Meaning and Interpretation of media

10 November 2021
Meaning
• Meaning of the message lies with the receiver
• What is meaning then?
• How do media make meaning?
• How do we interpret media's messages?
• What is media representation?
• Is it good?
• Is it bad?
• Is it neutral?
• Is it important to know these concepts?
• What happens if I ignore these concepts?

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Unpacking concepts
• The key to comprehending the notion of interpretation is to first
understand how the process of communicating ideas and
experiences takes place
• We use signs to help us achieve understanding with one another
• The systematic study of signs and their significance in society is
called semiotics
• Semiotic- “the study of everything that can be used for
communication: words, images, traffic signs, flowers, music,
medical symptoms, and much more”.
• French scholar of linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)
is considered to be the primary figure in the field of semiotics
• Saussure argued that the process of human communication is
dependent upon the creation of signs—words, images, objects,
acts.

3
Contd…
• Signs are defined by the interaction between two specific
elements: the signifier, or the form of the sign, and the
signified or referent

• The connection between signs and

referents is not given or “natural”
but is instead the result of human
social relations and the rules of
particular symbolic codes
• Since the connection between signs
and referents is never natural, it is
therefore always changing and
subject to power relations 4
Does picture tell real story?
Let’s talk about meaning
• Active audiences that use media content to create
‘meaningful experiences’
• Meaning is all about ‘mean-making’ process
• Meaning is created by the interaction between the text and
the reader
• Assumptions are:
• media texts are seen as constructions
• not natural occurrences
• manufactured
• a set of choices that led to its creation
• Meanings are the result of social conventions
• If texts are constructed from language, and the meaning of
language is created by social conventions, then the meanings
of the text is as much the result of these conventions as it is
the result of the intentions of the text's creators 6
Contd…

• Rhetoric analysis: the construction and manipulation of

language by the creator of a text in order to get an
affective response
• Meaning is not mainly about information
• But is tied to the way we learn about that information
• Its presentation and the particularities of the medium
• Making meaning of media texts involves looking at 3
different elements
• Media production
• Background of consumers
• Medium-specific language and conventions
• So, it is co-constructive relationship
• We construct meaning, media also construct us
• We become what technology allows us to become 7
Cultural studies
• Frankfurt School, 1930s, a group of German intellectuals
• Media is a cultural industry, propagates and perpetuates
western dominance
• French Marxist scholar Louis Althusser, media as a focal
point of the ideological domination of society
• Film viewers’ sense of reality, then, is essentially
controlled via the “imaginary unitary,” and viewers are
subsequently unable to separate themselves from the
film’s reality
• Screen theory- mainstream media representations also
reinforce the bourgeois status quo through narrative and
visual strategies, thereby forestalling any attempt by the
audience to subvert the text
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Encoding/Decoding Model
• Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies
• Audiences were much more active in their interpretations of
specific media texts
• Audiences approached media texts with a repertoire of
cultural competencies and discursive experiences that would
profoundly shape their understandings of messages,
regardless of the meanings intended by the creator of the
text
• They recognized the power of the text to structure potential
interpretations
• They also imagined audiences as active decoders of media
texts
• Social class was the primary lens through which audiences
crafted their symbolic responses to media 9
Contd…
• “Encoding/Decoding” by Stuart Hall, most influential
• There are two “determining moments” in any
communication exchange: encoding and decoding
• The first determining moment, according to Hall, occurs
when a message producer (such as a television
journalist or a podcaster) successfully encodes the
message
• The second component is the reception of the message
by the audience, which Hall calls the decoding process
• Before any communication message can “‘have an
effect,’ influence, entertain, instruct, or persuade,” it
must be “appropriated as a meaningful discourse and
be meaningfully decoded
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Contd…
• There are numerous factors that guide this encoding
process
• Encoding and decoding operates within a specific news
environment
Social systems Larger social structures; organization of media system (democratic,
controlled); ideology; economic basis of media production (capitalism,
state-controlled)
Social institutions Journalism and media production norms (reliance on official sources, reliance
on advertising, state control of media, public relations)

Media Expenses, revenues, ownership of media organizations, roles, structure,

organizations profitability, platform, target audience, influence from advertisers, and market
competition
Routines and Journalism: News values, objectivity, norms for newsworthiness, timeliness of
practices stories, proximity, fact-checking
Entertainment: Casting, hiring of talent, genres of programming, production
decision-making, audience research, scheduling and distribution decisions

Individuals Individual’s professional roles, work and personal background, ethics, personal
attitudes, values, beliefs 11
Few related concepts
• Discourse-‘a particular way of talking about and
understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)
• Discourses set the frames for meaning and practice
• French linguistic Foucault: discourses are more than ways
of thinking and producing meaning
• ‘Ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social
practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations’
• A discourse determines what is true and false, and thus
truth is discursively constructed, which implies that there
is no universal truth
• We all are creating meaning to establish our own version
of TRUTH
• Video 12
Ideology
• The study of ideology is primarily concerned with “the ways in
which meaning and power intersect, ways in which meaning
may serve, in specific socio-historical contexts, to sustain
relations of domination
• Ideology can be viewed as a way of representing the world
• In this sense, our views of the world are ideologically and
symbolically constructed
• Van Dijk describes ideology as ‘the basis of the social
representations shared by members of groups
• Ideologies allow people, as group members, to organize the
multitude of social beliefs about what is the case, good or bad,
right or wrong, for them, and to act accordingly’
• Media representation does ideological work
• It sustains and serves corporate power as well as advances
ideological claims 13
Various stages analyzing media texts
• Surface Descriptors and Structural Organization (text)
• This stage looks at some surface elements of the text -
the date of publication, the online newspaper in which it
was published, the author and the size of the article
• The size of most articles clearly expresses an online
newspaper’s valorization of the event at stake
• Regarding the authors of articles - journalists, identifying
information on their standings, institutional belonging
and ideological commitments can help locate the text in a
certain context
• The structural organization of the text has a key role in
the definition of what is at stake, as well as in the overall
interpretation of an issue’
• The headlines are the ‘crowd pullers’ 14
Contd…
• Objects-This stage identifies the discursive objects -
topics - and the ways in which they are constructed in
the text
• Social Actors: This stage involves identifying key social
actors, as well as how they are represented in the text
• The text plays an important role in representing social
actors and in defining their identities and relations
• In media discourse, some social actors may dominate
with their perspective compared to others in terms of
shaping the meaning in the text
• Having the predominant framing power in relation to a
certain issue is an important form of social influence
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Contd…
• Language and Rhetoric-This stage touches upon specific
aspects of language
• It involves looking at the writing style
• Rhetoric denotes the use of language effectively
• It is concerned with persuasive moves through such
devices as metaphors, hyperbolic enhancements,
quoting credible sources, and other rhetorical figures
employed in the text
• Hall again: Representation refers to ‘the embodying of
concepts, ideas and emotions in a symbolic form which
can be transmitted and meaningfully interpreted’
• We will use Hall’s concepts to understand topics such as
Gender and Feminism, including Race and Ethnicity
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Meaning in social media
• Social media do not stay the same
• Meaning in social media is communicatively grounded,
situated, and inter-subjectively negotiated and shared
• Co-creation of meaning
• Over time, meaning crystallizes in specific
interpretations and recurrent patterns of
communication
• This is called ‘social motif’
• The meanings of which are negotiated by various actors,
including service providers, developers, public figures,
and users, while in the making
• Meaning-making process, current technology gives data
but not accurate insights 17
Contd…
• Ignoring the conversation may lead to wrong conclusions
• All social actors are resource integrators
• Various forms of meaning co-create values
• Meaning emerges from within social interaction with
other humans and oneself
• These meanings are established and modified through
an interpretive process
• People are seen as active interpreters and creators of
their social reality and self-concepts
• Symbols are special kinds of social objects that stand for
something
• Conversations can split into multiple directions
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In lieu of conclusion
• We need to look into cross media conversations,
analyzing natural and dynamic casual talk occurring
across posts and across media
• We also need to explore real-time analyses methods,
the dynamic nature of social interactions and the
tendency of natural conversations to branch into
multiple meanings
• What was once though to be easy to interpret, has
become more diverse, dynamic and daring to capture
the meaning
• Video

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