Media Studies

The Essential Resource

Sarah Casey Benyahia, Abigail Gardner, Philip Rayner, Peter Wall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415540148
• eBook ISBN: 9781136259869
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together key writings with original textbook material, the second edition of Media Studies: The Essential Resource explains central perspectives and concepts within Media Studies. Readers are introduced to a range of writing on media topics promoting an understanding of the subject from both contemporary and historical perspectives.

The text is split into three parts covering Analysis and Perspectives, Media Audiences and Ecologies and Creativities. The key areas of study are discussed, with accessible readings from essential theoretical texts and fully supported with an author commentary. Theoretical perspectives are used to analyse contemporary media forms and activities direct students to interrogate readings further and apply their learning.

Encouraging critical and analytical study, Media Studies: The Essential Resource helps students to understand the main theories and theorists within Media Studies.

Part I

ANALYSIS AND PERSPECTIVES

Introduction

The analysis and interpretation of products constructed by the media is one of the cornerstones of Media Studies. It is also an approach which has become increasingly controversial with many theorists arguing that the traditional approach of ‘textual analysis’ is inadequate in dealing with the rapid changes in the contemporary media landscape. A particular concern is that the emphasis on analysing the media product (or text as it is commonly referred to) can ignore all the contexts which produced it (social, cultural, historical, political, etc.) and downplays the role of the audience in creating meaning. The role of the audience in this process of meaning and interpretation has clearly become more prominent with the development of new technologies where the line between producer and audience (or the maker and receiver of meaning) has become increasingly blurred. A further criticism of the textual analysis approach is that it treats media products as though they were examples of high art created by an individual artist, which could be understood simply by identifying the type of shots or lighting used. These concerns about the dominance of textual analysis in Media Studies – particularly at GCE level – are not new. In the previous edition of this book, concerns were raised about the approach, arguing that ‘no matter how great the virtuosity demonstrated in analysing texts, this is rarely an end in itself’ – but it is disputable that too often this is exactly what has happened.

So, you might ask, why have a section titled ‘Analysis and perspectives’ which includes extracts and references to some of the key approaches which have underpinned textual analysis – semiotics and formalism? The answer is clear – to understand the purpose and function of media products it is important to equip yourself with an effective toolkit. In this first part of the book we explore some of the tools that form this toolkit.

The analysis of a media product is one of the ways in which we can understand its wider cultural and social significance. As you will see, a semiotic approach is embedded in the culture which produces the signs; it is not separate from it. For example, the analysis of an advertisement for a beauty product is rarely an end in itself. Its significance is more likely to lie in the way in which it reveals to us the underlying nature of gender relations within our culture. This significance may become more evident when we consider the cumulative effect of the many similar advertisements which exist alongside it. In fact, it is likely to be the cumulative impact of a group of related texts that reveals the ideological forces that are at play within each one individually.

In consequence, individual products may require different approaches. Some may best be tackled initially using genre theory, while image analysis may be a better starting point for others; this fluidity also suggests the difficulty (and undesirability?) of attempting to limit meaning to a single perspective or definition. In organizing this part of the book there is, however, an underlying logic. Image analysis is placed first because, given the visual nature of much of the media, it does provide a crucial insight into the working of sign systems which are essential to an understanding of the functioning of media production. Ideology is placed last because it can be seen as the logical outcome of image analysis. The ideological work of a media text helps reveal to us the functioning of that text within broader social and cultural contexts. This is a key role played by analysis: to open our eyes to the value systems within our culture signified by popular cultural forms such as media products.

Dilemma

As you read the extracts and address the different activities in this section, consider the following dilemma:

Why do we need to apply perspectives to media products – why can’t we just enjoy them?

1	IMAGE ANALYSIS

A key item in a student’s analytical toolkit is a grasp of semiotics. In order to explore the many visual signs that constitute media texts, it is important to have a grasp of semiotic analysis as well as a functional vocabulary of semiotic terms. However, it should be borne in mind that knowing the principles and the terminology is in itself of no great value. It is necessary to develop an awareness of the way in which semiotic analysis shows us how meaning is created. In other words, semiotics is a means of focusing on the underlying structure of sign systems enabling us to talk about how texts are constructed in order to make meaning. This underlying structure is concerned with how a sign can be seen as a combination of a signifier (the physical representation of a sign, such as a spoken or written word, or a symbol) and a signified (the mental concept or meaning conveyed by the signifier).

How image analysis works

In the following extract, Ellen Seiter explains the significance of semiotics and structuralism in relation to television. She also provides a useful insight into the way in which semiotics has developed in the field of Cultural Studies.

Semiotics is the study of everything that can be used for communication: words, images, traffic signs, flowers, music, medical symptoms, and much more. Semiotics studies the way such ‘signs’ communicate and the rules that govern their use. As a tool for the study of culture, semiotics represents a radical break from traditional criticism, in which the first order of business is the interpretation of an aesthetic object or text in terms of its immanent meaning. Semiotics first asks how meaning is created, rather than what the meaning is. In order to do this, semiotics uses a specialized vocabulary to describe signs and how they function. Often this vocabulary smacks of scientism to the newcomer and clashes with our assumptions about what criticism and the humanities are. But the special terminology of semiotics and its attempt to compare the production of meaning in a diverse set of mediums – aesthetic signs being only one of many objects of study – have allowed us to describe the workings of cultural communication with greater accuracy and enlarged our recognition of the conventions that characterize our culture.

The term semiotics was coined by Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), an American philosopher, although his work on semiotics did not become widely known until the 1930s. The field was also ‘invented’ by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The term he used to describe the new science he advocated in Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1959, was semiology. Structuralism is most closely associated with anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose studies of the logic and worldview of ‘primitive’ cultures were first published in the 1950s. Although it relies on many of the principles of semiotics, structuralism engages larger questions of cultural meaning and ideology and thus has been widely used in literary and media criticism. Semiotics and structuralism are so closely related they may be said to overlap – semiotics being a field of study in itself, whereas structuralism is a method of analysis often used in semiotics.

Structuralism stresses that each element within a cultural system derives its meaning from its relationship to every other element in the system: there are no independent meanings, but rather many meanings produced by their difference from other elements in the system. Beginning in the 1960s, some leading European intellectuals applied semiotics and structuralism to many different sign systems. Roland Barthes carefully analyzed fashion, French popular culture from wrestling to wine drinking, and a novella by Balzac. Umberto Eco turned his attention to Superman comic strips and James Bond novels. Christian Metz set out to describe the style of Hollywood cinema as a semiotic system. By addressing the symbolic and communicative capacity of humans in general, semiotics and structuralism help us see connections between fields of study that are normally divided among different academic departments in the university. Thus they are specially suited to the study of television.

E. Seiter, ‘Semiotics, Structuralism and Television’, in R. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse Reassembled, 2nd edn, University of North Carolina Press and Routledge, 1992, pp. 126–28

ACTIVITY

Seiter argues that the development of semiotics represented a major change in the way in which cultural products had been analysed because rather than focusing on the interpretation of the meaning it asked how meaning is constructed.

Take a media image of your choice and try to apply this idea – list all the points you can make about the meaning of the image and then another list which identifies how the image was constructed to create this meaning.

One of the important aspects of semiotics is the way in which it considers all sign systems rather than focusing solely on the use of written and spoken language. One of the reasons why the analysis of media texts is such a complex business is that they often combine both ‘language’ and an elaborate system of visual signs. The two then work together to create complex meanings which the television viewer, Facebook user or film-goer is able to decode. It is of little surprise therefore that semiotics was rapidly appropriated by students of film in order to help with the analysis of their texts.

In his seminal book How to Read a Film, James Monaco explores the relationship between ‘language’, in terms of written or spoken communication, and the way a film communicates its meaning to an audience. In the extract that follows, he explores the relationship between signifier and signified and makes the important point that whilst in language these two bear little relation to each other, in film they are almost identical. Film works by presenting us with a series of iconic signs which closely mimic the reality they represent.

The irony is that we know very well that we must learn to read before we can attempt to enjoy or understand literature, but we tend to believe, mistakenly, that anyone can read a film. Anyone can see a film, it’s true, even cats. But some people have learned to comprehend visual images – physiologically, ethnographically, and psychologically – with far more sophistication than have others. This evidence confirms the validity of the triangle of perception uniting author, work, and observer. The observer is not simply a consumer, but an active – or potentially active – participant in the process.

Film is not a language, but is like a language, and since it is like language, some of the methods that we use to study language might profitably be applied to a study of film. In fact, during the last ten years this approach to film – essentially linguistic – has grown considerably in importance. Since film is not a language, strictly linguistic concepts are misleading. Ever since the beginning of film history, theorists have been fond of comparing film with verbal language (this was partly to justify the serious study of film), but it wasn’t until a larger category of thought developed in the fifties and early sixties – one that saw written and spoken language as just two among many systems of communication – that the real study of film as a language could proceed. This inclusive category is semiology, the study of systems of signs. Semiologists justified the study of film as language by redefining the concept of written and spoken language. Any system of communication is a ‘language’; English, French, or Chinese is a ‘language system.’ Cinema, therefore, may be a language of a sort, but it is not clearly a language system. As Christian Metz, the well-known film semiologist, pointed out: we understand a film not because we have a knowledge of its system, rather, we achieve an understanding of its system because we understand the film. Put another way, ‘It is not because the cinema is language that it can tell such fine stories, but rather it has become language because it has told such fine stories’ (Metz, Film Language [1974], p. 47).

For semiologists, a sign must consist of two parts: the signifier and the signified. The word ‘word,’ for example – the collection of letters or sounds – is a signifier; what it represents is something else again – the ‘signified.’ In literature, the relationship between signifier and signified is a main locus of art: the poet is building constructions that, on the one hand, are composed of sounds (signifiers) and, on the other, of meanings (signifieds), and the relationship between the two can be fascinating. In fact, much of the pleasure of poetry lies just here: in the dance between sound and meaning.

But in film, the signifier and the signified are almost identical: the sign of cinema is a short-circuit sign. A picture of a book is much closer to a book, conceptually, than the word ‘book’ is. It’s true that we may have to learn in infancy or early childhood to interpret the picture of a book as meaning a book, but this is a great deal easier than learning to interpret the letters or sounds of the word ‘book’ as what it signifies. A picture bears some direct relationship with what it signifies, a word seldom does.

It is the fact of this short-circuit sign that makes the language of film so difficult to discuss. As Metz put it, in a memorable phrase: ‘A film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand.’ It also makes ‘doing’ film quite different from ‘doing’ English (either writing or speaking). We can’t modify the signs of cinema the way we can modify the words of language systems. In cinema, an image of a rose is an image of a rose is an image of a rose – nothing more, nothing less. In English, a rose can be a rose, simply, but it can also be modified or confused with similar words: rose, rosy, rosier, rosiest, rise, risen, rows (ruse), arose, roselike, and so forth. The power of language systems is that there is a very great difference between the signifier and the signified; the power of film is that there is not.

Nevertheless film is like a language. How, then, does it do what is does? Clearly, one person’s image of a certain object is not another’s. If we both read the word ‘rose’, you may perhaps think of a Peace rose you picked last summer, while I am thinking of the one Laura Westphal gave to me in December 1968. In cinema, however, we both see the same rose, while the film...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Analysis and perspectives
• Part II: Media audiences
• Part III: Ecologies and creativities
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index