When the media was first seriously studied in the 1950's, much of the criticism was simply based on what was 'good' or 'convincing'. It didn't analyse how the product was put together, nor how we, as an audience understood it. Remember: the media is not a real thing, it is a reflection of a reality around us. The producer has chosen how to structure the product. The most obvious example is Big Brother. It is presented to us as a live programme about real people, however one of the major criticisms about this show from the people who feature in it or indeed the viewers is that it is edited and therefore structured in a certain way by the editor/producer to influence what the audience think about a character or a situation. Obviously: as the media is a construct – it is constructed or made by someone. It is impossible not to influence the audience in some way: by leaving a camera in the room running, you have still made a decision about where to place the camera and therefore influencing how the viewer of that film will see that room. So, Structuralism and semiology were used to analyse how media products and their meanings were constructed by producers and deconstructed by the viewers. Semiotics or semiology was initially the study into the meanings of language by Saussure. Saussure was interested in how we understood one another by using language. For example, take the word 'cat'. When I say that word, you imagine a furry creature with 4 legs which purrs although the word that I say has nothing to do with the furry thing. Obviously, if I said this to someone who didn't speak English they would not understand that this combination of sounds meant a furry thing which purrs. So, at some point, groups of people/societies decide to agree that certain combinations of sound stand for or signify objects or reality. Language is our way of making meaning of the world around us. Language reflects the world. The word 'cat' is a sign: it stands for or signifies the creature. The word itself has nothing to do with the creature itself, the word 'cat' is an arbitrary sign. The sign 'cat' can also mean independent/ bitchy/sneaky/untrustworthy. Many words have a range of meanings which depend on the speaker of that sign and their intended meaning as well as the audience. Think of the times that you may have misunderstood someone’s intended meaning. They
are polysemic - many meanings. The meaning therefore depends on the mode of address – how we communicate and who we are intending to communicate to. You wouldn’t speak to the principal of city college in the same way that you speak to your friend. Roland Barthes expanded on Saussure's work and applied it to all artefacts of communication not just speech and the written word. He analysed Citroen cars and wrestling and food…Barthes claimed that everything was a signifier – for example, the way we wear our hair communicates something about us. It signifies what we want people to think about our personality/character. These different elements of communication are known as codes, as they stand for something else. We learn to encode and to read those codes (decode). These codes follow a set of rules determined by our society in order for us to understand one another and this set of rules is called the convention. Codes and conventions follow structures in society. The study of how humans use structure (social or psychological) to organise themselves/make meaning was explored by Marx (social structure - economic life is structured in a way which determines political sympathies) and Freud (psychological structure- the human mind makes us act in ways we are not aware). Social anthropology is the study of how humans organise themselves in society. Levi-Strauss: binary oppositions - the rules and the tension, vital. With language, to know what 'cat' means you have to know what it doesn't mean as well (dog).