
BARTHES SEMIOTICS
Concept 1: Deeper outline
- We read the media imagery the same way we read conventional language
- We decode media imagery in two distinctly different ways: first, producing a denotative reading that recognises the literal content of an image, and then producing a connotative reading that diagnoses a deeper symbolic meaning
- Image based connotations are created through; props, post-production effects, pose, costuming, composition and lighting
- Media imagery is polyvalent
- Text based elements can provide anchorage - tying down the meaning of an image for the reader
- Suggests that meaning is produced by the simultaneous deployment of hermeneutical, Proairetic, semantic, cultural and symbolic features
BARTHES SEMIOTICS
Concept 2: Outline
The media has an ideological effect on audiences
BARTHES SEMIOTICS
Concept 2: deeper outline
- The media is powerful because it has the capacity to produce a realistic portrayal of the world
- The media has a myth like capacity to guide and influence our behaviours and actions
- The media naturalises ideas through repetition.
- The media reduces or simplicities ideas, discouraging audiences from questioning its specific presentation to the world
- The media tends to reinforce the worldview of those who affect social power
BARTHES SEMIOTICS
Two theorists who challenge
- Claude Levi- Strauss
- Tzvetan Todorov
BARTHES SEMIOTICS
Vs. Claude Levi-Strauss
Would be more interested in the way that media products articulate oppositions than in the effect of any single ingredient or moment.
Levi-Strauss would also argue that media products are informed by universally shared structures; Barthes argues that media products are constructed as a result of temporal or social influences
BARTHES SEMIOTICS
Vs. Todorov
Would argue that media products produce meaning through narrative features and that isolated instances of connotation are less significant.
LEVI-STRAUSS: STRUCTURALISM
Concept 1 outline
Media narratives use binary opposites
LEVI-STRAUSS: STRUCTURALISM
Concept 1 deeper outline
- Levi-Strauss offers a structuralist approach to media analysis, suggesting that humans encode and decode the world using universally shared principles.
- The media uses binary oppositions to explain and categorise the complexities of the world around us
- Oppositions can be found in the media in the presentation of characters or narrative themes
- Media markers also I apply stylistic oppositions to mis-en-scene, camera work, editing styles and image construction
- Thematic oppositions in media products can be genre driven
LEVI-STRAUSS: STRUCTURALISM
Concept 2 outline
The way binary oppositions are resolved creates ideological significance
LEVI-STRAUSS: STRUCTURALISM
Concept 2 deeper outline
- media products construct ideologies by positioning their audiences to favour one side of an opposition
- Narrative resolutions - the endings of media products - often help us to diagnose which oppositions a product favours (+ Todorov)
LEVI-STRAUSS: STRUCTURALISM
Three theorists who challenge
- Stuart Hall
- Paul Gilroy
- Judith Butler
LEVI-STRAUSS: STRUCTURALISM
Vs Stuart Hall
Would also argue that media products can be encoded using binary oppositions, but he would ass that audiences do not necessarily decode the products int he way that media makers intend
LEVI-STRAUSS: STRUCTURALISM
Vs Paul Gilroy
Argues that Western binary thinking has traditionally classified ethnicity in terms of simplified white/non0white and civilised/simplistic and hugely damaging binary classifications
LEVI-STRAUSS: STRUCTURALISM
Vs Judith Butler
Similarly argues that conventional Western gender binaries mask the complexities nature of sexuality. She also argues that individuals have resisted gender binary using ‘gender trouble’
TODOROV: NARRATIVE PATTERNS
Concept 1: outline
Narrative patterns - equilibrium, disequilibrium and new equilibrium
TODOROV: NARRATIVE PATTERNS
Concept 1 deeper outline
- Todorov suggests that meaning in media products is constructed through narrative sequences and transitions rather than through any individual effect or single moment within a product
- Todorov suggests that an ideal narrative structure follows the narrative pattern
- The new equilibrium stage transforms characters and the world they inhabit
TODOROV: NARRATIVE PATTERNS
Concept 2 outline
The ideological effects of story structure
TODOROV: NARRATIVE PATTERNS
Concept 2 deeper outline
- the power of stories lies in their deeper symbolic meanings
- Narratives contruct ideals for the audience through the use of equilibrium
- Disequilibrium sequences represent ideas, values or behaviours that are deemed problematic - often these negative ideologies are embodied through the villain character
- Narrative transformation produces further ideals or positive models of behaviour for a media audience
TODOROV: NARRATIVE PATTERNS
Two theorists who might challenge Todorov
- Steve Neale
- Levi-Strauss
TODOROV: NARRATIVE PATTERNS
Vs Steve Neale
Would argue that story structures are continuously adapting and changing.
The idea that there exists an ‘ideal’ story structure, as such, is problematic for Neale
TODOROV: NARRATIVE PATTERNS
Vs Levi-Strauss
Concerned with the way that narratives present oppositions rather than rhetoric way those oppositions are transformed or synthesised
STEVE NEALE: GENRE THEORY
Concept 1 outline
The pleasures afforded through repetition and difference
STEVE NEALE: GENRE THEORY
Concept 1 deeper outline
- The genre of a product is determined by a variety of factors
- Genres offer specific pleasures to their audience
- Audiences enjoy genre subversion as well as repetition
- genres are not fixed but are subject to constant change as a result of real world effects and the needs of audiences
- genre hybridisation is a common feature which in the contemporary media landscape
STEVE NEALE: GENRE THEORY
Concept 2 outline
Industry effects on genre-driven media
STEVE NEALE: GENRE THEORY
Concept 2 deeper outline
- Genre driven output is shaped by auteurs and is also subject to the effects of institutional mediation
- Genre labelling is widely practised by media producers to create a narrative image for a media product
- Promotion and marketing materials (intertextual relay) can fix the genre of a product
STEVE NEALE: GENRE THEORY
Two theorists who might challenge
- Stuart Hall
- James Curran and Jean Seaton
STEVE NEALE: GENRE THEORY
Vs Stuart Hall
Would agree that products construct pleasures for audiences, but would also emphasises the potential dangers that certain genres have in effecting audience ideologies through genre specific character representations and stereotypes.
STEVE NEALE: GENRE THEORY
Vs Curran & Seaton
Might challenge the notion that genre hybridisation is not a significant feature of the contemporary landscape.
Curran and seaton suggest that media concentration has in fact led to fewer experimental forms and that media companies are instead overly reliant on tried and tested narrative formulas that are designed to garner mass audience appeal.
BAUDRILLARD: POST-MODERNISM
Key concept outline
From the real to the Hyperreal
BAUDRILLARD: POST-MODERNISM
Key concept deeper outline
- Baudrillard suggest that there have been three distinct cultural phases: pre-modernity, modernity and postmodernity
- We now live in the postmodern age which is marked by a massive proliferation in media content and media messages
- Media proliferation has resulted in an implosion of meaning through the simultaneous presentation of oppositional truths
- Media proliferation is enables through endless copying of pre-existing media. Media forms ‘blend’ and hybridise during this copying process
- The post modern age is marked by the dominance of advertising as a media form. Advertising has also impacted on other media forms creating hyperreal inertia.
- Baudrillard suggests that media blending has resulted in the construction of fictionalised reality.
- Audiences yearn for authenticity in postmodernity; the media industry tries to satisfy this yearning through realised fiction
BAUDRILLARD: POST-MODERNISM
Two theorists who might challenge
- Roland Barthes
- Henry Jenkins
BAUDRILLARD: POST-MODERNISM
Vs Barthes
Would argue that media products have a clear relationship with reality.
Media texts represent and naturalise the world views of those who hold power in society.
BAUDRILLARD: POST-MODERNISM
Vs Henry Jenkins
Would contest the idea that postmodernity results in Hyperreality inertia.
Contemporary digital media, he would argue, can make a positive difference in the real world through the use of participatory culture
