Summary
Summary How to approach and analyze media texts
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- University Of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN)
A breakdown of how to approach media texts, ready for active recall.
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Approaching media textsIntroduction
The media are not so much ‘things’ as places that most of us inhabit, which weave in and out of our
lives. Their constant messages and pleasures seem to flow around and through us, they immerse
most of our waking lives.
Two examples of the two main approaches to media ‘texts’: QUALITATIVE and QUANTITATIVE.
This means we look at semiotic and content analysis methods. These methods are broadly
interested, respectively in:
Exploring the qualities of individual texts, and registering what can be discovered by
counting repeated patterns or elements across groups or quantities of texts.
Terms: ‘text’ and ‘readers’
But for semiotics and structuralist approaches, used in the study of media and culture, a text
can be ANYTHING which is being investigated-haircut, hip-hop lyrics, a dance, a film.
Within the semiotic analysis, the audience, is called ‘readers’.
A way of emphasizing that we are dealing with something learned rather than ‘natural.’
To indicate the degree of activity needed to make sense of signs.
*Partly as a way of emphasizing that we are dealing with something learnt rather than ‘natural’ and
partly to indicate the degree of activity needed to make sense of signs.
Semiotic approaches
Media, especially news and factual media, have often been thought of as conveyor belts of
meaning between ‘the world’ and audiences.
Sometimes, this involves news or the hidden secrets of celebrities.
It has often been assumed that the task of such communication is simply to tell ‘the truth’
about what it reports.
Semiotics, however, does not assume that the media work as simple channels of
communication, as ‘windows on the world’.
Asks questions about how meanings are constructed by different languages and cultures.
Semiotics is defined as
the study of signs
the social production of meanings and pleasures by sign systems
the study of how things come to have significance.
It draws largely on the work of the linguists Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Peirce, and
Roland Barthes.
*Media, especially news and factual media, have often been thought of as kinds of conveyor belts of
meaning between ‘the world’ and audiences, producing images ‘about’ or ‘from’ this or that debate,
event or place. Sometimes this involves news, or the hidden secrets of celebrities.
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