This document discusses codes, conventions, and languages used in media to communicate meaning. It explains that technical codes like camera angles and lighting and symbolic codes like character dress and actions are used to construct meaning. It then defines different media languages including written, verbal, non-verbal, visual, and aural and provides examples. The document also discusses semiotics, denotation and connotation. It profiles theorists Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss and their work on structuralism and semiotics. Finally, it provides quotes from each theorist and briefly summarizes two music videos.

1. MEDIA LANGUAGES/ CODES AND
CONVENTIONS
BY EMILY AND CHARLOTTE

2. EXPLANATIONS…
Codes and conventions: A way of constructing meaning in media
texts to communicate ideas and impressions for an audience.
Technical codes include camera angles, sound and lighting (how
technology is used to create meaning). Symbolic codes include the
language, dress and actions of characters (mise-en-scene).
Media languages: This is how the media communicates to the
audience. There are different types of media languages which include
written, verbal, non-verbal, visual and aural.

3. Written Language
In print-based media, also in text such as captions for photographs. The language
chosen generates meaning. Captions allow the publication to present a story in a
particular way.
Verbal Language
In media areas such as television, radio and film. How the language is delivered
and its context used are important factors in the way meaning is generated for the
audience.
Non – Verbal Language
This is in terms of body language: gestures and actions. The meaning received by
the audience is seen through how the actor uses their body.
Visual Language
Television and film. What is on the screen has been chosen specifically to generate
a series of effects and meanings (semiotics). Specific camera angles and movement
are chosen to tell the story and meaning of that scene.

4. Aural Language
Diegetic/non-diegetic sound. Sound can help create a scene and construct the
environment, atmosphere and mood. The aural language of a media text can
also help us to define the genre of a piece.
Semiotics
The study of signs and symbols, discusses the literal and potential meanings.
There are two identified orders of signification, denotation and connotation.
Denotation
The literal or obvious meaning – description of what is physically seen or
heard.
Connotation
The potential or suggested meaning – for example a cross
(Christianity/maths/crucifix).

5. THEORISTS
Roland Barthes: Semiotics
• It‟s the study of signs, or of the social production of meaning by sign systems, of
how things come to have significance by meaning.
• Barthes was a French linguist who pioneered semiotic analyses of cultural and media
forms.
• First, a sign has physical form (words either in a form of marks on paper or sounds
in the air; a fingerprint or photo). This is called the signifier. A sign must be
understood as referring to something other than itself.
• This is called the signified and is a concept. For
example the word „ROSE‟ refers to the concept of a
certain kind of flower. Barthes would call it
„ROSENESS‟ to emphasize the distinction between
this concept, the signified, and the referent.
• Signs are only fully understood by reference to their
relationship to, or difference from, other signs in
their particular language system.

6. Structuralism is a set of early 20th century ideas and
positions which emphasized that meanings, whether
linguistic or anthropological can only be understood
within social or psychological.
Claude Levi-Strauss emphasized the importance of
structuring oppositions in myth systems and in and
THEORISTS
in language.

7. QUOTES
“Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which
is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all
classifications are oppressive.” (ROLAND BARTHES)
“Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which
man knows nothing.” (CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS)

8. MUSIC VIDEO
The Powder Paint fight
We thought that the powder paint fight was symbolic of the two groups coming
together. The lyrics didn‟t match the visuals but we liked the idea that the two groups
then came together after the fight as the lyrics go „sing along with the common people‟.
Supermarket
„I took her to the supermarket‟ – in this one we had matching lyrics and visuals as
there was someone pushing someone in a trolley who was lip synching.