Marshall McLuhan

"In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message"

Interesting Man.. A bit mental though

Following on from this lecture, I have been trying to use McLuhan's theories and have created another tetrad;

Extends - Ears, Speech
Obseleces - Gramaphone, Telegrams, Newspapers
Retrieves - Collective Belonging
Reverses - Abuse of Information, e.g. Hitler, Propaganda

Iconic and Arbitrary

Having studied semiotics for 4 years during Media A levels AND GCSE, I was really really not looking forward to this lecture! But actually I learnt quite a lot (just shows you can't always assume things). I was particularly interested by 'Iconic and Arbitrary' signifiers. I decided to show my friend (who also studied media at a level) some iconic and arbitrary images and she just didnt get it! From this I feel the idea that an 'iconic' signifier isn't necessarily a more realistic signifier for everyone, for example, in different cultures different signifiers mean different things. Therefore, surely depending on cultural aspects of your life, you will gain a different signified from different images you are shown? This jogged my memory a bit and I remembered something I had been shown a couple of years ago regarding the way that film posters are designed differently for other countries. I can't remember the exact film that it was, however it had a cartoon (arbitrary) image of a woman dressed in little clothing, but in the Indian version of the poster the woman was covered up with another picture. This all comes down to culture, because even though the picture was an arbitrary one, what was signified to an eastern audience, was a different message or value, than it was to a western audience

I've been trying to find some interesting pictures that are relevent to my essay topic... took me a while but heres what i've found...


Arbitrary image, e.g a cartoon drawing, painting



Iconic image, such as a photograph, or even better a moving image

By encorporating this semiotic related theory into society we start to understand a lot more about semiotics and how the notion of the 'sign' is extremely important in the analysis of media texts, and also everyday life.
Some interesting further reading on this I have found is "semiotics for begginners" (Chandler,D,2007)

Binary Opposition

Just thought of some more examples;
Adult - Child
Honesty- Lies
Heaven - Earth ?

Intertextuality

Really hadn't studied Intertextuality in depth before, but it turned out to be really good. I've watched both of the versions of Planet of the Apes before and I didn't notice the connection even though I knew Charlton Heston (who I absolutly dispise!!) was in the second one. I love stuff like that though, I also found it a bit weird that half the class in the seminar hadn't watched Nosferatu before?! How is that possible! After the lecture I decided to do a little bit more research on Intertextuality in film particularly. Is it just me or does every horror film follow the conventions set up by the "Master of Suspense" Alfred Hitchcock? Everything from the scores of his films (obviously appropriate to mention Bernard Herrmann in this sentence) which build tension, to the camera angles and the red herrings, have been copied since he devised his winning formula. Learning about Intertextuality today has really helped me to gain a deeper knowledge. Everything is borrowed nothing is new.

Process Model of Communication and Cybernetics - MHC 12/10/10

MCH this week taught us more about cybernetics and introduced us to the 'Process model of communication' One thing during the lecture that I found interesting was a quote that our lecturer said;
'Seeking redundancy in an entropic world'
I thought it really reflected modern society, every so often you hear someone say something like 'oh anything for an easy life'