Media Studies

Texts, Production, Context

Paul Long, Beth Johnson, Shana MacDonald, Schem Rogerson Bader, Tim Wall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317428299
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This thoroughly revised and updated third edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the various approaches to the field, explaining why media messages matter, how media businesses prosper and why media is integral to defining contemporary life.

The text is divided into three parts – Media texts and meanings; Producing media; and Media and social contexts – exploring the ways in which various media forms make meaning; are produced and regulated; and how society, culture and history are defined by such forms. Encouraging students to actively engage in media research and analysis, each chapter seeks to guide readers through key questions and ideas in order to empower them to develop their own scholarship, expertise and investigations of the media worlds in which we live. Fully updated to reflect the contemporary media environment, the third edition includes new case studies covering topics such as Brexit, podcasts, Love Island, Captain Marvel, Black Lives Matter, Netflix, data politics, the Kardashians, President Trump, 'fake news', the post-Covid world and perspectives on global media forms.

This is an essential introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, film studies, the sociology of the media and popular culture.

PART ONE
Media texts and meanings

As a starting point for our studies we should consider how media industries are organised around a process of production, distribution and consumption.

Media companies such as Disney, News International, Canal+, Bertelsmann, Microsoft and CCTV.com are organised as businesses with departments covering finance, production, recruitment and so on that allow them to function as effective economic entities. Individuals in such departments oversee the production of saleable materials through research, development, cultivation of the creative process and final realisation of product to its packaging ready for delivery. Consider a Nintendo video game as the end product of such a process. This product is developed and produced, then marketed and distributed: you can buy games in shops, by mail order or over the internet – maybe even borrow them from friends or obtain illegal ‘pirated’ copies. Finally, media products are consumed by viewers, listeners, web surfers, readers and so on. With Nintendo and its products, consumers spend hours mastering games, moving through each level relating to the pleasure, attraction and rewards they get from them.

In this first part of the book we are concerned with this final stage – media output – in very particular ways. For most of us our main experience of the media is as consumers of its output. What we ‘consume’ is the meaning of that output in apps, news stories, pop songs, billboard advertisements, radio and TV shows, podcasts, films, photographs, computer games and websites. This meaning is the basis of the thrills, pleasures and informational aspects of media forms in all their variety – the very basis of their existence and success.

The four chapters in this part of the book are intended to lead you through a step-by-step process of thinking about media output and meanings and some of the key terms by which media studies describes and makes sense of this output through interpretation. Beginning with the acknowledgement of the fact that we already know what meanings media forms have, we aim to equip you with some procedures and tools that will aid you in making sense of how media make meaning and how we understand those meanings.

We’ll first ask ‘How do media make meaning?’, exploring the nature of texts and methods of rhetorical and semiological analysis. In Chapter 2, ‘Organising meaning in media texts’, we look at the different categories of media texts in terms of genre as well as consider how stories are organised in terms of narrative. In the third chapter we pay attention to the way in which all media ‘represent’ the world – fictional or otherwise – and in particular, to how we are invited to think about individuals and groups and what is at stake in such representations. Finally, Chapter 4, ‘Reality media’, develops these themes further by thinking of the relationship of meanings and the worlds media depict or construct in terms of the truth claims they make or are assumed to make. In addition we’ll tie all of these threads together in an extended analysis of a media text in order to work through ways of making sense of how meaning is made.

Chapters in this section

Chapter 1: How do media make meaning?

Introduces the concept of text and the tools of rhetorical and semiological analysis that aid the understanding of how media meanings are made.

Chapter 2: Organising meaning in media texts: genre and narrative

Examines types of media text and the conventions governing meaning and the organisation and structuring of stories and representation.

Chapter 3: Media representations

Develops the idea of media representation to consider the specific issues and ways in which social groups and individuals are represented in media forms.

Chapter 4: Reality media

Evaluates the relationship of media forms and meanings with the real, truth, fact and authenticity as well as our expectations of these ideas.

CHAPTER 1

How do media make meaning?

Thinking about media meanings

Consider the image reproduced in Figure 1.1 and ask yourself some simple questions of the kind that we rarely ask (because we know the answers already). What is this image and what is it telling me? How do I know what it is saying to me and how is it saying it?

Figure 1.1 What is this image, what exactly is going on here and how do I know what it is and what it means?

Source: Ads of the World, Advertising Agency: DDB Tribal Berlin, Germany

Some readers might leap to respond along the lines of ‘it is obvious what it is: it is an advertisement for Volkswagen Park Assist!’ We would agree that it might well be an advertisement but there is nothing at all obvious here that tells us that this is such a media product, nor does it say anything specific about Volkswagen products – at least unequivocally.

There is some written text here to guide our interpretation: ‘Precision Parking. Park Assist by Volkswagen’.

The trademark for Volkswagen is placed after the anchoring text. The diagonal placement of the key images – two closely positioned transparent bags containing water and a single goldfish, one behind another, followed by a spiky porcupine and then a final bagged goldfish – echoes the landscape of a road. The spherical shape of the goldfish bags is matched visually to the circular VW trademark badge in the bottom right, and the colour-tones are also matched, muted, cool and calm in greys and blues, drawing the eye to both the brown sharp quills of the porcupine and the neon gold of the fish. While the jutting quills of the porcupine represent a sense of jeopardy or hazard the carefully measured distance between the four items allows the viewer to infer a clear sense of safety.

What does all of this mean then and what are we meant to take from it? Is there a discernible message about Volkswagen on offer or simply a feeling that one might associate with the idea of ‘precision assistance’ or even the safety of the VW brand more generally? The fact that no car features in the advert is in itself a mechanism that allows the audience to understand that the ‘park assist’ product is not attached to a single VW car, but rather is an invisible piece of technology that aids the safety of all VW drivers. Indeed, as a digital product, the park assist technology is not useful and visible in its own right, but its meaning can be understood through the images that represent the ways in which VW technology embody safety and precision handling.

While some of us might ‘get’ what this media text offers without a second thought, others might not be best placed to ‘read’ its meanings (on occasion, gaining no meaning at all) and may even misinterpret it completely. Your reading might be completely at odds with ours for instance, and readers may even consider that we have ‘over-read’ this media product. How we react may in fact relate to the skill with which this media product has been put together and its level of success in communicating with audiences.

Whatever our reactions, we could agree that while this is a very simple-looking piece of media output, one that graces Tweets, billboards, pages of magazines, websites and so on, in order to reach millions, it is, in fact, a very sophisticated image indeed. It is sophisticated in that it is full of meaning and it draws upon a range of conventions and associations, with little or no attempt made to notify us of the fact that it is ‘doing’ something. That something is that it is communicating ideas about Volkswagen as a company and producer of ‘cutting-edge’ products.

It is worth noting, too, that like many advertisements nowadays this one does not exhort us to buy a product or, indeed, tell us anything significant about any one item from the Volkswagen portfolio.

Beginning to ask questions about the selection and organisation of the constituent parts of media images such as this one – without recourse to its creators – and thinking about meaning and the terms of analysis are the objectives of this first chapter.

What we will we do in this chapter

This chapter introduces the concept of the text as a way of focusing on and analysing the meaning of media output. We will move on to explore the ways in which media make meaning, by defining and using tools of rhetorical analysis and then semiological analysis. The kinds of questions we ask of our apparently simple advert, and the way in which we might make sense of how it makes sense, can be extended to newspaper articles, web pages, popular music recordings, magazine covers, films, computer games and all media products.

By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

• Distinguish between the artefactual, commodity and textual aspects of media outputs.
• Systematically identify the rhetorical devices involved in producing and organising meaning in media texts.
• Utilise tools of rhetorical and semiological analysis in support of detailed interpretations and arguments about the meaning of media texts.
• Begin to conceptualise the relationship of media meanings to social contexts.

KEY TERMS:► affect; analysis and interpretation; artefact; cognition; commodity; construction; diachronic; langue; meaning; multi-accentuality; paradigm; parole; polysemia; rhetoric; semiology; synchronic; syntagm; text.

Thinking about media as texts

Most people experience media as consumers – solely through various forms of output, the end result of media production. That is to say we read newspapers, magazines and comics, we watch films and TV shows, listen to the radio, pod-casts and music, as well as use the internet and play computer games. And, of course, we experience a range of media products in a variety of places – a pop song can appear on the radio, as a soundtrack to a film or in the background of a TV show.

We can distinguish between ways of labelling media output and understanding function and meaning by considering the following three-part relationship:

• First, the output of the media has a physical form as an artefact. Media arte-facts include DVD discs, tabloid-sized newspapers, reels of celluloid film, hard-copy photographs or the digital signals that make up a downloadable song by any music band. These are all physical forms.
• Second, there is the economic value embodied in media output, in terms of commodity status. Here we refer to the cost and price that are put on media production and media products – the cost of a cinema ticket, which adds to the revenue of a film alongside online streaming subscription or download prices, for example. Even when we don’t necessarily pay directly for media products (encounters with advertising hoardings being one example, or songs heard over supermarket PAs or on commercial radio), we are encountering an economic chain in which the value and cost of the media arte-fact is in some way related to some other expenditure that we might make. Either way, payment has been entered into by the consumer with some kind of return on investment – hopefully a profit – expected by the producer.
• Third, we can consider media output as a site for the generation of meaning value: what media outputs say and how they speak, and what meanings output has for us as individuals and social beings. Meaning here refers to the ways in which we are affected psychologically, emotionally, culturally, physically and intellectually by media output: the way in which media forms entertain, stimulate, inform us – giving us pleasure, shock or food for thought.

When we study texts, we are interested in asking questions about meaning rather than the physical results of production, distribution and consumption, or the way that output is produced, marketed and sold as a commodity defined by its economic status. Of course, we should be aware of the way in which these three ways of labelling media output interact, but for now let us insist upon the distinction as a means of exploring the particularities of text and the construction and relay of meanings.

Here, the use of the term ‘text’, as distinct from ‘artefact’ and ‘commodity’, displays the debt owed by the field of media studies to English literature. In literary studies, texts are books, poems or plays, which are read and analysed in terms of the meanings derived from the selection and deployment of words alone. T...