An image appearing as a work of art in a museum takes on quite a different meaning when it is reproduced in an adver- tisement. We are trained to read for cultural codes signifying gendered, racial, or class-specific meanings.
The creation of meaning in any given image is thus derived from many different factors, both within and in the context of the image. Here, the image of trees in the shape of a lung constructs a message about deforestation that combines several signs to create a visual impact. The lush, green quality of the meadows and trees signifies aliveness, fertility, and life, and the shape of the trees will be read by most viewers as evoking the shape of the human lungs.
The combination of these signs, forest as life and forest as lungs, makes a connection between the trees and the capacity of the planet to breathe.
A disease or cancer of the earth is suggested: the earth will increasingly have trouble breathing. Importantly, the ad does this through visual codes, rather than the use of text. Our interpretation of this image as one of interlocking signs uses semiotics to describe an interpretative process that we use every day. We use many tools to interpret images and we often use these tools automatically.
As such, semiotics names the kind of image interpretation that we do all the time without thinking too much about it. In images, meaning is often derived through the combination of text and image. We can see this at work in this anti-smoking ad that plays FIG. The cowboy is featured on horseback or just. It is testimony to the power of these ads to create the sign of Marlboro as masculinity and the Marlboro Man as connoting a lost ideal of masculinity that many contemporary Marlboro ads dispense with the cowboy altogether and simply show the landscape, in which this man exists by implication.
This ad campaign also testifies to the ways in which objects become gendered through advertising. Indeed, the Marlboro Man has long been appropriated as a camp icon in gay male culture. Our understand- ing of the Marlboro ad and its spoof is dependent on our knowledge that cowboys are disappearing from the American landscape, that they are cultural symbols of a particular ideology of American expansionism and the frontier that began to fade with urban industrialization and modernization.
We bring to these images cultural knowledge of the changing role of men and the recognition that it indicates a fading stereotype of masculine virility. Peirce described three kinds of signs or representations: iconic, indexical, and symbolic. Many paintings and draw- ings are iconic, as are many comics, photographs, and film and television images.
Her personal life is caught up in the violent changes in Iranian society. In this image, she depicts herself as a young girl who, with her classmates, has been obliged to wear a veil to school. In stark black and white, the veils command visual attention within the frame. Satrapi uses. These strategies of framing, motif, and the flattening of space here, the girls are situated against a blank background are used to depict character and psychology.
Yet their facial expressions establish that they are all responding in different ways annoyance, dejection, compliance. The veil has also been used in popular media to promote the image of the Muslim woman as a positive and empowered figure, and not simply as an object of oppression.
In this depiction, the burka is a symbol of the integrity, strength, and empower- ment Jiya embodies as a Muslim woman. Unlike iconic signs, which typically resemble their objects, symbolic signs, according to Peirce, bear no obvious relationship to their objects. For example, languages are symbolic systems that use conventions to establish meaning. There is no natural link between the word cat and an actual cat; language conventions derived from Latin, Germanic, and Old English roots give the word its signification.
Symbolic signs are inevitably more restricted in their capacity to convey meaning in that they refer to learned systems. Someone who does not speak English, Dutch, or German will probably recognize an image of a cat an iconic sign , whereas the word cat a symbolic sign may have no obvious mean- ing.
Our earlier point that meanings are always contextual is well illustrated by the U. This means that they have coexisted in the same place at some time. Some examples of indexical signs include the symptom of a disease, a pointing hand, and a weathervane.
Fingerprints are indexical signs of a person, and, impor- tantly, photographs are indexical signs that testify to the moment that the camera was in the presence of its subject. Indeed, although photographs are both iconic and indexical, their cultural meaning is derived in large part from their indexical meaning as a trace of the real. The indexical quality of photographs is a key factor of their cultural value and power.
As we noted earlier, the myth of photographic truth is related to this indexical quality. The Robert Frank photograph discussed earlier Fig. Images and Ideology To explore the meaning of images is to recognize that they are produced within dynamics of social power and ideology.
Images are an important site through which ideologies, as systems of belief, are produced. When we think of ideology, we may think of propaganda—the crude process of using false representations to lure people into holding beliefs that may compromise their own interests. This understanding of ideology assumes that to act ideologically is to act out of ignorance. In this use, the term ideology is pejorative. However, contemporary theorists see ideology as a much more pervasive, mundane process in which we all engage and about which.
In this book we define ideologies as the broad but indispensable shared sets of values and beliefs through which individuals live out their complex relations in a range of social networks. Ideologies are widely varied and intersect at all levels of all cultures, from religions to politics to fashion choices.
Our ideologies are diverse and ubiquitous; they inform our everyday lives in often subtle and barely noticeable forms. One could say that ideology is the means by which certain values—for example, individual freedom, progress, or the impor- tance of family and home—are made to seem natural.
Ideology is manifested in widely shared social assumptions not only about the way things are but also about the way things should be. Images and media representations are some of the forms through which we engage or enlist others to share certain views or not.
Practices of looking are intimately tied to ideology. The image culture in which we live is an arena of diverse and often conflicting ideologies. Images are elements of contemporary advertising and consumer culture through which assumptions about beauty, desire, glamour, and social value are both constructed and lived. Contemporary artists often critique dominant ideologies. The most powerful aspect of ideologies is that they appear to be natural or given, rather than part of a belief system that a culture produces to function in a particular way.
Visual culture is not just representation of ideologies and power relations. It is integral to their production. Ideologies permeate the world of entertain- FIG. They also permeate the more mundane Matthew Brady, carte de visite realms of life that we do not usually associate photograph of U.
Cavalry Major General George Armstrong with the word culture: science, education, med- Custer, icine, law. Images are used, as we dis- cuss in further chapters, for the identification and classification of people, as evidence of dis- ease in medicine, and as courtroom evidence. Photography has been a medium through which individual, family, and national values have been affirmed and through which citizens have been categorized and regulated by the state.
Shortly after photography was developed in early nineteenth-century Europe, private citizens began hiring photographers to make individual and family portraits. Portraits often.
One widespread early use of photography was to incorporate the image into a carte de visite, or visiting card. These small cards were used by many middle- and upper-class people in European and American societies as calling cards featuring photographic portraits of themselves.
In addition, in the late nineteenth century there was a craze of purchasing cartes de visite of famous people, such as the British royal family. This practice signaled the role that photo- graphic images would play in the construction of celebrity throughout the twentieth century. This carte de visite of U. Thus, in the nineteenth-century carte de visite, the photographic portrait affirmed individuality and integrated pho- tography into bourgeois life and its values. They are crucial to what we remember, but they can also enable us to forget those things that were not photographed.
With digital imaging, photogra- FIG. But the reason is not that the camera does not need to be in the same place as the object it depicts it does, unless we are speaking of a sim- ulation. Rather, it is that we have become so used to the possibilities for creative manipulation of loca- tion, proximity, and historical period, all of which can be evoked with digital effects. Many also took portraits of the dead, in particular of their children who had died.
Photography thus quickly became a medium through which family memories could be retained. By the twentieth century, the Kodak company was selling the idea that amateur photography, which Kodak promoted through its consumer cameras and film developing, should be about the family.
Photography has thus played an important role in the ideology of the family and the social values attached to it. Photo theorist Allan Sekula writes that photography developed quickly into a medium that functions both honorifically in personal portraiture and repressively in the classifying of citizens according to racial and ethnic categories in security surveillance images, for example.
Portraiture was, according to Sekula, the key in a system of double representation. From the beginning of the medium in the mids, photographs were widely regarded as tools of science and public surveillance. Astronomers used photographic film to mark star movements. Photographs were used in hospitals, mental institu- tions, and prisons to record and study populations, in hopes that they could be classified and tracked over time. Indeed, in rapidly growing urban industrial centers, photographs quickly became an important way for police and public health officials to monitor urban populations perceived to be growing not only in numbers of people but also in rates of crime and social deviance.
He is using the the independence of Catalonia, Bar- state-issued card, which identifies him as Catalan, to make the celona, Spain, September 11, case that Catalonia should be recognized as a separate state.
What is the legacy of this use of images to manage and control pop- ulations? Photographs are a primary medium of evidence in the criminal justice system.
We are accustomed to the fact that most stores, banks, and public places are outfitted with surveillance cameras. Our daily lives are tracked not only through our credit records but also.
When we engage in social media, we encounter the potential of being in the public eye and of being tracked. It is increasingly the norm to forgo privacy in favor of participating in social networking, using photography as a lingua franca across our spheres of friends, family, and coworkers.
The meaning of images, however, can change dramatically when they move across these different social contexts. Today, the contexts in which images cir- culate have become infinitely more complex than they were even a few decades ago. Photographs and videos of private moments circulate rapidly on the web and are potentially seen by millions. This means that any given image or video might be displayed in many very different contexts, each of which might give it different inflections and meanings.
It also means, to the dismay of many politicians and celebrities, that once images are set loose in these image distribution networks, they cannot be fully retrieved or reg- ulated.
Even cherished and protected family photographs can become evidence in the workplace, in law, and in the public eye long after their original circumstances. The circulation of images is increasingly difficult to control as the means of image reproduction and circulation proliferate with advances in networks and software. The legal regulation of image circulation through copyright and fair use laws is an issue we consider in Chapter 5. Image Icons One of the ways that we can see how images generate meaning across contexts is to look at image icons and how they both retain and change meaning across differ- ent contexts.
Here, we use the term icon in a general sense, rather than in the spe- cific sense used by Peirce that we discussed earlier. An icon is an image that refers to something outside of its individual components, something or someone that has great symbolic meaning for many people. Icons are often perceived to represent universal concepts, emotions, and meanings. Thus an image produced in a specific culture, time, and place might be interpreted as having broader meaning and the capacity to evoke similar responses across all cultures and in all viewers.
The polar bear has become a ubiquitous icon of climate change. A particularly iconic scene is that of a polar bear clinging to a dwindling ice floe. Melting ice is a signifier of climate change and the clinging polar bear a signifier of endanger- ment to life caused by a warming climate.
Polar bears signify cold—a cold swim is referred to as a polar bear dip. As our discussion of this image shows, icons can be quite reductive. Climate change is obviously a complex issue that cannot be reduced to ice melting and polar bears in precarious sit- uations.
However, simplification is central to the creation of icons that can convey iconic meaning across many different contexts. The polar bear image resonates around the world. In climate justice protest marches, the polar bear is often prominently featured on posters, logos, even in costumes.
It has become an icon for a global movement. One meme that circulated widely FIG. This image of a lone student at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, is an icon recognized around the world.
In this historical demonstration, students led the call for democratic social reforms, and many lost their lives. This image of the student protest became a pow- erful icon of the demand for democracy worldwide. The value of this image, often called Tank Man, is based in part on its cap- turing of a special moment it depicts a key moment in the June Fourth Incident during which media coverage was restricted and the speed with which it was transmitted around the world it was the pre-Internet era, so the image circulated in part by fax.
Its denotative meaning is simple: a young man stands before a tank. Its connotative and iconic meanings are com- monly understood to be more complex and widely relevant: the importance of individual actions in the face of injustice and the capacity of one individual to stand up to power.
This image thus has value not as a singular image once broad- cast, it was not one image but millions of images on TV sets and in newspapers, though it was censored in China but through its speed of transmission, its infor- mative value, and its political statement, which is both specific to the protest and more broad, capturing the individual resolve behind many democratic movements around the world.
The iconic status of the Tiananmen Square image has resulted in a broad array of remakes. For example, this image emerged during protests against the oppression of Tibet in the months before the Summer Olympics in Bei- jing. Here, the protestors have effectively com- bined the iconic sign of the Olympic rings with the iconic sign of the tank and student to put their protest in historical context.
In , Chinese artist Liu Wei cre- ated a video work, Unforgettable Memory, in which he shows the iconic photograph. In this work, the image is a means to disrupt collective forget- ting, to pull this event of the past into the present, reminding people of the hundreds who were massa- cred that day.
The artist notes that people typically respond without showing empathy or mourning, but when confronted with the picture, they fall silent or run away from their own memories. Image icons are often experi- enced as universal, yet their meanings are always historically and contextu- ally produced.
Consider the example of the image of mother and child that is ubiquitous in Western art. The iconogra- phy of the mother and child is widely believed to represent universal concepts of maternal emotion, the essential bond between a mother and her offspring, and the importance of motherhood throughout the world and human history. The sheer number of paintings with this theme attests not simply to the centrality of the Madonna figure in Christianity but also to the ideological assumption that the bond between mother and child is universal and natural, not culturally and histor- ically specific and socially constructed.
To question this assumption means looking at the cultural, historical, and social meanings that are specific in these images. Icons do not represent individuals, nor do they represent universal values. Our Lady of Guadalupe, regarded by some as the protector of unborn babies,. The closer we look at these two images, the more culturally and historically specific they are revealed to be.
It is in relationship to this broad tradition of Madonna and child icons that more recent images of women and children gain meaning. This photograph is regarded as an iconic image of the Great Depression. It is famous because it evokes the despair and perseverance of those who survived the hardships of that time. Yet the image gains much of its meaning from its implicit reference to the history of artistic depictions of women and their children, such as Madonna and child images, and its difference from them.
This mother is anxious and distracted. Her children cling to her and burden her thin frame. She looks not at her children but outward as if toward her future—one seemingly with little promise. At the same time, it makes a statement about the complex role of motherhood that is informed by its place in the iconic tradition.
This photograph has historically specific meanings, yet its function as an icon allows it to have meanings that go beyond that historical moment. Lange took the photograph while working on a government documen- tation project funded by the Farm Security Administra- tion FSA.
With other photographers, she produced FIG. She took five pic- photo, interviewed on October tures of this woman and her children.
Yet for many years little 10, Years later, her identity was revealed by her children, who hoped to use her name to raise funds to support hospital bills following a stroke. Florence Owens Thompson thus was featured once again in press photographs, many of them mother-and-child images in that they include her grown children, the daughters who appeared in the famous Lange photograph. But the reveal was fraught with irony. Her hard life never got much easier; the photograph that brought Lange so much fame brought Owens Thompson very little very late.
For whom is Migrant Mother iconic and for whom is it not? The images of motherhood we have shown are specific to particular cultures at particular moments in time. Similarly, the classical art history images of Madonna and child may not serve as icons for motherhood in all cultures.
To interpret images is to examine the assumptions that we as viewers bring to them at different times and in different places and to decode their visual language. All images contain layers of meaning that include their formal aspects, their cultural and sociohis- torical references, the ways they reference the images that precede and surround them,. Reading and interpreting images is one way that we, as viewers, assign value to the cultures in which we live.
Practices of look- ing, then, are not passive acts of consumption. By looking at and engaging with images in the world, we influence their meanings and uses. In the next chapter we examine the many ways that viewers create meaning when they engage in looking. Hal Foster Seattle: Bay Press, , ix. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, See William J. Victor Burgin London: Macmillan, , Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Repub- lished by Vintage UK , Paris Match, issue , June 25 to July 02, Barthes, Mythologies, Richard Howard.
New York: Hill and Wang, , 14— New York: Routledge, Further Reading Barthes, Roland. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, [] Republished by Vintage UK , Barthes, Roland. New York: Hill and Wang, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin, Bryson, Norman. Burgin, Victor, ed. Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan, Vision and Visuality.
New York: New Press, Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans- lated and edited by James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signi- fying Practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Hill, Jason, and Vanessa Schwartz. London: Bloomsbury, Horne, Peter, and Reina Lewis, eds. Jones, Amelia, ed.
The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. Lloyd, Fran, and Sajit Rizvi, eds. London: Saffron Books, McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Merrel, Floyd.
Semiosis in the Postmodern Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Peirce, Signs, and Meaning. Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [] Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed.
New York: Rout- ledge, Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. The Visual Culture Reader. How to See the World. New York: Basic, Mitchell, W. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Robinson, Hilary. Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology — Rose, Gillian. Sebeok, Thomas A.
Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics. Sekula, Allan. Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, Smith, Marquard. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Delta, Wagner, Anne, and Richard K. Law, Culture and Visual Studies. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, Wells, Liz, ed. Photography: A Critical Introduction.
West, Nancy Martha. Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rather, these meanings are produced through complex negotiations between viewers and image texts; they are shaped by the social practices through which images are interpreted, shared, and produced.
Although images may have dominant or primary meanings, view- ers may interpret and use them in ways that do not conform to these meanings. Throughout this book, we use the term viewer rather than audience. A viewer is, in the most basic sense of the term, a person who looks. These practices are enacted not simply between individual human subjects who look and are looked at, but also among people, objects, and technologies in social places and spaces.
Viewing, even for an individual subject, is a multimodal activity. Viewing is a rela- tional and social practice whether one looks in private or in public and whether the image is personal a photograph of a loved one , technical a medical image used for diagnosis in a hospital , or public a work of photojournalism.
Interpellation is an important concept in our formulation of the viewer. To interpellate, in the traditional usage of this concept, is to interrupt a procedure or to question someone or something formally, as in a legal or governmental setting in a parliamentary procedure, for example. In the s, political and media theorists adapted the concept of interpellation to better describe the practices through which ideology operates.
Ideology refers to the conscious and unconscious beliefs, feel- ings, and values shared in any given social group. Interpellation is one of numerous processes through which ideology is carried out. To be interpellated is, quite simply, to be hailed or called in a way in which you recognize yourself to be the person intended by the call.
Imagine that you are driving a car. You hear a siren wail behind you. The sound catches your atten- tion, making you look into your rearview mirror, where you see spinning lights on a police car. Hailed by the police car, you instantly recognize yourself as a subject of the traffic law of the state, even if you know you are not guilty of any legal infraction.
You still felt called out, for an instant. And if you are among the groups of people subject to racial profiling, you may feel interpellated in the sense of being targeted for no other reason than how you look.
In our exam- ple, sounds the siren and images the emblems on the police car and a logic of the gaze the police officer looking at you through your rearview mirror all inter- pellate you into the ideology of the law, whether or not you believed the implied accusation or message to be right or true.
To be caught up in ideology does not always mean to share in a belief but rather more often entails being complexly caught up in its network of power relations. As we discuss further in Chapter 3, looking entails complex power relationships in which we may act, or may be made to act, in a variety of ways. Making History offers a fresh perspective on the study of history. It is a detailed exploration of the practice of histo. Visual Culture is an introductory textbook book on visual literacy, exploring how meaning is both made and transmitted i.
This book is one of the first few books written in English on Chaozhou culture and history. It compiles information from. Radio is considered the most widely accessible form of mass communication in the world and the medium used to the greatest degree in the United States. Music streaming services such as Apple Music and Spotify , have also integrated radio features onto the platform.
Convergence refers to the coming together of telecommunications as forms of mass communication in a digital media environment. There is no clear definition of Convergence and its effects. However, it can be viewed through three lenses: technological convergence , cultural convergence, and economic convergence. Sex and the City , an American show set in New York City, was viewed internationally and became popular among female workers in Thailand.
The film industry began with the invention of the Kinetoscope by Thomas Edison. His failure to patent it resulted in two brothers, Louis and Auguste Lumiere creating a portable camera that could process film and project images. Despite the ever-growing popularity of moving images, the Lumiere Brothers did not seek to revolutionize the style of the film, but stuck to documenting daily life in France.
This set the grounds for future film revolutionaries, including George Melies, who sought to create narrative sequences in his films through the use of special effects. In the s, television began to change to include more complicated and three-dimensional characters and plots.
PBS launched in , and was the home for programming that would not be suitable for network television. It operates on donations and little government funding, rather than having commercials.
In the s, television became geared towards what has become known as the MTV Generation, with a surge in the number of cable channels. Photography plays a role in the field of technology and mass communication by demonstrating facts or reinforcing ideas. Although the photos are altered digitally, it is still considered [ by whom? Camera obscura was one of the first techniques that lead to creating photos. It could create an image on a wall or piece of paper.
Joseph Niepce was a French inventor that took the first photo in that required 8 hours of exposure. In , Louis Daguerre introduced the daguerreotype that reduced exposure time to about thirty minutes. As the years progressed, so did photography techniques, including creating better image quality, adding color to an image, and reduced exposure time. The modern industry has dramatically changed with the development of digital, as phones and digital cameras have made film-based cameras a niche product.
Kodak discontinued making a color film in and declared Bankruptcy in Other companies like Fujifilm adapted despite a downturn in sales. Video game genres are a classification assigned to a video game based on its game play rather than a visual or storytelling differences. A video game genre is defined by a set of game play challenges and are classified independently of when and where the game takes place.
Interactive media is a form of communication technique that refers to services on digital computer-based systems. This requires two or more parties who respond to each other through text, moving images, animation, video, audio, and video games. The violence of video games relates to ethics in interactive media because it brings on aggressive attitude and behavior that impacts the social lives of the people playing these video games.
People are able to download books onto their devices. This allows consumers to track what they read, to annotate, and to search for definitions of words on the internet. In addition, the Kindle has added accessories including games, movies, and music. Communication researchers have identified several major theories associated with the study of mass communication. Communication theory addresses the processes and mechanisms that allow communication to take place.
Communication researchers study communication through various methods that have been verified through repetitive, cumulative processes. Both quantitative and qualitative methods have been used in the study of mass communication.
The main focus of mass communication research is to learn how the content of mass communication affects the attitudes, opinions, emotions, and ultimately behaviors of the people who receive the message. Several prominent methods of study are as follows: [25]. The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication [26] is the major membership organization for academics in the field, offering regional and national conferences and refereed publications.
The International Communication Association [27] and National Communication Association formerly the Speech Communication Association are also prominent professional organizations. Each of these organizations publishes a different refereed academic journal that reflects the research that is being performed in the field of mass communication. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: the article contains some incessant paragraphs and inaccurate claims.
Please help improve this article if you can. December Learn how and when to remove this template message. Titled 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse', Hall's essay offers a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, disseminated, and interpreted.
When you decode a message, you extract the meaning of that message in ways that make sense to you. Decoding has both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication: Decoding behavior without using words means observing body language and its associated emotions. Sometimes when someone is trying to get a message across to someone, the message can be interpreted differently from person to person.
Decoding is all about the understanding of what someone already knows, based on the information given throughout the message being received.
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