31.1918, Review: Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics: Danesi (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1918. Wed Jun 10 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.1918, Review: Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics: Danesi (2018)

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Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 11:35:08
From: Gloria Dou [gloriadou2 at gmail.com]
Subject: Understanding Media Semiotics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-4540.html

AUTHOR: Marcel  Danesi
TITLE: Understanding Media Semiotics
SUBTITLE: 2nd Edition
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Gloria Yan Dou, The University of Hong Kong

SUMMARY

Understanding Media Semiotics by Marcel Danesi offers students an in-depth
guide to understand the “meaning structures” that media texts/products help
spread into the everyday of modern life. The author adopts a historical and
anthropological perspective and takes us on a journey to explore the
development of media technologies and their influences on our social life and
culture. Consisting of a total of nine chapters, this book contextualizes
various media within their context of invention and production, and analyzes
how meaning comes to be constructed and circulated in these media within a
semiotic framework. Especially, this book has been informed by the emergence
and evolution of social media as compared to when the first edition was
published in 2002. 

In Chapter 1, “The mediated world”, the author gives an overview of the
mediascape we inhabit today. He starts by explicating that human communication
is mediated in nature, although the representational means may take different
physical forms across different time periods. No matter it is before the
advent of alphabets or in today’s “Digital Galaxy”, the notion of mediation
has always been an essential one in understanding civilization. He then
briefly introduces the major types of mass media and new media representations
that constitute the mediascape, and relates them to writing and earlier
transmission media. Danesi points out that convergence is manifest in the
digitization of all media technologies, which would come to shape social
conditions and world orders. How exactly this is realized will be a focus of
this book. 

In Chapter 2, “An outline of semiotic theory”, Danesi presents the reader with
some basic notions and concepts in semiotic theories, laying out the
theoretical foundation for the book. He points out that Saussurean terminology
will be adopted in most of the book, but it  is complemented with Peircean
notions when necessary. He goes on to give a flashback of Barthes and
Baudrillard who applied semiotic theories to media critiques. While Danesi
stresses the study of how mass media produce or recycle signs as the primary
goal of media semiotics, he claims that there is no need to overly
“ideologize” semiotic analysis as semiotics is supposed to be a discipline to
study sign-based behavior, not for political critiques. Some alternative
approaches or notions are then introduced to the reader, such as discourse
theory, visual rhetoric, narratology, and metaphor, to enrich the book’s
theoretical basis. 

Danesi gives a detailed account of print media’s development, and its modern
counterparts, in Chapter 3, “Print media”. Orality was a notable component of
human communication in the pre-literate age, but it was taken over by literacy
as a result of the emergence of pictographic and then alphabetic systems in
human society. With the advent of printing technology, efficient dissemination
of knowledge gave rise to the publishing industry; books, newspapers and
magazines became items for mass consumption. As a result, the world evolved
fast socially and culturally. A new world order, or to use McLuhan’s (1962)
words, the Gutenberg Galaxy, was established. The Print Age valorized reading
over listening, and favored linear-narrative models. In today’s world, most of
print media artifacts have taken new forms, such as electronic books and
blogs, that are featured with hypertextuality. 

Chapter 4, “Audio media”, presents the reader with the history of different
music genres and radio genres. In the first half, it delineates how the music
industry benefited from the advent of recording and radio broadcasting
technologies, and elucidates how music transforms itself from an elite art
form to a common commodity and reaches large audiences. Music crystallized as
a social code: it was born from the social conditions, and in turn shaped
them. The latter half of the chapter is concerned with the evolution of radio.
Radio programs were integrated with advertising that affected people’s
lifestyles and engendered audience research. In the Digital Galaxy, the radio
develops into the Internet radio that is accessible around the globe. 

Chapter 5, “Film and video”, illustrates the crucial role played by
vision-based and vision-enhancing media in understanding today’s mediascape,
or the “visually mediated world”. As a composite of images, narratives and
music, cinema creates semiotically powerful representations, accentuated with
rich digital effects. While Hollywood establishes its dominance in the film
industry, movies gain widespread popularity in other countries as well. In a
specific section entitled “Cinema and postmodernism”, Danesi discusses how
cinema helps promote postmodernism as a cultural trend by employing postmodern
technique, scenario and imagery, thus problematizing and deconstructing
modernist beliefs. 

Chapter 6, “Television”, embraces TV as a social text that shapes the
groupthink. The author argues that while the TV has been engaging a massive
audience, it is also inculcating materialistic values in the society. After
providing a detailed account of TV’s emergence and its genres, Danesi
discusses at length TV’s psychosocial impacts on people, including the mean
world syndrome, the mythologizing effect, the history fabrication effect, and
the cognitive compression effect. TV sets the social agenda and affects public
opinions, but also induces social change by causing shifts in people’s
mindset. 

The author moves on to talk about “The computer, the internet, and artificial
intelligence” in Chapter 7. The rapid advances in computer technology
transformed “systems and modes of mass communications” and shaped “cultural
signifying orders” throughout the world, spawning an age called Digital
Galaxy. Nevertheless, Danesi observes that Digital Galaxy is an extension of
the Gutenburg galaxy. For instance, writing continues to serve as the primary
medium through which knowledge is transmitted, albeit taking multimodal and
hypertextual formats; hypertextuality is an extension, not a metamorphosis, of
the linear textuality of print books. And the sense of connectivity brought
about by the computer, as Danesi quips, returns us to the “unified fields of
old tribal cultures”. Then he discusses major types of social media networks
that are typical to the age of Web 2.0, which allows users to communicate
interactively within the community. 

Chapter 8, “Advertising”, provides an interesting target to study modern
signifying orders. The chapter is concerned with two fundamental questions: 1)
how are meanings encoded in advertising textuality? 2) how are signification
systems created by advertisers for people to be perceived as meaningful? To
answer these, Danesi first walks the reader through the history of
advertising, and then analyzes the rhetorical and image-making techniques
employed by advertisers in embedding the ad message to appeal to potential
customers. He also illustrates a few advertiser’s strategies in creating a
signification system, such as branding and ad campaigns. In addition, he
discusses co-option and incorporating artworks as ways of creating advertising
textuality to be built into products. 

The final Chapter, “Impacts of the media”, serves three aims. The author
starts with an overview of semiotic analysis, reviewing its main features and
embracing it as a perspective for analyzing media texts. Next, he contemplates
the impacts of media on writing and on mind and culture. He notes that the
popularity of emojis simultaneously carries an imaginative mode of expression
and is reminiscent of the pictographic writing of our ancestors. While he
continues to list out some critical views of the mediated culture, he is
skeptical about the kind of “media bashing” attitude which tends to blame
media influence for every single social and moral issue we are dealing with
today. Finally, he reflects upon the relation between the media and
contemporary culture, and is optimistic about humanity despite some
constraints of the media. 

EVALUATION

Through an anthropological lens, this book provides the reader with a rich and
useful guide to understand the meaning structures of major media communication
tools, how they derive from the social and technological conditions, and how
they come to shape our society and culture. There, however, are two
considerations that the reader may want to take into account.

First, this book has drawn primary inspiration from the mass media and lacks
in-depth discussion of the features of new media communications. Logan (2010)
defines new media as those digital media which are “interactive, incorporate
two-way communication and involve some form of computing”. New media allows
users to become active participants in producing media content to be
disseminated. In light of this, to what extent Saussurean semiology is still
applicable to our understanding of media semiotics is problematized. 

Second, Danesi seems to indicate that semiotics does not require a critical
analysis in the sense of the political and ideological connotations embedded
in the message. However, mass media production nowadays is tightly linked to
power, and those in power can function as gatekeepers who decide which content
gets to make it to mainstream media and which does not. This is especially the
case when social media content moves into broadcast news (Hänska Ahy, 2016).
Therefore, the discussion of power and ideology is still highly relevant in
media semiotics.

REFERENCES

Hänska Ahy, M. (2016). Networked communication and the Arab Spring: Linking
broadcast and social media. New Media & Society, 18(1), 99-116.

Logan, R. K. (2010). Understanding new media: extending Marshall McLuhan.
Peter Lang.

McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Gloria Yan Dou is PhD Candidate in School of English, The University of Hong
Kong. Her research interests include digital photography, computer mediated
communication, and identity and globalization.





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