Article for MIdterm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/us/politics/obama-romney-roast-each-other-at-al-smith-charity-dinner.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

Image for MIdterm

Midterm

MIDTERM

COM203

FALL 2012

1. Describe and interpret the photograph on the screen. Refer first to the image itself and then explain its

relationship with the caption and the news article. Use the following terminology: icon, index, symbol, denotation, connotation, sign, signifier, signified, signification. One full page. (25 points)

Extra credit: Apply the terms “anchorage” and “myth” as used by Roland Barthes. (Three possible points)

2. Magic bullet theory/theory of limited effects—two pages. Choose A or B.

A)How was the magic bullet theory disproven through communications research? Discuss the validity of the theory of limited effects. Use evidence from the following studies: The Invasion from Mars (War of the Worlds), Experiments with Film (Why We Fight) , The People’s Choice (Erie County), and the Personal Influence (Decatur) study.

B) Focus on one of the following studies--The Invasion from Mars, Experiments with Film, and the Personal Influence study—and argue how it disproves the magic bullet theory and supports the theory of limited effects.

(25 points)

3. Define four of the following groups of terms in a paragraph of more than four sentences. Give examples not used in class or in class notes. (7.5 points each)

I                       paradigm/syntagm

II                      synecdoche/metonymy

III                        irony/trope

IV                         linguistic value/onomatopoeia

V             deictic/demonstrative

VI            locution, illocution, perlocution

4. What does Saussure mean by “the arbitrary nature of the sign”? Why is this aspect of the sign so essential to semiotics? Answer in two paragraphs. (20 points)

Extra credit: Why do Roman Jakobson and Emile Benveniste argue that the word “I” is an indexical symbol? Why do they use the term “shifter” to describe the pronouns “I” and “You”?  Answer in two paragraphs. (3 points)

Extra extra credit: Explain Roland Barthes’s argument in “The Photographic Message.” (3 points)

semiotic reading of image

denotation
connotation
icon
symbol
index
signifier
signfied
signification
myth

McLuhan/ Baudrillard

Media hot and cold: From understanding media—


There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is provided. the ear is given a meager amount of information. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.

High definition means well-defined, sharp and detailed visually, such as a map. Low definition refers to indistinct images scanned by the eye, with which the viewer is left to fill in the blanks, such as a sketch

Radio hot
Tv cool
Speech cool
Film hot
Print hot
Photograph cool
Cartoon cool
Telephone cool
Internet?

Hot medium extends one sense in “high definition.” Cool is of low definition, and requires that the user has to fill in information in order to complete the working of the medium.

"whether the spoken word or the manucript or TV, leaves much more for the listener or user to do than a hot medium." Internet: A composite of several media (photographs, print, animated images, movies, sound, telephone conversations, posted notes...) and also in itself a new medium of over 100 million potential "publishers" and interactors, the Web itself seems much closer to MacLuhan's "cool."

The global village. Today's instant communications have all but erased time and space and rendered national boundaries meaningless


The notion of a global village, while appealing to Web surfers and CNN junkies, is a dangerous illusion--witness the ongoing debacle in Iraq, which has come to pass in part because U.S. leaders kidded themselves into believing that Iraqis were just like us and would embrace democracy as soon as Saddam Hussein was gone. The hot/cool dichotomy has limited usefulness as an analytical tool. Consider a kid doing his homework while simultaneously watching TV, playing his stereo, and IMing with his friends, who pauses to rip and burn a few tracks for later listening, E-mail a photo, and send a text message via cell phone. Which part of this multimedia environment is cool and which hot, which interactive and which not?
Still, McLuhan was right about one thing: the central place media would assume in our daily lives. Less a systematic thinker than a provocateur, he was among the first to raise the public's consciousness--another McLuhan-era term--about communications. No one doubts now that we live in a postindustrial age or that we traffic not so much in material goods as in information. It's a stretch to say that McLuhan predicted the contours of the modern world, but the extent to which it has evolved in directions he anticipated is remarkable. The global village, for example, may have been oversold, but a version thereof is definitely emerging:
In medium is the massage, the form of the book itself it the message, as much as the content—it is graphical, pictorial, moves from hot to cool, and relies as much on aphorism as it does on sustained argumentation.

The formal qualities of the tv or the web is what is what we receive, it forms the message. We receive the code, no message.


Aphorism--Short pithy statement of a general truth—

-the-implosion-of-meaning-in-the-media/

Baudrillard—also wrote Simulations one of the most cited books by graduate students in the last 20 years—also science fiction filmmakers—
Asserting that we are living in a mediated simulation of reality, as opposed to reality itself. A radical assertion yet one that is reliant upon classical distinctions between the original and the copy.

his belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually; the original is a conception not a perception.

The simulacra is thus a copy of a copy

speech act theory

 Speech Act Theory:

http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/speech_act.htm


Pronouns—Benveniste and Jakobson

p.286 what does I or You refer to?

“I signifies ‘the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I’”
“It has no value except in the instance in which it is produced.”
You=the individual spoken to in the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance you.”

“These pronominal forms do not refer to ‘reality’ or ‘objective’ positions in space of time [as he or she or cat or dog do] but to the utterance, unique each time, that contains them, and thus they reflect their proper use” p288

In order to solve the problem of intersubjective communication [words traded between adressor and addressee that refer to themselves]---“Language has solved this problem by creating an ensemble of ‘empty’ signs that re non referential with respect to ‘reality’.”

“These signs are always available and become ‘full’ as soon as a speaker introduces them into each instance of his discourse.”

“Language wards off this danger by instituting a unique but mobile sign, I, which can be assumed by each speaker on the condition that he refers each time only to to the instance of his discourse.”

Think of I and you as words that you can never own, but you can borrow them (from the library as it were) to enable your expression and communication and to refer to yourself and to your addressee.

I and you mark the “difference between language as a system of signs and language assumed into use by the individual [the speech act, parole, as distinct from langue].”

With the use of I: “language is turned into instance of discourse, characterized by this system of internal references of which I is the key, and defining the individual by the particular linguist contstruction he makes use of when he announces himself as the speaker.”

The speaker “appropriates” I/you, but it is not hers even though the usage actualizes I/you
Bringing it into discourse. [and then return it to the library for another’s use]

The third person he/she does not have the same elasticity and emptiness/fullness of The I/You. They refer “not the themselves but to an ‘objective’ situation.” (289)
The assumption with pronouns:

I/You = subjective
He/She = objective

He/She serve as “abbreviated subsitutes” for the proper name of a person. “Professor Miller no longer coughs. He is feeling better.”

JaKobson—
Distinguishes between MESSAGE [meaning of words] and CODE [mode of transfer/utterance] — even as both are vehicles of linguistic commnication.


I/You are indexical symbols. They indicate the presence of a person who is speaking or is spoken to, and at the same time they are words, and hence symbolic.

“For Jakobson, a shifter is a term whose meaning cannot be determined without referring to the message that is being communicated between a sender and a receiver.” I/You/Here/There are without meaning save for how they are being deployed, and by whom, in what context.

http://nosubject.com/Shifter


Jakobson attempts to devise a typology of verbal categories/
1. Speech itself and its topic, the narrated event. Jim talks about walking his dog Fido. [I heard Jim talk about his dog Fido]
2. the event itself (also the event of the speech)

Jim walks his dog—the event
Jim talks – the speech event, the narrated event, also an event, but one about an event that at least initially was not narrated.

From this there are four distinguisable items:
1. narrated event. (jim walking his dog
2. a speech event (jim talking about walking his dog)
3. a participant of the narrated event (fido, Jim)
4. a participant of the speech event whether addresser or addressee (Jim/those who hear Jim)



quantifiers (such as related to numbers) and qualifiers (such as related to gender)

 

 

deixis/demonstratives + regulative vs constitutive rules

A deictic is of or relating to a word, the determination of whose referent (the object or person to which the word refers to) is dependent on the context in which it is said or written. In the sentence "I want him to come here now" the words I, here, him, and now are deictic because the determination of their referents depends on who says that sentence, and where, when, and of whom it is said. In the previous sentence the word "that" is also deictic, but is also a demonstrative.

A demonstrative specifies or singles out the person or object referred to: the demonstrative pronouns these and that. "I want that car." "I don't want this one. "That" is distal (far way) and "this" is proximal.

deixis indicate the situational ‘co‐ordinates’ of person (I/you, us/them), place (here/there, this/that), and time (now/then, yesterday/today)

demonstratives include this, that, these, those, yonder, and the archaic yon and are pronominal, indicating the location (in relation to the speaker) of a noun.

--------------------


regulative vs constitutive rules

rules that govern how we dine (the use of specific utensils, not talking with mouths full) etc is regulative. It doesn't define what we eat; it regulates how we eat, eating is a pre-existing activity.

Searle argues that games like football and chess are constitutive. the rules are itself the game; nothing exists but adherance to the rules (and mastery). constitutuve rules not only regulate the activity but constitute it. Non-adherance to the rules is cheating. there is no outside to the construction of the game.

he suggests that so it is with illocutionary acts. they are made up or constituted by rules (and not just regulated by then). the rules related to speech acts (that pre-exist the speaker) constitute the speech act itself.

cf. the Saussurean notion, emphasized by Lacan that language is a pre-existing condition, a system that is not defined by the user, but uses her to reassert its structures.

Speech Act / Messages

speech act theory



the photographic message


shifters and indexical symbols


pretext text context
subtext


http://www.slideshare.net/RSJones/media-intertextuality


Is There a Constitution in This Text

encode/decode

http://www.speech-therapy-information-and-resources.com/the-encode-decode-model-of-communication.html

Prince video

Sign O the Times

Semiotics Terminology

denotation, connotation, myth



paradigm/syntagm


From Chandler:
Synchronic analysis studies a phenomenon as if it were frozen at one moment in time; diachronic analysis focuses on change over time. Insofar as semiotics tends to focus on synchronic rather than diachronic analysis (as it does in Saussurean semiotics), it underplays the dynamic nature of media conventions (for instance, television conventions change fairly rapidly compared to conventions for written English). It can also underplay dynamic changes in the cultural myths which signification both alludes to and helps to shape. Purely structuralist semiotics ignores process and historicity - unlike historical theories like Marxism. 

change in language occurs at least initially at the level of langage, or speech.  


From Chandler:

What Saussure refers to as the 'value' of a sign depends on its relations with other signs within the system - a sign has no 'absolute' value independent of this context (Saussure 1983, 80; Saussure 1974, 80). Saussure uses an analogy with the game of chess, noting that the value of each piece depends on its position on the chessboard (Saussure 1983, 88; Saussure 1974, 88). The sign is more than the sum of its parts. Whilst signification - what is signified - clearly depends on the relationship between the two parts of the sign, the value of a sign is determined by the relationships between the sign and other signs within the system as a whole (Saussure 1983, 112-113; Saussure 1974, 114).

The notion of value... shows us that it is a great mistake to consider a sign as nothing more than the combination of a certain sound and a certain concept. To think of a sign as nothing more would be to isolate it from the system to which it belongs. It would be to suppose that a start could be made with individual signs, and a system constructed by putting them together. On the contrary, the system as a united whole is the starting point, from which it becomes possible, by a process of analysis, to identify its constituent elements. (Saussure 1983, 112; Saussure 1974, 113)

As an example of the distinction between signification and value, Saussure notes that 'The French word mouton may have the same meaning as the English word sheep; but it does not have the same value. There are various reasons for this, but in particular the fact that the English word for the meat of this animal, as prepared and served for a meal, is not sheep but mutton. The difference in value between sheep and mouton hinges on the fact that in English there is also another word mutton for the meat, whereas mouton in French covers both' (Saussure 1983, 114; Saussure 1974, 115-116). 


tropes


List of tropes