Roland Barthes was a 20th century French theorist who was influential in developing structuralism and semiotics. He argued that all cultural forms are composed of signs and that analyzing the relationships between signs, as well as how they are organized and interpreted, reveals the underlying ideologies encoded within texts. Barthes believed that meaning is created not by producers but by active audiences. He explored how myths, narratives, and representations in media can naturalize particular perspectives and potentially mask reality by analyzing the semiotics and structures within cultural forms.