Keywords for Media Studies: Text

Temporality and Media Technology

• Technologies exacerbate temporal relationships under the guise of providing access to the time of another in highly gendered ways.

• The history of telemothering or domestic technologies in the home serves as a primary example; these technologies promise free time but actually increase the time of work, a phenomenon noted by Schwartz-Cowan ($1983$)

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• Portable media contribute to this shift by creating a need for phone chargers in transit spaces. This reorients labor toward maintaining and servicing power outlets rather than focusing on people, as observed by Gregg ($2015b$).

• A shared expectation across the temporal differential is that individuals must recalibrate their sense of time.

• In media studies, temporality involves tracing these shifts and complicating the "grand order of time" that is often presented through the consumer packaging of high-tech gear.

• This perspective allows for the opportunity to retrace historical steps and identify how other media forms, which have already been theorized, might contain additional temporal threads worth exploring.

Defining the Text in Media Studies

• A text is defined as a unit of meaning for interpretation and understanding.

• Under this broad definition, most things are, or could be treated as, texts.

• Common examples of media texts include:

  • Television programs

  • Films

  • Video games

  • Websites

  • Books

  • Songs

  • Podcasts

  • Newspaper articles

  • Tweets

  • Apps

• Texts are significant because they are bearers of communication and movers of meaning. They have the power to inspire, delight, disgust, or disappoint.

• Crucially, texts intervene in the world and culture by introducing new ideas or by attacking or reinforcing old ones.

• Textual analysis is a primary mode of investigating media studies. Scholars use it to determine:

  • What a text means.

  • How it conveys meaning (the techniques used).

  • What its themes, messages, and explicit and implicit assumptions aim to accomplish.

The Complexity of Textual Context

• While texts are often treated as discrete units of meaning, they are never truly discrete because meaning is always contextual, relative, and situated in a specific place and time.

• The challenge of analyzing media texts involves tracking how context works and how texts connect to each other, the outside world, producers, and audiences.

• Early textual studies (from the Victorian era to the late twentieth century) in English literature, art history, and film studies often took the text’s discreteness for granted. They focused on how novels, poems, paintings, sculptures, and films work.

• Media studies draws much of its analytical apparatus from these fields to answer similar questions about media texts.

Analytical Techniques and Dialogism

• Some texts announce their dominant meanings clearly or "ham-handedly," but many meanings are subtle.

• Techniques used to convey meaning include:

  • Limited color palettes in cinematography.

  • Sound and music.

  • Costumes.

  • Editing.

  • Duration.

• Mikhail Bakhtin ($1981$) observed that texts, particularly novels, are characterized by "dialogism."

• In a dialogic work, characters represent various worldviews and beliefs that clash in the narrative. Readers must listen through this dialogue to determine messages, meanings, or themes.

• Despite drawing from other fields, media studies has rarely developed its own rigorous forms of textual analysis, sometimes adopting a haphazard "nonmethod" that prioritizes questions of reception over established methods for working out textual meaning.

Audience Interaction and Encoding/Decoding

• A key interest in media studies is what audiences do with a text.

• Stuart Hall's canonical encoding/decoding model ($1973/1980$) identifies two determinate moments of meaning creation:

  • Encoding: The moment creators build meaning into the text.

  • Decoding: The moment audiences extract meaning from the text.

• While Hall viewed these moments as equally important, many scholars focus on the decoding process as the more fascinating moment of interpretation.

• Various theorists have offered metaphors for the relationship between the text and the audience:

  • Stanley Fish ($1980$) argued that a text is empty until filled with meaning by the reader.

  • Roland Barthes ($1977$) compared the collaboration between text and audience to a musician riffing off a piece of sheet music.

  • Wolfgang Iser ($11978$) likened readers to stargazers who see specific points in the night sky but must connect them in their minds.

  • Michel de Certeau ($1984$) compared the journey through a text to a stroll through a city; while specific buildings (structures) are in place, the individual chooses their own path, leading to differing experiences.

• Hall ($1973/1980$) noted that texts have "preferred meanings," but audiences can perform:

  • Preferred readings.

  • Oppositional readings.

  • Negotiated readings.

• Identity markers such as class, gender, and race impact these readings. Consequently, a text is seen as unable to contain its own meanings; it is finished, edited, or reproduced by the audience.

• This iconoclastic conclusion suggests that no text—whether legal doctrine, sitcom, or holy text—has an unequivocal or immutable meaning.

The Messiness of Encoding and Borders

• Encoding is often chaotic because most media have multiple authors. This creates a level of dialogism where messages conflict because creators have not reached a perfect consensus.

• While directors or others attempt to manage these artistic visions, they must also navigate commercial pressures and production rituals.

• Encoding involves "noise" resulting from social differences and societal ideologies that impact meaning creation unintentionally.

• Valentin Volosinov ($1973$) argued that meaning exists only within context. A single sentence can change meaning based on the setting and the listeners’ histories with those specific words.

• Rigorous textual analysis must be sensitive to the geography and temporal setting of the text.

Juxtaposition, Flow, and Intertextuality

• Lev Kuleshov’s experiment demonstrated that meaning is constructed based on what something is next to. By placing the same image of an actor’s face next to different images, viewers perceived different nuances in the acting.

• Sergei Eisenstein and others realized the power of juxtaposition through this experiment.

• In television, scheduling is treated as an art. Raymond Williams ($1974$) discussed "flow" as a central attribute, where commercials insert themselves into the flow of meaning, altering the experience of the show.

• Juxtaposition occurs across all media through:

  • Scheduled double features at cinemas.

  • Music playlists.

  • Online ads placed next to specific content.

• Intertextuality suggests that all textuality is, in truth, intertextuality. Every unit of meaning (letter, word, image, character) is understood through previous encounters in other contexts.

• Example: Seeing Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart together triggers intertextual awareness of their roles in X-Men (Magneto and Professor X), their real-life friendship, and other roles like Gandalf, Jean-Luc Picard, a Nazi in Apt Pupil, or a version of themselves in Extras. These past images create a "dance of meaning" between past and present.

Space, History, and Paratexts

• The meaning of a text is affected by physical space, such as the venue where a band plays or the location where a film is watched.

• Sociopolitical contexts influence meaning; a mundane website in one country might be censored in another.

• Proper study requires sensitivity to history. For example, understanding South Park requires knowing what it mocks and where it fits within the history of sitcoms, animation, satire, and American television.

• Paratexts (Genette $1997$; Gray $2010$) are elements that draw other materials into the orbit of a text. In a mediated era, promotional budgets often exceed production budgets.

• Examples of paratexts include:

  • Ads and trailers (early portals framing expectations).

  • Merchandise.

  • Reviews.

  • Podcasts and DVD bonus tracks.

  • Liner notes and interviews.

  • Fan film, fan art, and fan fiction.

• Paratexts function as "taste tests." Even if an individual does not consume the "thing itself," they construct a meaning of what the text is through its paratexts.

• Paratexts can meddle with, amplify, bury, or transform textual meaning. They are sites of contestation where musicians might explain intent or fans might announce readings that contradict producers.

• Paratexts allow texts to be retrofitted for different audiences or times (e.g., new book covers).

The Fluctuating Borders of the Text

• Traditional "close reading" often ignores paratexts, context, and intertext. This is considered a troubling mode of analysis if media studies aims to treat texts as social and cultural actors.

• A text does not simply exist; it "becomes."

• Its borders fluctuate, and its very being and meaning are predicated on the interplay between context, intertext, and paratext.