Read this statement carefully:

Authors Avatar

COM2/3409 Assignment 1                                                                           Student ID: 18257259                        

Read this statement carefully:  

…By the word reading, we mean not only the capacity to identify and decode a certain number of signs, but also the … capacity to put them in a creative relation between themselves and other signs (Hall, S. in During, S. (ed) 1993: 99).

How can we understand this statement in reference to your choice of media text in reference to organising category? Pay particular attention to approaches to representation, reading protocols, audience address, techniques of narration, implied/resisting reader.   Your essay should synthesise theoretical explanations and textual analysis.

To understand how signs convey meanings of a particular text, it is important to study the theoretical approach to representation and understand how media texts might be said to ‘work’ in forms of representation. In this essay, I will examine the chosen media text and explain how it ‘works’ in relation to the question, along with an analysis of the connections between texts, reading protocols and meanings interpreted.  

The media text chosen from a men’s magazine, NewMan, was an interview on actress-model, Jaymee Ong. With scanty, sexy dressing and posing close to nudity, it is certainly inviting for men - one of the audiences addressed. Women could also be the audience although the majority readers would be men.  

I will now explain the quotation and elaborate on its meaning with reference to the media text. By glancing through the front cover’s (Appendix 1) photograph and decoding the signs that made up the word “naked”, one might misinterpret the text’s content to be on pornography. However, by reading the subsequent word “truth” and the interview piece (Appendix 2), one should notice the insertion of the word “naked” prior to “truth” was to emphasise on the point that the interview narrated the “exposed facts” about Jaymee’s life, hence “naked truth”. With this illustration, it shows that individual words functioning as signs should not be simply read and decoded exclusively. Instead, signs among other signs must go together in order for media texts to ‘work’ and construct meanings. With the media text’s topic on a woman, it therefore falls under the organising category “Gendered identities: images of the ‘real’”.  

Join now!

As mentioned earlier, media texts might be said to ‘work’ in forms of representation. So, what is representation? According to Hall (1997: 61), representation is “the process by which members of a culture use language or a signifying system to produce meaning”. In the semiotic approach, representation was understood based on the way “words functioned as signs within language” (Hall 1997: 42). Although language is central to the production of meaning, tool of analysis such as discourse plays an important role in the study of representations and meanings interpreted.    

Foucault’s work on ‘representation’ was concerned with ...

This is a preview of the whole essay