This week, we discussed more in depth about semiotics and different levels of meaning in media and media messages.Semiotics can be deifined as a study of signs, but can also be applied to all sorts of human endeavors, eg. Cinema, Theaters, paintings, politics etc.
We use a variety of gestures to signify a sign. We need to think of texts as a system of signs. Which gain their effect via the constant clashes between these systems. For example, everybody knows what hand signs mean when driving when a garda flags you to move on, or stop. Or even when we are playing sport, like football, when the referee signals different hand gestures, we know what he is doing, it is something basic, but its because we have learned these over time, that it becomes instinctive. But with that being said, different cultures have different values, and one gesture may mean another in different countries, or what a person has grown up and learned through a different background.
Written texts involve the sequence of letters and words, images involve arrangement of shapes and colours. Music involves the composition of sound, but ultimately they all can be regarded as amalgamations of signs.
An example of how signs can be perceived differently is in the videos we watched, of "Mary Popins" and "The Shining", where they had been edited to be the exact opposite of the original movies, eg. Mary Popins was edited to be a horror movie, and The Shining had been made to look like a happy romcom style of movie, just by using editing techniques, the style and story were drastically changed and no outside footage had been used other that the original shots from each movie. The use of music/editing/narration/imagery/cuts, can be very misleading, this is due to the semiotics.
The successful communication of meaning is reliant on shared societal systems of understanding.
Levels of meaning can be seen in two ways:
Denotative: refers to the most immediate level of meaning eg, what a dictionary would do. It is what it is, and cannot be argued. A photo of a street is a photo of a street, but there are so many signifiers and representations within this photo, that to someone who is looking at it may have a memorable meaning, and may possess emotion to the picture, based on there feelings and memories of that particular street, which leads us to:
Connotative: This is the second order, associated meanings. They are more likely to be culturall specific, like what I just discussed about the photo of the street.
The communication is unlikely to be successful unless the audience is well versed in the particular cultural conventions by which they operate.
We discussed Paradigms & Syntagms.
Pardigm: is a vertical set of units, from which the required one is selected.
Syntagm: is the horizontal chain into which units are linked, according to the agreed rules and conventions, to make a meaning whole.
An example of this, is the classic... A terrorist bombed a government building this morning. There are so many cultural specifics in that sentence. Substitute, "Terrorist" with the word "Freedom-Fighter", then the sentence has completely new meaning. Just like taking out the "this morning" part of the text, then we have no time boundaries and are unknown to the time that this event took place. There are many substitutions that can be made to any text, to give it a whole new meaning. This is something that, as a media analysist, I am learning to become aware of.
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