ENCODING / DECODING

DOMINANT NEGOTIATED OPPOSITIONAL

relations of production

encoding (structures of meaning)

decoding (structures of meaning)

relations of reception

programFrom Stuart

Hall

Respond to this picture: When was it shot? How does it make you feel? Does it remind of other photographs?

Lewis Paine

Executed on July 7, 1865 for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Which one is “real?”

President Bin Laden

C – O – W

C

C – O

SemioticsThe Study of Signs and Their Meanings

SignifierSignified

= SIGNSymbolic = arbitrary

Iconic =structural

Indexical = copresence

SemioticsThe Study of Signs and Their Meanings

Roland Barthes

The construction of myth

Linguistic messages: anchorage & relay

Denoted image: what it is; tautologyConnoted image: Rhetoric and the floating chain of signifiers

SemioticsThe Study of Signs and Their Meanings

Roland Barthes

The layers of signification

Third level = cohere into a comprehensive whole (knowledge society)

First level= self-contained (man)

Second level = motivated meanings, derived from culture (wisdom, learning, etc.)

SemioticsThe Study of Signs and Their Meanings

Paradigmatic Analysisvertical

metaphor

selective/associative

bipolar oppositions

meaning by context (media, genre)

SemioticsThe Study of Signs and Their Meanings

Syntagmatic Analysishorizontal

metonymy

combinative

composed of paradigms

narrative

SemioticsThe Study of Signs and Their Meanings

SYNTAGMS

PARADIGMS

PARADIGMS

NARRATIVE

AURAL AND VISUAL IMAGES

Tony Schwartz

“The critical task is to design our package of stimuli so that it resonates with information already stored within an individual and thereby induces the desired learning or behavioral effect. Resonance takes place when the stimuli put into our communication evoke meaning in a listener or viewer. That which we put into the communication has no meaning to itself. The meaning of our communication is what a listener or viewer gets out of his[/her] experience with the communicator’s stimuli. The listener’s or viewer’s brain is an indispensable component of the total communication system. His[/her] life experiences, as well as….expectations of the stimuli he/[she] is receiving, interact with the communicator’s output in determining the meaning of the communication.”

From The responsive chord (1973)