Intro to Communication 241009

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Intro to Communication 2410/09

• Mass Communication
• and Culture III
• Semiotic Codes

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Culture and Content IILecture Outline

• Defining semiotic codes
• culture
• Ideology
• subjectivity and interpellation
• describing semiotic codes
• practicum.

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Defining Semiotic Codes

• According to Roland Barthes, codes can be
  understood, at their most basic, as associative
  fields constituted of signs which are related to
  each other through a common system of meaning
• examples would be the linguistic code, the
  fashion code, the cultural code and so forth...

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Culture

• The ideas, customs, skills, arts and social
  practices of a people or group that are
  transferred, communicated or passed along, as in
  or to succeeding generations
• also describes such ideas, customs, etc. which
  belong to a particular people or group in respect
  to a precise historical moment or set of
  circumstances
• finally, culture can be understood as the
  apparatus of social relations which define the
  individual subject in terms of their own identity
  and subjective place in the world.

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Ideology

• While culture can be said to reside in the social
  practices of the collective as they are enacted
  in the everyday - ideology can be said to reside
  in the ideas and thoughts that provide the basic
  assumptions and beliefs for such behaviour and
  action.
• In turn, these values and beliefs are not always
  clearly expressed through action which may take
  place in an unreflexive, one might say
  unconscious manner, as part of what is loosely
  understood as social action, practices supported
  and articulated by and through any number of
  social institutions.

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Terry Eagletons Versions of Ideology

• a) the process of production of meaning, signs
  and values in social life
• b) the body of ideas characteristic of a
  particular social group or class
• c) (false) ideas which help to legitimate a
  dominant political power
• d) systematically distorted communication
• e) that which offers a position for the subject
• f) forms of thought motivated by social
  interests
• g) socially necessary illusions
• h) the conjuncture of discourse and power
• 1) the medium in which conscious social actors
  make sense of their world
• j) action-oriented set of beliefs
• k) the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal
  reality
• l) the indispensable medium in which individuals
  live out their relations to a social structure
• m) the process whereby social life is converted
  to a natural reality.
• Eagleton, T., 1991, Ideology, an
  Introduction, New York, Verso Books, pp.1-2

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Subjectivity and Interpellation

• As previously discussed, the process of
  interpellation is fundamental to the creation of
  the subject - it can be understood, in reference
  to the mass media - as the moment when we are
  addressed by either the material structure of the
  apparatus or its content in terms which describe
  and define not only the world around us but also
  our idealized relationship to it.

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Interpellation
Religion
Age
Ethnicity
Race
Social Sphere
Socio-economic Status
Politics
Personality
Gender
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Semiotic Codes

• Cultural code
• Linguistic code
• Aesthetic code
• Narrative code
• Socio-ethnic code
• Symbolic code
• Scientific code

Rhetorical code Code of action Code of
communication Enigmatic code Chronological
code Code of capital
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Practicum 1 - Find the Codes
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Practicum 2 - Find the Codes
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Practicum 3 - Find the Codes
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Exercise for this lecture

• Practice looking for and identifying codes in
  a variety of mass media texts dont forget to
  think of codes as systems of signs and therefore
  also initially identify the signs themselves and
  their signifying relationships to each other
  within any given code.

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