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Approaching media texts
The media are not so much âthingsâ as places which most of us inhabit, which weave in and out of our lives. Their constant messages and pleasures seem to flow around and through us, and they immerse most of our waking lives. So thereâs usually little problem with immediate understanding or enjoyment of them. Yet precisely because of their taken-for-grantedness, many people have seen it as important, and enjoyable, to try to analyse the roles and consequences of this part of everyday lives. And because most of us have learnt their âcodesâ so thoroughly, they can be hard to stand back from, to try to âunpickâ.
In this chapter we focus broadly on two examples of the two main approaches to media âtextsâ: qualitative and quantitative, looking at semiotic and content analysis methods. As their names suggest, these are broadly interested, respectively, in:
⢠exploring the qualities of individual texts, and
⢠registering what can be discovered by counting repeated patterns or elements across groups or quantities of texts.
Some perceive an opposition between these approaches, and they are indeed different. But they can fruitfully be used together, and each of them is best used with an awareness of the other one as supplementing some of its own weaknesses.
Note: You will probably need to spend some time on all this. The terms youâll be trying out are now part of the bloodstream of much media study, and thus not explicitly used all the time, though they often structure many media scholarsâ work. Semiotic approaches (part of qualitative methods) have been hugely qualified and debated in recent years. Yet broadly semiotic approaches, with an awareness of how
Part of the âtaken-for-grantednessâ of broadly semiotic or constructionist approaches is media discussions of spin, or PR (public relations). News media often make minute interpretation of signs, debating what a celebrityâs facial expression or a politicianâs choice of phrasing âreallyâ signifies. See Chapter 11. |
meanings, images, etc. are âconstructedâ, are part not only of this subject area, but also of mainstream media. This is especially true in comment on fashion and politics. You may find you already know more about semiotic approaches than you at first imagine.
Roland Barthes (1915â80) French literary theorist, critic and philosopher who applied semiotic analysis to cultural and media forms, famously in Mythologies (1972, originally published 1957), a collection of essays wittily working with ads, wrestling, Greta Garboâs face and so on. |
Intertextuality: the variety of ways in which media and other texts interact with each other, rather than being unique or distinct. |
A major example of qualitative approaches seeking to relate texts to their surrounding social orders has been semiotics (now less often called âsemiologyâ, Saussureâs term). Content analysis, on the other hand, tries to explore what seem to be patterns or omissions across many of these âtextsâ, and is a prime quantitative method.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857â1913) French linguist who pioneered the semiotic study of language as a system of signs, organised in âcodesâ and âstructuresâ. The Russian theorist Volosinov, however, suggested the term âdecodingâ tends to treat language as a dead thing, rather than a living and changing activity. |
Semiotic approaches
Media, especially news and factual media, have often been thought of as kinds of conveyor belts of meaning between âthe worldâ and audiences, producing images âaboutâ or âfromâ this or that debate, event or place.
The word âmediaâ comes from the Latin word âmediumâ meaning âmiddleâ. âMediaâ is the plural of this term. |
Sometimes this involves news, or the hidden secrets of celebrities. But it has often been assumed that the task of such communication is simply to tell âthe truthâ about what it reports. Semiotics, however, does not assume that the media work as simple channels of communication, as âwindows on the worldâ. Instead they are seen as actually structuring the very realities which they seem to âdescribeâ or âstand in forâ. This disturbs powerful notions of âa truthâ to the complex worlds we inhabit which can be straightforwardly accessed and âbrought backâ.
Semiotics is a theory of signs, and how they work to produce meanings, or the study of how things come to have significance. This includes signs devised to convey meanings (language, badges) as well as âsymptomsâ (as in âthatâs the sign of swine fluâ). |
When the media were first seriously studied, in the late 1950s, existing methods from literary, social science and art criticism were routinely applied to them. Value was set on âgood dialogueâ, âconvincing charactersâ, âtruthfulnessâ and âbeautiful compositionsâ. As well as comfortable assumptions about âtruthâ, high value was set on âindividualityâ (usually of a very limited group of writers, artists). But it soon became clear that simply to discuss a film or television programme by such methods was...
