Media Studies - Media Language Theorists

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

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

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

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

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