SOCB50H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Roland Barthes, Semiotics, Kerry Washington
Document Summary
Topic: mass media and the social construction of deviance and normality. Looking and seeing culturally specific, politically charged and has to do with power: power associated with whether you have the right to look at something or not. Example: images with controversy: 2 year old syrian boy . A lot of politics surrounding it and a lot of controversy surrounding conscience choice? what happened. Semiotics think of things like images/pictures as signs and symbols and language and is based in symbols. Eventually, they were morphed into words: a sign can be depicted into two ways. 1) signifier what is literally being represented/denoted (word signs) 2) signified what is represented culturally, what is the meaning (word: signs can have multiple meanings. Images have three levels of meaning: denotative meaning literal, descriptive meaning of an image, connotative meaning culturally specific meanings of an image.
