Media Theorists

Here are just three theorists and an overview of their theories. Try to find out about at least 10 - 15 media theories for G325 Question 1 (a) and (b) and have them at your fingertips for the exam. Remember - you must apply them to your own work.

Roland Barthes:
Roland Barthes concentrated some of his work on a discussion of how myth operates in society and he discussed this in the context of denotation and connotation.
Connotation and denotation are often described in terms of levels of representation or levels of meaning.
Denotation - the literal, 'obvious' or 'commonsense' meaning of an image.
Connotation - is used to refer to the socio-cultural and 'personal' associations (ideological, emotional etc.) of the image. These are typically related to the interpreter's class, age, gender, ethnicity and so on. Images are more open to interpretation - in their connotations than their denotations. 

Stuart Hall:
Stuart Hall suggests that there are three different positions that the reader of a text can occupy when trying to interpret a text, they are:

Preferred Reading is when the reader fully shares the text's codes and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading i.e. the most dominant reading. 

Negotiated Reading is when the reader partly shares the text's codes and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests - this position involves contradictions.

Oppositional Reading is when the reader, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred reading but does not share the text's code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference (radical, feminist etc.).

In this instance a 'code' can be interpreted as what a text says.

Ferdinand de Saussure:
Semiotics is the study of the social production of meaning from sign systems. Saussure stated that a sign could be made up of something which physically resembles the object in some way (icon), or has a direct link between it and its object, it is somehow connected i.e. smoke indicates fire (index) or it can be something with no resemblance at all and it communicates only because people agree that it shall stand for what it does (symbol). 

The reading of a sign is determined by cultural experience of the reader. Semiotics pays great attention to the role of the reader in realising and producing meanings out of texts.

Useful web link:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html