Media Language

How meaning is created.

What you are doing to communicate a specific thing with the audience. 

Ferdinand de Saussure - The signifier and the signified

Roland Barthes - denotation and connotation [Enigma code]

Stuart hall - encoding and decoding (preferred reading) [Reception Theory]

Saussure:

Similar to connotation and denotation, it discusses the idea there are two levels of meaning in a text. 

Firstly there is the signifier - What is there in front of us, what we see/hear.

Secondly there is the signified - The idea that we associate with the signifier in our heads, the concept it represents. 

A sign or symbol does not make sense without the actual object and the meaning it creates, both must be present. 

E.g. If characters in a film are talking about a bank, the audience must determine which bank they mean; a grassy slope or a place to deposit money. 

3 types of signs - 

Signifiers can be broken down into 3 different types.

Iconic signs - look like what they mean (e.g. a picture of a cowboy is a cowboy) generally literal

Indexical signs - show a connection (e.g. smoke is fire, sweating is heat or exertion) 

Symbolic signs - where the sign is completely disconnects (visually) from the meaning (e.g. a heart is love, white dove is peace) generally metaphorical

Barthes:

denotation and connotation

It looks at how an audience will interpret meaning from a text.

The interpretation is influenced by society and audience member's own experience of the world.

Denotation - an object placed within a media text.

Connotations - the meaning the audience draws from their own cultural, social and historical knowledge. 

The main difference to signifier and signified is that a connotation may not always be intentional.

Stuart Hall:

A text will always have a preferred reading that a producer intends.

This is done by encoding meaning into the text. 

These meanings are then decoded by the audience so they can interpret it.

Often refers more to values and messages than literal signs and connotations. 

The audience can decode the meaning in three ways.

Fully accepting the producers intentions with a preferred reading 

Agreeing with some but not all of the intended meaning and therefore taking a negotiate meaning

They may understand the intended message but reject it in favour of their own which is an oppositional reading. 

KEY WORDS:

polsemy - one sign can have multiple different meanings

juxtaposition - constrasts

anchoridge of media language - fixing a meaning to something