Media Studies - Media Language Theorists

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Semiotics - Roland Barthes

Concept 1: The Media constructs meaning through a process of denotation and connotation

  • We read media imagery in the same way that we read conventional language

  • We decode media imagery in two distinctly different ways: first, producing a connotative reading that recognizes 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 - likely, in other words, to produce a number of connotative effects

  • Text-based elements can provide anchorage - tying down the meaning of an image for the reader

  • Barthes suggest that meaning is produced by the simultaneous development of hermeneutic, proairetic, semantic, cultural, and symbolic features

Concept 2: The media has an ideological affect on audiences

  • 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 naturalizes through repetition

  • The media reduces of simplifies ideas, discouraging audiences from questioning its specific presentation of the world

  • The media tends to reinforce the worldview of those who affect social power

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Structuralism - Claude Levi-Strauss

Concept 1: Media narratives use binary oppositions

  • 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 makers also apply stylistic oppositions to mise-en-scene, camera world, editing styles, and image construction

  • Thematic oppositions in media products can be genre driven

Concept 2: The way binary oppositions are resolved creates ideological significance

  • 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

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Narratology - Tzvetan Todorov

Concept 1: Narrative patterns - equilibrium, disequilibrium, and new equilibrium

  • Todorov suggests that meaning in media products is constructed through narrative sequences and transition rather than through any individual effect or single moment within a product

  • Todorov suggests that an ideal narrative structure follows a pattern of equilibrium, disequilibrium, and new equilibrium

  • The new equilibrium stage transforms characters and the world they inhabit

Concept 2: The ideological effects of story structure

  • The power of stories lies deep in their deeper symbolic meanings

  • Narratives construct 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 produced further ideals or positive models of behaviour for a media audience

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Genre Theory - Steve Neale

Concept 1: Repetition and difference

  • The genre of a product is determined by a variety of factors

  • Genres offer specific pleasures to their audience

  • Audiences enjoy subversion as well as repetition

  • Genres are not fixed by are subject to constant change as a result of real world effects and the needs of audiences

  • Genre hybridization is a common feature within the contemporary media landscape

Concept 2: Industry effects on genre-driven media

  • Genre-driven output is shaped by auteurs and is also subject to the effects of institutional mediation

  • Genre labelling is widely practiced 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

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Postmodernism - Jean Baudrillard

Concept: From the real to the hyperreal

  • Baudrillard suggests 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 enabled through the endless copying of pre-existing media. Media forms ‘blend’ and hybridise during this copying process

  • The postmodern ages 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

  • Audience yearn for authenticity in postmodernity; the media industry tried to satisfy this yearning through realised ficiton