reading media texts journal

this week we learned how semiotics can be used to analyse film. we looked at some still images and some moving sequences to decipher what information they are giving us. what i find interesting is that we barely realise the information we are interpreting from a film until we stop to really think how it is that we have come to know that. it is so ingrained into our everyday thinking and into our signage system that we barely notice that we notice it. for example, from the big chill clip we watched in class today we could figure out that a particular woman was a housewife and that she was rich. it seems so simple but the way we know that is because she is sitting in a house, with a fancy tea set and a polo sweater on. it is such a part of our cultural literacy that i have some trouble even recognising its relevance. its almost like asking “how do we know this is a man, how do we know this is a woman?”. that a man has a penis and a woman has a vagina is so linked to out idea of man and woman that we dont really need to think about it, it just is.
but then i guess you get to more complex things, where things represent other things- like the absolut homage ad we analysed today.(you can see it herevodka the ad features an absolut bottle with martini glasses bent over towards the bottle. at first we read the bottle as a god, and the glasses as its disciples, bowing down to it. i read the spotlight on the bottle as elevating it to rockstar status, and the glasses were its groupies. then lisa suggested maybe it had something to do with sex and we saw that the bottle was quite a phallic symbol and the glasses quite feminine, begging for the bottle to “fill me up” (as one guy said in the tute! haha) the dark colouring and the spotlight certainly alludes to this kind of night-time night-clubbish behaviour. i found it interesting just how much can be read into something that seems so obvious at first, and leads me to the author as god debate. it seems to me sometimes that we read too much into things- some things are simply not intended to mean much at all, and i wonder if there is any point reading so far into them. i know im getting all “whats the meaning of life” but really, if you have to try so hard to find a meaning in something, is it worth finding? and what value does it have? if it not intended to be read that way (author as god style), then does it really have relevance to anything?
i think that sometimes it is useful to read past and deeper than the authors intention and find meaning that is important to you, but sometimes it seems it is just a wanky waste of time…

we talked about langue and parole in both lecture and tute this week. this idea came from the structuralists.
langue is defined as a system, and parole is defined as the way the system is used. we also thought that “langue” may be ale to be used interchangably with “conventions”.
for example, the langue could be the english language and the parole would be grammar, pronounciation etc.
we worked on an example in class where we took a film genre and described its langue, and then took a film and examined how it used the langue (the parole).
im gonna try this again with something different, something perhaps closer to my area of study, a corporate brochure. the langue for a corporate brochure includes the following:
folded a4 or a3 paper
heading/s
sub heading/s
informational text
logo
imagery (not always but common)
contact details

it is the way in which the designer uses these conventions that makes the brochure interesting or not. depending on the combination and relationships with all the other signs the brochure may be anything from a black and white word printout to a full on superslick production. here we get back to the semiotics- the brochure depends on all the signs working with or against each other to create a full system (the brochure).

similary, food packaging displays a langue and parole:
something that encloses the food
the name of the food
a description of the item (an example from my fridge- rev, low fat milk)
a clear area where the food can be viewed
the nutritional information
the ingredients
the use by date
the company who produces the food

however, i can think of a few situations in which the langue is not used in the parole.
imported food often does not have the same types of information printed on it- some does not have nutritional information, some do not have description of the item.
also, some food stuffs do not have a peephole where you can see the food. for example, a type of muesli bar that i often buy is completely enclosed in card and cannot be seen (you can see the pic of the package here, on the products page). i am not sure if this means that “a clear area where the food can be viewed” is not in fact part of the langue, or if it means the langue is being subverted.
actually, no i come to think of it, i can think of a number of foods that do not have a peephole in them. my milk, my muesli bars. i am not sure how common something has to be to be defined as part of the langue.

EDIT 18/3
i showed this to jenny and she said

I am not entirely sure that you understand the lange/parole distinction. Parole is an instance of langue. Langue is a system. Eg the langue of English includes the vocabulary, grammar, syntax, everything that goes into the system. This email is parole, an instance of langue.

so i need to think about it again at some time

i actually ended up reading this before i began the course, because id looked in the tute notes and had no idea what semiology was. i feel *sort of comfortable with the idea: semiotics is the “science of signs”.
in the tute we discussed what a sign is. we decided that a sign is anything which has meaning. a gesture, an image, a facial expression etc. in my mind they were almost exactly identical to texts, and i said so. the general consensus was that a sign is different to a text because a text can constitute many signs, whereas a sign is a singular thing. a sign is the building block of a text, i noted. but i still dont really understand the difference.
“’semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all of these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification’ (Barthes 1967, 9). ” (this quote is taken from the website mentioned earlier).
it is a system of relationships of between signs. Signs do not have an inherent meaning, they are defined by what is around them. you cannot construct a meaningful sentence without many words which create a kind of context for all the other words in the sentence. none of the words make sense without any of the other words. this Shakspeare quote from romeo and juliet came to mind in the lecture:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.”
it seems to me (and i am possibly completely wrong) that this sentence sums up semiotics to me. it is saying there is a system of signs which connects the word “rose” to the idea of the smell and appearance of a rose (i think this is the signified, signifier thing), but that without that everything in the system is reliant upon everything else in the system. a rose WOULD smell the same if it was named something else because it relies on the system of signs around it, not in the name itself.

context i something i seem to be able to grasp a little more easily, for some reason.
my notes from the class say that context is the situation (place and time) in which a text is “read”. context is constantly changing, from minute to minute, person to person.
The example we used in class really got through to me, so i will try to elaborate on it and then give my own example a go.
in the example from class the text was WW2. we looked at how the same text could have a different meaning, depending on which context it was placed in. first we watched 2 film previews for films about WW2 that were made when WW2 was just beginning. the films starred big-named actors. they were propaganda films to make people feel positive about the war, like a pep talk. in this context the text (WW2) was read as a huge, manly adventure for brave, handsome and smart guys.
the next film was made after the war and was about a former fighter pilot who had been to war and was surveying a “graveyard” of fighter planes. the mood of the film is solemn, reflective and sad. in this context, the war is seen as a burden this man must shoulder for the rest of his life. in this context, the war is something which has negatively affected people.
we watched some more films after that but i think these two examples really give the gist of it. in different times and places the same text can have a different meaning. different attitudes, experiences and knowledge evolve with time and differ from place to place, so the one text can be viewed in myriad way. while the text remains essentially as the same “thing”, it can be read differently depending on who and where (space and time) we are (ie, the war will be seen “through different eyes” from country to country, military to civilian, one century to the next etc).
i will try another example…i will try a quite traditional text to give me more of a feel for it.
“a clockwork orange”
in this case, making it a bit more complicated, the text is actually 2 texts, originally a book by anthony burgess, and then a film directed by stanley kubrick. but for this i guess we’ll just stick with the film.
when the film was first released it drew a lot of controversy. the film contains a lot of violence and sexual violence.
in the UK for the film was hard to see for 27 years because of how controversial its violent scenes and ideas were.
in the US people were accused of copycat crimes and 30 seconds of the film had to be replaced with something less extreme to get the rating from X to R.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_%28film%29#Responses_and_controversy)
these days though, the film is a cult favourite. while the film has not changed, the context has, and peoples reaction and reading of it has changed. people no longer see it as a senselessly violent film, they see it as commentary on institutions, society and control. another interesting point is the violence itself- the lvel of violence remains the same yet people have a much more subdued response to it because as time has passed we have been desensitised against violence- we see ultra-real violence in movie and on television and the shock factor that people must have experienced when the film came out is no longer the same.

the last few days have been the first time ive ever really thought about text and context. pretty stupid really that im a commdesign student…but anyway it means i have a lot to take in, a lot to try and understand.
ill start by trying to explain to myself what i think we learned yesterday.

TEXT

from what i gathered from the lecture, and our kind of confusing tute yesterday is that a text can be anything at all, as long as a meaning can be derived from it. Rebecca Hills definition was “any type of practice that is meaningful”. so here i find it gets difficult, because i would intuitively think of a text as an object, a thing, not something intangible like a smile, or faith, for example.
i will try to unpack a couple of examples for myself to make this less mysterious to me.
to use the examples from class, a text can be something as straightforward as a newspaper, a book, a poem, or can be as abstract as a plant, food or religion. this seems simple enough.
lets use the newspaper as an example-i interpret the information in the newspaper so it has a meaning to me. i can find out whats happening in the world, i can find out what paris hilton is wearing today and who won the football and those sort of FACTS. but i can also get more information from it that is not so obvious (or is so obvious you dont even notice- ie cultural literacy)- for example- say i see someone reading The Age newspaper. what meaning does it have?
i am probably in melbourne
i am probably in an english speaking country
the person reading it is probably educated
so, by the word meaning, do we actually mean clues? and would The Age have a (different) meaning if it was being read by a different person in a different CONTEXT?
in class, we used another, more abstract example of a text- a clock.
how does a clock have meaning? it defines things, it provides information, it has an aesthetic, it is designed. this is a bit challenging for me, so i will try my on example and see what i can get.
food. how does food have meaning? it may show what country you are in, it has been designed (thought about), it may be packaged (which offers other meanings), it may be restaurant food or a packet of chips, it might tell what sort of diet you have (ie, vegetarian, vegan etc).
i think i might be getting the hang of this?