Understanding Media Semiotics

Marcel Danesi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350064188
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Media semiotics is a valuable method of focusing on the hidden meanings within media texts. This new edition brings Understanding Media Semiotics fully up to date and is written for students of the media, of linguistics and those interested in studying the ever-changing media in more detail. Offering an in-depth guide to help students investigate and understand the media using semiotic theory, this book assumes little previous knowledge of semiotics or linguistics, avoiding jargon and explaining the issues step by step. With in-depth case studies, practical accounts and directed further reading, Understanding Media Semiotics provides students with all the tools they need to understand semiotic analysis in the context of the media. Semiotic analysis is sometimes seen as complicated and difficult to understand; Marcel Danesi shows that on the contrary it can be readily understood and can greatly enrich students' understanding of media texts, from print media right through to the internet and apps.

Chapter 1

The mediated world

The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.

—Ernst Fischer (1899–1972)

In his often-intriguing lectures, the late Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) would be wont to warn his students at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s that the media to which they were exposed on a daily basis constituted a blessing and a curse at the same time. While the mass media, delivered on all kinds of platforms from radios to smartphones, do in fact make information more available and accessible to larger and larger groups of people, McLuhan argued well before the advent of the Internet, that the media also engender a general feeling of alienation and “disembodiment” in people. Several decades after his death, it has become obvious to virtually everyone that McLuhan’s caveat was well-founded. Our modern mediated world is indeed a two-edged sword. The “disembodiment” that McLuhan warned about just a few decades ago has, seemingly, become widespread, at the same time that more and more people gain access to information that was once the privilege of the few.

How did this come about? Do the media moguls of the world truly control the minds and souls of common people (as intimated by the James Bond movie mentioned in the introduction to this book), brainwashing them into submission day in day out with the resources of the “distraction factory,” as the cultural critic Goodwin (1992) calls the global media entertainment industry? Are the new “robber barons” the CEOs of media empires such as the Disney Corporation, Time Warner, General Electric, AOL, Google, Apple, and Yahoo, who now own and distribute a lot of what people see and hear? Clearly, these are important questions for all of us who live in the mediascape—the world as presented through and by the mass media. But these questions can hardly be answered in a simplistic way.

The distraction factory was not built overnight. It is a product of technological and historical forces. So, the logical point of departure on the road to answering such questions is to cast an initial glance at some of those forces. That is the first of the two main objectives of this opening chapter. The second one is to delineate some of the basic semiotic notions that will guide us on our journey through the contemporary mediascape in subsequent chapters.

What is a medium?

Before the advent of alphabets, people communicated and passed on knowledge through the spoken word. But even in early “oral cultures,” tools had been invented for recording and preserving ideas in durable physical forms. The forms were invariably pictographic—a pictograph is a picture representing something in the world or in the mind. So intuitive and functional is pictography that it comes as little surprise to find that it has not disappeared from our own world, even though most of our written communication is based on the alphabet. The figures designating male and female on washrooms and the no-smoking signs found in public buildings, to mention but two common examples, are modern-day pictographs.

Pictography is a perfect example of what a medium (in Latin medius “middle or between”) is—a means of recording ideas on some surface (a cave wall, a piece of wood, papyrus) with appropriate technology (a carving tool, pigment, a stylus). More generally, a medium can be defined as the physical means by which some system of “signs” (pictographs, alphabet characters, etc.) for recording ideas can be actualized.

Pictography did not alter the basic oral nature of daily communication, nor did it alter the oral mode of transmitting knowledge in early societies. That occurred after the invention of alphabetic writing around 1000 BCE—an event that brought about the first radical change in world order. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) called such radical changes “paradigm shifts” (1970). The move away from pictographic to alphabetic writing was, to use Kuhn’s appropriate term, the first great paradigm shift of human history, since it constituted the initial step toward the establishment of a worldwide civilization. Simply put, alphabetic writing made print the first viable global medium for storing and exchanging ideas and knowledge.

The second step in the establishment of a worldwide civilization was taken in the fifteenth century after the development of movable-type technology—an event that made it possible to print and duplicate books cheaply. McLuhan designated the type of world order that ensued from that technological event, the “Gutenberg Galaxy,” after Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1400–68), the German printer who invented movable type in Europe. The Gutenberg Galaxy did indeed, as McLuhan pointed out, establish printed books as the primary tools for recording and preserving information and knowledge. But it did more than that. It also established cheaply produced books as the first true “mass distraction” devices of history. And, indeed, to this day we read books not only for educational or reference purposes, but also to while away our leisure hours.

The third step toward the founding of a worldwide civilization was taken at the start of the twentieth century, after advancements in electronic technology established sound recordings, cinema, radio, and (a little later) television as new media for communicating information and, above all else, for providing distraction to larger and larger masses of people. Since electronic signals can cross borders virtually unimpeded, McLuhan characterized the world that was being united by electronic media as the “global village.” To paraphrase the perceptive Canadian scholar, that world can be designated as the “Electronic Galaxy.” Near the end of the twentieth century, the fourth step toward establishing a worldwide civilization was taken right after computers became widely available and the Internet emerged as a truly global mass medium. In line with the terminological style established by McLuhan, the current world can thus be called the “Digital Galaxy.”

The academic study of the mass media and that of the mediascape traces its roots to America in the 1930s. It was not until the late 1950s, however, that the study of the connection between the mass media, pop culture, and social changes emerged on the academic landscape, right after the publication of McLuhan’s pivotal 1951 book, The Mechanical Bride. McLuhan warned his readers that the media to which they were exposed on a daily basis reshaped their minds. Media affect the brain because they provide environments for transmitting knowledge and information that directly influence how the brain executes its activities. The Russian Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1978) referred to this feature of the brain as its plasticity. McLuhan (1964: 300) put it perceptively as follows: “Environments are not ju st containers, but are processes that change the content totally.”

Representation

The process of recording ideas, knowledge, or messages in some physical way is called representation in various disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and semiotics. In terms of the latter, this can be defined more precisely as the use of “signs” (pictures, sounds, etc.) to relate, depict, portray, or reproduce something perceived, sensed, imagined, or felt via some physical form—a word, a story, a painting, and so on. It can be characterized as the process of constructing a form X to call attention to something that exists either materially or conceptually, Y, in some specific way, or X = Y for short. Figuring out the meaning of X = Y is not, however, a simple task. The intent of the form-maker, the historical and social contexts in which the form was made, the purpose for which it was made, and so on and so forth, are complex factors that enter into the picture. The purpose of semiotics is to study those very factors. In order to carry out this task systematically, it has established a distinct terminology and a set of principles. As will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, in semiotics the actual physical form of a representation, X, is generally called the signifier; the meaning or meanings, Y, that it generates (obvious or not) is called the signified; and the kinds of meanings that can potentially be extracted from the representation (X = Y), in a specific cultural ambiance, is called signification. There are other ways to designate these features of representation; but for now these will suffice.

As an example of what representation entails, consider the action of kissing someone on the lips (known as osculation) to convey romantic love. Romantic love is something that exists in the world as a biological and emotional reality, but its expression through osculation does not, even in today’s global village (Danesi 2013). In the semiotic theory of representation romantic love is called a referent, because it is something to which we desire to refer in some way as it “presents itself” to our consciousness through our senses, emotions, and intellect. Now, as a referent, it can be represented (literally “presented again”) in some physical form constructed on purpose. And that is where kissing comes into the picture as a signifier. For example, in modern-day Anglo-European cultures, the representation of romantic love through osculation can be realized with such signifiers as: (1) a photograph of two people who are obviously in love with each other engaged in kissing romantically; (2) a poem describing metaphorically various physical and emotional responses to kissing; or (3) a romantic movie depicting the physical action of kissing in a close-up. The meanings that each captures will vary somewhat, although they will converge around a basic semantic nucleus that comes from cultural convention. These constitute the signifieds of romantic love. Note that these are built into each signifier not only by its maker, but also by certain preexisting notions relative to the culture in which the signifier was made. Representations of romantic love in, say, London are likely to be different from representations of the same referent that tend to be made, for instance, in traditional tribal cultures. Moreover, the medium used to portray the referent also shapes the signified. Photographs can show fairly limited views of the referent, whereas movies can provide much more graphic detail of the kissing action. Finally, the ways in which people living in London, Calcutta, or San Francisco will derive meaning from the above representations will vary. This is because they have become accustomed in their specific cultures to different signification systems that underlie perceptions of romantic love and its kiss representations.

There is no way to pin down the meanings of a sign or to predict what system of signification will be employed for figuring out precisely what a particular representation (X = Y) will mean to specific people. The process of deriving meaning from some representation is not a completely open-ended one, however. It is constrained by social conventions, by communal experiences, and by many other contextual factors that put limits on the range of meanings that are possible in a given situation. A task of semiotic analysis is to figure out what that range is. That aspect of semiotic methodology is known as interpretation, as pointed out in the introduction.

Throughout this book little difference will be made between the medium used to construct a representation and the representation itself. So, for instance when a term such as print medium is used in this text, it can refer exclusively or jointly to: (1) the physical elements that are used to produce print signifiers (pictographs, alphabet characters), (2) the types of signifieds that these allow people to encode (words, texts, etc.), and (3) the physical materials used (paper, papyri, etc.) to make print representations.

Transmission

Representation is not the same as transmission. The former refers, as we have just discussed, to the depiction of something in some specific way; the latter refers instead to the delivery, transfer, broadcasting, or communication of a message in some sensory-based way:

Sensory modality	Examples
Auditory-vocal	Vocal speech, singing, whistling, crying, and so on
Visual	Pictography, sign languages for the hearing-impaired, drawings, and so on
Tactile	Braille for visually impaired or sightless people (in which varied arrangements of raised dots representing letters and numerals are identified by touch), alphabetic toy blocks used to impart familiarity with letter shapes through touch, and so on
Olfactory	Perfumes and colognes, religious incense, and so on
Gustatory	Chemical ingredients in food that attempt to reproduce certain natural tastes, and so on

At a purely biological level, a message can be received successfully (i.e., recognized as a message) by another species only if it possesses the same kind of sensory modality used to transmit it. Of these, the tactile modality is the one that seems to cut across human and animal sensory-transmission systems. There is no doubt in my mind that my cat and I enter into a rudimentary form of tactile communication on a daily basis. Sharing the same living space, and being codependent on each other for affective exchanges, we do indeed transmit our feeling-states to each other by sending out body signals and especially by touching each other. However, even within the confines of this versatile transmission-communicative modality, there is no way for me to convey a broader range of feeling-states to my cat that are implied by words such as embrace, guide, hold, kiss, tickle, and so on. Clearly, interspecies communication is realizable, but only in a very restricted sense. It can occur in some modalities, partially or totally, to various degrees according to species. If the sensory systems of the two species are vastly different, however, then virtually no message transmission is possible.

Representations can also be transmitted through technology, that is, through some artifact or invention. Early societies developed simple tools for transmitting messages, such as drums, fire and smoke signals, and lantern beacons, so that they could be seen or heard over short distances. Messages were also attached to the legs of carrier pigeons trained to navigate their way to a destination and back home. In later societies, so-called semaphore systems of flags or flashing lights, for example, were employed to send messages over relatively short but difficult-to-cross distances, such as from hilltop to hilltop, or from one ship to another at sea.

A tool is an artifact that extends some sensory, physical, or intellectual capacity. An ax extends the power of the human hand to break wood; the wheel of the human foot to cover great distances; and so on and so forth. For the sake of scientific accuracy, it should be mentioned that tool-making is itself an outgrowth of bipedalism—the capacity to walk with an erect posture on two legs. Fossils discovered in Africa provide evidence that hominids walked erect and had a bipedal stride even before the great increase in their brain size millions of years ago. Complete bipedalism freed the human hand, allowing it to become a supremely sensitive limb for precise manipulation and grasping. The erect posture gave rise to the subsequent evolution of the physiological apparatus for speech, since it brought about the lowering and positioning of the larynx for controlled breathing.

McLuhan (1964) claimed that the type of technology developed to record and transmit messages determines how people process and remember them. Human beings are endowed by nature to de...