5. Analysing Media Texts Using Semiotics
Semiotics is a way of analysing any media text to uncover the ways it creates meaning for its
target audience. Some key terms in semiotics are sign, code, denotation and
connotation.
Media texts, like the magazine ad below (from a charity’s campaign against verbal abuse),
can be made powerful and compelling.
If you’ve been to any recent film at a multiplex cinema with an ultra-wide screen and
surround Dolby 5.1 sound, you’ll have experienced how very realistic media companies can
now make their ‘representations’ of the world…
So believable, often, that it really does seem as if the media is able to offer us a ‘window on
the world’.
6. Semiotics provides important ways for you to be able to ‘deconstruct’ a
media text so you can work out how it is working on its target audience to
create particular meanings and feelings.
Sometimes, too, a media text will be working to create or reinforce a
particular way of viewing or thinking about the world.
Semioticians believe that when we, as humans, put ‘things’ together to
create some kind of meaning, we end up saying far more than simply
what the things in themselves ‘say’, that is, we create ‘codes of
meaning’. Sounds confusing? Read on…
Semioticians would say that a common and important ‘sign system’ is
the clothing we each use to cover our bodies. They say that clothing
means far more – in our culture – than merely to act as a body covering.
Instead, we use clothing as a series of meaningful signs that are placed
together to create an even more meaningful code, one that our
‘audience’ (i.e. those we dress to impress!) can ‘crack’ and so ‘read’ that
we are trying to say… ‘I’m cool’, ‘I’m a Goth’, ‘I’m a Hippy’... serious,
fashionable, clever… and perhaps most especially, that ‘I am an
individual’ and ‘…not poor’, ‘street wise’… and whatever else we deem
important to us in our society.
7. There are, in semiotics, many such ‘sign systems’: architecture, cosmetics,
home and office furnishings, restaurant menus, and so on.
In fact, ‘sign systems’ are all around us if we could but see and recognise
that we so often do not want to just denote literal meaning, we want to
connote ideas and feelings. Yet, those ‘sign systems’ are often not
noticeable simply because they seem so ordinary, so every day, so normal.
Think of these three signs: a teenage boy, a teenage girl, a red rose. Are
they gardeners or are they romantically attached?
Can you think up more ‘signs’ that work together to create ‘extra’ meaning
beyond the obvious? Here’s another to help you along: a man and a
woman in their late twenties; a child of three, a child of six months, a
swing, a garden, sunshine, blue sky…
What was the code? A happy family – a normal family… (but are all families
like this? Is it a genuine representation of reality)
Now over to you…
8. To recap: semiotics is the study of the way meaning is created within a particular culture or society… by
its various sign systems. It applies not only to media texts but to all kinds of human creations. It offers a
truly important way of deconstructing and analysing all kinds of media texts.
• A sign is defined as any single thing that creates separate meaning on its own. Signs usually
denote meaning when viewed individually.
• A code is defined as a collection or group of signs that seem – to us in our society or culture – to
‘go naturally together’ and thus to seem a part of a single thing that creates a larger meaning than the
individual signs from which it is made.
• The meaning created by a code is always greater than that of the individual signs from which it
is constructed (remember… romance is the meaning (and feeling!); the code is made up of a few signs: a
boy, a girl, a red rose… a smile, bright eyes, rosy cheeks… …
9.
10. • So, here you will need to apply Goodwin (Music
Video) or Rubiger (Documentary) and GENERIC
conventions
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16. Write an answer to this question in
preparation for your exam:
“Media texts can communicate to their
audiences in various ways.” Discuss the
ways in which Media Language has been
used within one of your productions.
