ARTS1090 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Roland Barthes, Miss Representation, Consumer Activism
6 May 2018
School
Course
Professor
2/05/18 UNSW notes | ARTS1090 Monique Munro
Media, Culture & Everyday Life
Week 9 notes
ARTS1090 Lecture
Semiotics: Representation and Meaning within media studies
• This lecture will:
- Introduce semiotics
- History
- Analyse different ways meaning is produced (linguistically, generally) - esp visually
- Show how the processes of meaning making are intrinsically involved in social and
cultural processes (polysemy, ideology)
- Discuss contemporary advertising and ideology in relation to branding and
advertising
• Assessment:
- Get your research right
- THE FOCUS: How we use the media rather than what the media does, the ways in
which media tech are used in everyday lives
- Basic skills in scholarly analysis
- Working with concepts (concept reflection)
- Basic research skills (to locate existing ideas)
- Ability to summarise and evaluate them ( think about their usefulness)
- Connecting your ideas to the existing scholarly literature (what's the way forward;
extending the ideas, understanding new examples)
• Assessment 1 - working with concepts
- Concept reflection goals
+ Always define the concept you are working with
+Always connect this to the way that other scholars have applied the term
+This sets up a framework for you won analysis (of the real world example)
+Based on you example/analysis can you extend or 'innovate' on the ideas of the current
scholars who write in the area?
• Assessment 2 - locating existing ideas
- Annotated bibliography
+Identifying academic research
+Identifying relevant scholarly literature to media studies and the course
+Media studies (looking at the way media became part of everyday life, impact culture,
beliefs and values, norms, institutions). What people do with media, rather than what
media does to them.
• Assessment 3 - evaluating existing ideas
- Literature review
+Within the discipline of media studies
+Everyday life
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
2/05/18 UNSW notes | ARTS1090 Monique Munro
+ Different from daily living, or the things you do everyday
+ People's subjective experiences of things, people's practices (patterns and routines,
rituals, sense-making behind what they do what they do), people are active agents (not
victims who are duped and controlled by the media).
+ Note: It is wrong to think the selfie is attached to narcissism. Moreso about representing
themselves in a variety of contexts across media. Look more at the subjective experience of
representing the self within the context of media
• Literature review
- What is the existing knowledge about how your topic area relates to media and
everyday life
- In other words (what are the patterns and routines, rituals, discourses, experiences
and mediations) that go on around the topic
- Not an essay, no need for arguments
- Location-based gaming
- Television viewing and social media
- Taking selfies
- Moral panics around contemporary media
• Assessment 3 - evaluating existing ideas - take stock of existing ideas
- A literature review is not an essay - it is a normal component of a research
paper http://www.citewrite.qut.edu.au/write/litreview.jsp
- Making connections, synthesizing, analysing
- Can refer to any article from any date, any idea as long as it relates
• The goal of a lit review is:
- Determine what has already been written about a topic
- Give an overview of key concepts
- Evaluate the usefulness of this research for understanding media and everyday life
- Identify any gaps in the existing knowledge (eg. Real world examples that could be
studied? Changes around that media that have been studied?)
• Semiotics: the science of signs
- Ferdinand de Saussure (course in general linguistics 1916).
- Ferdinand = father of semiotics he wrote a book on linguistics - he taught linguistics.
Meaning is just not a process within the brain is what he said. Meaning is a
complicated process.
- Meaning and communication is not that easy, we are more likely to miscommunicate
and misunderstand
- Qs about meaning - are of media.
- Semiotics literally means the systematic study of the science of signs.
- Methodology
- Semiotics is the study of how signs produce meaning and by extension the processes
by which we understand, make sense of and socially organise the world.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Semiotics: representation and meaning within media studies: this lecture will: Analyse different ways meaning is produced (linguistically, generally) - esp visually. Show how the processes of meaning making are intrinsically involved in social and cultural processes (polysemy, ideology) Discuss contemporary advertising and ideology in relation to branding and advertising: assessment: The focus: how we use the media rather than what the media does, the ways in which media tech are used in everyday lives. Basic research skills (to locate existing ideas) Ability to summarise and evaluate them ( think about their usefulness) Connecting your ideas to the existing scholarly literature (what"s the way forward; extending the ideas, understanding new examples: assessment 1 - working with concepts. + always define the concept you are working with. +always connect this to the way that other scholars have applied the term. +this sets up a framework for you won analysis (of the real world example)
