Chapter 20

The Semiotics of the Mass Media

Marcel Danesi

20.1 Introduction

The objective of semiotics is to study the production and comprehension of signs

and sign systems as they manifest themselves across cultures, contexts, media,
channels of communication, and even species (Posner et al. 1997–2004). Of par-
ticular interest to the present topic is the study of how signs and their utilization in
textual forms by the mass media shape social processes or perhaps mirror them.
This branch has come to be known broadly as media semiotics, aiming to explore
at a deeper level the implicit or unconscious, signifying structures and practices
present in mass media content. As an analytical and conceptual framework, it has
proven itself to be particularly well suited to deciphering media effects on cultural
trends and on how meaning systems inherent in human codes are transformed for
various purposes by the media.
The fundamental approach in media semiotics is to investigate how cultural
meanings encoded by media texts (programs, spectacles, and so on) are adopted,
adapted for specific purposes, and then redistributed throughout the culture. An
implicit “semiotic law of media” is, in fact, that as the media change, so too do the
patterns of semiosis—the making and utilization of signs and sign forms (texts,
codes, etc.). Although the scientific analysis of the mass media and their effects
on people and culture go back at least to the late 1930s in disciplines such as psy-
chology and sociology, a full-fledged media semiotics did not surface until the late
1950s. It has now become a major enterprise within semiotics itself and also in
other fields as a conceptual and notional tool of analysis (Jensen 1995; Bignell
1997; Nöth 1997; Berger 2000; Danesi 2002, 2012). Like the other branches of the
discipline, media semiotics interweaves insights and findings from cognate fields in
order to unravel the modalities implicit in “mediated signification,” as media-based
and media-delivered meanings are commonly called.

M. Danesi ()
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
e-mail: marcel.danesi@utoronto.ca

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 485

P. P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics,
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_20
486 M. Danesi

20.2 The Origins of Scientific Media Study

The scientific study of the media predates the advent of media semiotics. Before the
appearance of such study, various social critics in the industrialist era were already
assailing the advent of mass print media (newspapers, tabloids, dime novels, and
the like) as breeding a vulgar form of mass culture. The nineteenth-century British
social critic Matthew Arnold (1869), for example, saw mass culture as producing a
tasteless and homogenized form of language and art generally. Arnold warned his
contemporaries that this trend was a threat to civilized society. His attack was taken
up by another British intellectual, Frank R. Leavis (1952), who saw the spread of an
ever-expanding popular culture through mass communications technologies such
as radio as evidence of the decline of civilization. Although these opinions are now
viewed as manifestly elitist critiques, with no empirical evidence to back them up,
they are still considered to be valuable contributions to the debate today of the ef-
fects of new media on individuals, culture, and social systems.
The philosophers of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, founded in
1922, also assailed the mass-mediated culture of modern capitalist societies from a
specific philosophical angle—Marxism. Scholars like Theodor W. Adorno (1941),
Max Horkheimer (1947), and Leo Lowenthal (1949) characterized such societies
as producing cultural “products”—works of literature, music, and so on—as if they
were “commodities” to be sold and quickly discarded in the marketplace just like
manufactured commodities. At about the same time, American journalist Walter
Lippmann (1922) presented a similar view of mass culture in his controversial
book, Public Opinion. Lippmann claimed that the mass media had a powerful effect
on the minds of people. That claim is the earliest version of what soon after came
to be called hypodermic needle theory (HNT)—a view which asserts that the mass
media can directly influence behavior in the same way that a hypodermic needle can
directly affect the body. The American scholar Harold Lasswell took up Lippmann’s
basic view in Propaganda Technique in World War I (1927), arguing that mass-
mediated content influenced people’s outlooks and behaviors (see McCombs 1994;
Lowery and DeFleur 1995; McQuail 2000).
The scientific study of media effects, however, did not crystallize until a truly
remarkable and now well-known event took place in 1938—a radio broadcast of
the War of the Worlds, which was a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel about
the invasion of Earth by aliens by the actor Orson Welles, imitating the style of
news bulletins interrupting a musical program. The idea was to recreate the novel in
modern terms using the radio as a metaphor for how people came to grips with real-
ity. But many listeners mistook the bulletins as describing an actual occurrence—
the invasion of earth by aliens—despite regular announcements that it was fiction.
Some left their homes in panic; others contacted the local authorities. The event led
to the first psychological study of the media, called the Cantril Study, after Princ-
eton University professor Hadley Cantril (1940) and a team of researchers inter-
viewed 135 subjects directly affected by the event. Titled The Invasion from Mars:
A Study in the Psychology of Panic, the study appeared to lend empirical support
20  The Semiotics of the Mass Media 487

to the belief that mass media influenced people negatively—a view that up till then
was only speculation—because it obliterated the dividing line between fiction and
reality. The panic caused by the broadcast was real, even though many subjects did
not admit to believing it, lying in order to hide their shame.
The study was quickly criticized as being flawed, since it did not establish a
statistical correlation between the radio broadcast and the degree of reported panic.
Moreover, the panic may have been caused by subsequent media reports exaggerat-
ing the story. In actual fact, no deaths or injuries were ever connected to the radio
broadcast; and the streets were never crowded with hysterical citizens as the media
claimed. The reported panic was itself a media fiction. Regardless of such criticism
and flaws, the study established a scientific basis to the study of the media, since
it aimed to determine if a specific media event did indeed affect people, opening
the door to a series of follow-up studies. Data and theories of the media started pil-
ing up. In contrast to the Cantril Study, some claimed that people got out of media
content what they were already inclined to get. For example, in an influential 1948
study, The People’s Choice, the American sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and a team of
researchers (Lazarsfeld et al. 1948) found that the media had very little (if any) abil-
ity to change people’s minds about how they would vote in an election. The research
concluded that people simply took out of media content only the views that fitted
their preconceptions, paying little or no attention to the others.
Follow-up research has largely corroborated Lazarsfeld’s findings, demonstrat-
ing, cumulatively, that the reception and use of media content is context-bound and
often mediated by the communities in which people lived or to which they aligned
themselves. Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) showed that people’s interpretations of me-
dia content were consistent with the values of the social class or group to which
they belonged or which they sympathized with. In effect, audiences react to media
content as members of interpretive communities—families, unions, neighborhoods,
churches, peer groups, and so on. In such communities, there are “opinion leaders”
(for example, union leaders, church ministers, and the like) who influence how the
other members will interpret a media event. So, in contrast to HNT, which portrays
media impact as a one-step flow reaching a homogeneous and passive audience
directly, the work by Lazarsfeld and his coresearchers saw it as a two-step flow, in
which the first step was through the opinion leader(s) who interpret media content,
and then pass it on to group members thus shaping their opinions (the second step).
Lazarsfeld also argued that the media actually have a conservative social “func-
tion,” rather than a purported disruptive one (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). For exam-
ple, the representation of violence and deviancy on TV crime programs will hardly
lead to more violence or violent crime in society, because such representations have
a moral subtext built into them, warning people about the dangers of violence and
crime. This is known as Cultivation Theory; it claims that the media “cultivate,” not
threaten, the status quo. The overrepresentation of violence in the media, therefore,
actually reinforces a respect for law and order.
In a series of follow-up studies, Elihu Katz (1959) argued that audiences are
not passive consumers of media representations. On the contrary, they use the me-
dia for their own purposes and gratifications. Known as Uses and Gratifications
488 M. Danesi

Theory, Katz suggested that individuals use the media for their own purposes thus
blocking any HNT effect that they might produce (see also Klapper 1960). But
others have argued that the media do produce effects in an unconscious way. In a
1970 study, Gerbner looked at the beliefs of habitual television viewers and those
of nonviewers, finding that awareness of violence was higher in the former than it
was in the latter (Gerbner and Gross 1976). But awareness of violence does not lead
to violent action. People watching television violence simply seem to believe that
there is more violence in society than there actually is. In 1984, Elisabeth Noelle-
Neumann demonstrated with her work that there are, however, long-term effects
from exposure to the media, because the media tend to generate consent or consen-
sus, and those who do not subscribe to it might feel marginalized. Known as Spiral
of Silence Theory, she claimed that those who perceive their opinion as being a
minority one, for example, tend to remain silent fearing ridicule or marginalization
(see also Scheufele and Moy 2000). Thus, the media reinforce the majority opinion
by “silencing” dissenting voices.
British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1977) also suggested that people do not
absorb media representations passively, but rather read them in one of three ways.
The preferred reading is the one that the media makers hope people will take from
their representations. However, Hall asserts, this does not always happen. Indeed,
the most common form of reading is the negotiated one, whereby audiences are
affected only by some parts of media content, disputing or rejecting others. And
some people even tend to give an oppositional reading to media content—a read-
ing that is in contrast to what the makers of the media product had intended. Hall’s
contemporary, the British social critic Raymond Williams (1950), argued that
mediated spectacles, performances, texts, and forms (such as media slang) are self-
perpetuating because of their ability to adapt to social change. Williams called the
mainstream form of media culture in place at any given time as being based on a
dominant interpretive code. He saw in this code residual tendencies from previ-
ous codes, including nondominant ones, and emergent tendencies, which point to
the future. It is in tapping into the latter that media industries beget their power to
change and thus perpetuate themselves.
Williams also subscribed to the view that media texts are controlled by those in
power in order to ensure consent by the masses. Known as Hegemony Theory—
a concept going back to Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1937)—supporters of
this perspective see genuine culture under modern capitalism as improbable,
condemning media representations generally as forms of propaganda designed to
indoctrinate the masses and disguise social inequalities, with the bottom line be-
ing the profit motive. A version of hegemony theory is the one associated with
the writings of the American linguist Noam Chomsky, sometimes called Gatekeep-
ing Theory or Agenda-Setting Theory. For example, Chomsky and Herman (1988)
claimed that those who control the funding and ownership of the media, including
the government in power, pressurize the media to select and present news coverage
in ways that are favorable to them. They characterize the mass media as nothing
more than a propaganda arm of the government and of capitalist interests, which are
complicit in the “manufacturing of consent.” The selection of the topics to be printed
20  The Semiotics of the Mass Media 489

or broadcast, the establishment of the character of the concerns to be expressed, the

shaping of the ways in which issues are to be framed, and the filtering out of any in-
formation assessed to be contradictory are the means used to manufacture consent.
Examples used to support this view include American TV coverage of recent wars,
from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror (in Afghanistan and Iraq). The end result
is a media propaganda system that espouses an elemental form of patriotism and the
benevolence of power brokers and the institutions that they head.
During the 1950s and 1960s, communication theorists also took interest in the
mass media. Prominent among them was the Canadian Marshall McLuhan (1951,
1962). McLuhan never really coined a term for his theory. However, the term Con-
vergence Theory, as used today to refer to the integration of technologies with
cultural forms and evolutionary tendencies (Negroponte 1995), would seem to be
an appropriate one to characterize his overall approach retrospectively. Of special
significance for semiotics is McLuhan’s notion that the media influence text con-
struction and interpretation. He called this mediation, adopting and adapting a term
used originally by the Frankfurt School intellectuals. Mediation is the likely reason
why the media have largely replaced the traditional spheres (family, religion, and so
on) in shaping signification. McLuhan claimed that mediation influences how peo-
ple understand the world and how they evolve psychologically and culturally. The
reason for this is that media are extensions of human beings—they extend sensory,
physical, and intellectual capacities—and thus we experience them as “natural.”
The claim that media are extensions of human faculties is a concept that parallels
Charles Peirce’s (1931–1958) contention that signs are extensions of sensory and
intellectual processes. In effect, signs are tools—forms or artifacts (real or imagi-
nary)—that extend some sensory, physical, or intellectual capacity.
In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics attacked the mainstream media as cater-
ing to patriarchal patterns of culture and thus misrepresenting women. They argued
that representations of women in the movies, on television, and in print were often
degrading, and, more ominously, a source of influence in promoting violence against
women. Although no empirical evidence was ever produced to back up the latter
claim, it was clear that some of the critiques were well founded, given the images
of women in the media as either sexual creatures or subservient homemakers. How-
ever, already in the 1950s, alongside such patriarchal views of women, there were
sitcoms, such as The Honeymooners, which portrayed women as independent think-
ers who were critical of the male-dominated ambiance in which they lived. By the
1990s, the feminist approach changed radically, as it became obvious that, perhaps,
the media ironically and paradoxically enhanced the liberation of women. The new
feminism came to be called the postfeminist movement. The claim was made (and
continues to be made) that the display of female sexuality in media should not be
viewed as exploitation, but rather as a transgressive form of representation against
previous and largely religious restrictions on the public display of women’s bodies.
Today, the debate over the validity of any one theory of the media has become
largely politicized. Some see the current digital media as sources of negativity on the
social order; others see them instead as mirrors of what is already present in society
or as liberating channels of communication. The study of media now focuses on
490 M. Danesi

the effects of digital media on people. This is an ever-burgeoning topic that cannot
be broached here. Suffice it to say that results from studies of digital media effects
seem to parallel those of the effects produced by traditional media.
In actual fact, the idea of representations affecting people is much older than
the current-day debate. The philosopher Aristotle saw representation (such as a
theatrical play) as the primary means through which human beings came to grasp
reality. He warned that representations create illusory mind worlds and, thus, can
easily lead people astray. Plato was even more adamant about the effects of repre-
sentations, claiming that they led people away from contemplating life as it really
is. Representations thus had to be monitored because they could foster antisocial
behavior or encourage the imitation of evil things. Plato’s argument has not disap-
peared from the modern world. It is the reason why we accept such restrictions on
our freedom as movie ratings. These are modern-day “Platonic attempts” to protect
people from themselves.

20.3 The Advent of Media Semiotics

As mentioned, the study of the media from the standpoint of semiotics surfaced in
the late 1950s, when Roland Barthes applied semiotic notions and methodological
principles to the study of mass-mediated popular culture in his 1957 book, Mytholo-
gies. Philosophically, Barthes saw contemporary capitalist culture as a commodity
culture, like the Frankfurt scholars, and thus as one beset by the interminable repeti-
tion of textual and performative styles and forms, most of which were recyclings of
previous material (see also Lavers 1982; Culler 1983; Moriarty 1991; Cobley 2006).
The marketplace is what generates a constant need in people for “new books, new
programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning” (Barthes 1975,
p. 24). But the psychological reason why people literally “buy” the commodities
is because they reflect a second-order or connotative level of meaning, connect-
ing modern humans to historically based meanings, and thus validating them at
an unconscious level. A photograph in a newspaper, for example, does not simply
portray a fact visually. It takes on historically relevant social connotations through
the way it is shown, where it is placed in the layout, and how captions annotate it.
The photograph of a cat, when viewed without a caption, lends itself to many pos-
sibilities of interpretation. However, if the caption Looking for a Companion were
enjoined to it, then the photo might be perceived as an appeal for pet adoption or
some other meaning involving a second-order interpretation of the cat. The thing
to note is that this connotation is linked to the meaning of cats in the culture, thus
creating a signifying link to other domains of the culture. Barthes also showed how
media texts are assembled through a form of pastiche. A newspaper, for instance,
is put together as an amalgam of information, advertising, current interest stories,
cartoons, puzzles, and so on and so forth. One does not read such a text logically
or linearly, but associatively and connectively by assembling its individual parts
individualistically and selectively (Danesi 2002).
20  The Semiotics of the Mass Media 491

Barthes also argued that mass-mediated texts and spectacles are nothing more
than recycled ones that were based on culture-specific mythic themes. To distin-
guish between the original myths and their contemporary media versions, Barthes
designated the latter mythologies. In superhero comics and movies, for example,
the heroes and villains are reconstructions of ancient mythic heroes and their op-
ponents, each possessing the same personality characteristics. Superman has the
same kinds of powers that an Atlas or a Hercules had; he also has a tragic flaw, like
Achilles; and so on. Because of the unconscious power of myth, fictional media
heroes become cultural icons—symbolizing virtue, heroism, and righteousness—
above and beyond the comic and movie scripts in which they appear. They are
recycled mythic personae. So, Barthes claimed, the code is the same—the hero code
in this case—but its textualization and representation is adapted and updated to fit
the present day.
By the early 2000s, media semiotics had carved a substantial niche for itself
throughout the academic terrain. As a major framework within general media stud-
ies itself, its concepts are now used to study television, radio, the Internet, video
games, social media (such as Facebook), text messaging, and so on. Two factors
influencing the media semiotics and media studies generally is the role of technol-
ogy and globalization in signification processes. In his online article “Media Studies
2.0,” David Gauntlett (2007) argues for a new approach to the study of media—an
approach that would no longer focus on the traditional division between audiences
and producers, but on the effects of the new technologies on the collapse of such tra-
ditional dichotomies. There is, no doubt, a close relation between technology, social
evolution, and the media. But the traditional dichotomies may not have disappeared
as Gauntlett and others argue. Internet audiences exist as communities in the same
way that audiences existed for everything from vaudeville spectacles to television
sitcoms. The problem is determining how they are constituted in what McLuhan
called the virtual global village.
Actually, long before the Internet age, the intrinsic interconnection between mass
communications technologies, signification, and cultural evolution became, already
in the early period, a fertile area of study, as a consequence of both Barthes’s and
McLuhan’s crucial insights. The American communication theorist Wilbur Schramm
(1982) eventually provided a common terminology for studying this connection,
elaborating on previous work by the telecommunications engineer Claude Shannon
(1948)—a terminology that continues to be used today. The notions of encoder and
decoder are central to Schramm’s overall conception—the encoder is the compo-
nent (human or electronic) converting a message into a form that can be transmitted
through an appropriate channel; the decoder reverses the encoding process so that
the message can be received and understood successfully. Schramm’s model came
to be called, logically, the Sender–Message–Channel–Receiver model, or SMCR
for short. The critical part of this model in the Internet age is that often the two are
one and the same as people go online to post their own productions. The problem
is in determining which audiences are available for such productions. The problem
still remains an open one.
492 M. Danesi

An elaboration of the SMCR model that was based on the notion of code, was the
one put forward by George Gerbner (1956), amalgamating general media studies
with basic semiotic concepts. The relations between the sexes in, say, a television
sitcom, or the features that make a hero, superhuman, in adventure movies are based
on codes that have a sociohistorical origin. Codes are sign systems—collections of
signs that cohere with each other in historically determined ways. There are three
general features that define codes and their relation to the media (Danesi 2007).
The first one can be called representationality. This implies simply that codes are
used to stand for—represent—something innovative or habitual. The representa-
tion, moreover, will vary according to the medium. The news on television will be
represented in a more visual and condensed fashion (given the visual nature of the
television medium) than it will in print, which is less condensed, allowing for more
reflection on content. The second feature is interpretability. This implies that mes-
sages can be understood successfully only by anyone who is familiar with the codes
used to construct them (or which underlie them). The third is contextualization. This
implies that message interpretation is affected by the context in which it occurs.

20.4 Structuralism

Structuralism is the general term used in various disciplines, including media stud-
ies, to designate a specific approach based on several fundamental ideas, especially
the one that human-produced forms (including media ones) exhibit structure. In
music, for example, the arrangement of tones into structures, known as melodies, is
felt to be “musically correct” only if this arrangement is consistent with harmonic
structure, as we have come to experience it and thus understand it. Overall, in order
to recognize something as a melody, one must be: (1) able to differentiate it from
other melodies and (2) know how its component parts fit together. More technically,
the former is called paradigmatic (differential) and the latter syntagmatic (combina-
tory) structure.
One of the main methods of structuralism is that of opposition. What keeps two
words, such as cat and rat, distinct and, thus, meaning-bearing? It is, in part, the
fact that the phonic difference between the initial c and r is perceived as distinctive.
This constitutes a paradigmatic feature of the two words. Similarly, a major and
minor chord in the same key will be perceived as significantly distinct on account
of a half-tone difference in the middle note of the chords. These examples support
the structuralist claim that forms are recognized as meaning-bearing structures in
part through a perceivable difference built into some aspect of their physical consti-
tution—a minimal difference in sound, a minimal difference in tone, etc. The psy-
chological importance of this feature was noticed by the early-nineteenth-century
psychologists, who termed it opposition. In his Cours de linguistique ­générale, the
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) saw opposition, which he called différence,
as an intrinsic property of language. The linguist determines the meaning and
grammatical function of a word such as cat by opposing it to another word such as
20  The Semiotics of the Mass Media 493

rat. This will show not only that the initial consonants c and r are paradigmatically
significant in English but also what makes the word cat unique, pinpointing what
cat means by virtue of how it is different from other words such as rat, hat, and so
on.
A paradigmatic structure tells only part of the story of how we recognize mean-
ing-bearing forms. The other part is syntagmatic structure. Consider the words cat
and rat once again. These are perceived as being structurally appropriate English
words, not only because they are recognizable as distinct through a simple binary
opposition of initial sound cues but also because the combination of sounds with
which they are constructed is consistent with English word structure. On the other
hand, rtat would not be recognizable as a legitimate word because it violates a spe-
cific aspect of such structure—namely, English words cannot start with the cluster
rt. This is an example of syntagmatic structure. In music, a melody is recognizable
as appropriate only if the notes follow each other according to the rules of harmony.
As a technique, opposition was elaborated by a number of linguists who met
regularly in Prague in the early 1920s. As Charles K. Ogden (1932, p. 18) claimed,
“the theory of opposition offers a new method of approach not only in the case
of all those words which can best be defined in terms of their opposites, or of the
oppositional scale on which they appear, but also to any word.” In the 1930s and
1940s, structuralists started noticing that opposition was not confined to language.
Also, as work with binary oppositions showed in the 1950s, there are also grada-
tions within the binary oppositions themselves, which are due to culture-specific
connotative processes. So, for example, between night and day there is dawn, noon,
twilight, and other gradations. Thus, night and day wouldseem to be limiting poles
in a continuum of meaning between these two that can be segmented in any way a
language (and culture) desires or needs. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss also
entered the debate on opposition theory in the 1950s by showing that pairs of op-
positions often cohere into sets forming recognizable units. In analyzing kinship
systems, Lévi-Strauss (1958) found that the elementary unit of kinship was made up
of a set of four oppositions: brother versus sister, husband versus wife, father versus
son, and mother’s brother versus sister’s son. Lévi-Strauss suspected that similar
sets characterized units in other cultural systems and, thus, that their study would
provide fundamental insights into the overall nature of human social organization.

20.5 Post-Structuralist Approaches

A major problem with structuralism was the question of the function of the two
poles in a conceptual binary opposition, such as night versus day. Which of the
two is the default or basic one and which is derived? To answer this question, the
early structuralists introduced the notion of markedness (Andrews 1990; Battistella
1990). Is night absence of day or vice versa is day absence of night? We seem to
perceive day as more basic. This is called the unmarked pole, whereas night is the
marked pole, standing out as absence of day.
494 M. Danesi

Markedness theory raises some fundamental questions about the relation

of oppositions, such as the masculine versus feminine one, and society. In some
languages, the masculine as the unmarked form in grammar generally indicates that
the society that uses the language is historically male-centered. As King (1991, p. 2)
aptly puts it, in societies where the masculine is the unmarked form in grammar,
“men have traditionally been the political leaders, the most acclaimed writers, the
grammarians, and the dictionary makers, and it is their world view that is encoded
in language.” On the other hand, in societies (or communities) where the feminine
is the unmarked form, the women are typically the ones in charge. Research has
tended to bear this out, suggesting that sign structure mirrors social structure.
In media semiotics, the notion of markedness provides a useful framework for
explaining the content and evolution of various texts. For example, in the early
1950s, TV sitcoms the fatherhood versus motherhood opposition reflected the
existing social view of fatherhood as unmarked and, thus, the father as the head
of the family. This was evident even in the titles of the American sitcoms (for
example, Father Knows Best). Motherhood was portrayed as complementary or
supplementary to fatherhood in the overall representation of the family. There were
some exceptions to this, of course, but by and large fatherhood was depicted as the
unmarked pole in the opposition. As society changed in the 1970s and 1980s, so too
did the markedness structure of the opposition. It came to be deconstructed, with
sitcoms such as All in the Family, Married with Children, and The Simpsons. To
this day, the notion of markedness is used in media semiotics mainly because it has
proven itself to be very useful.
But despite its obvious utility, opposition and markedness theory raised issues
early on, leading to the movement known as post-structuralism as early as the
1960s—a movement associated at first with the late French philosophers Michel
Foucault (1972) and Jacques Derrida (1976, 1978). Derrida brusquely contested
the classic notions of Saussurean structuralism, which he saw as logocentric. The
central notion that set off this movement was that oppositions do not encode reality,
but rather construct it. According to Derrida, all sign systems are self-referential—
signs refer to other signs, which refer to still other signs, and so on ad infinitum.
Thus, what appears stable and natural turns out to be illogical and purely arbitrary.
In contrast to Saussure’s idea of différence, Derrida (1978) coined the word dif-
férance (spelled with an “a,” but pronounced in the same way), to intentionally
satirize Saussurean theory. With this term, Derrida wanted to show that Saussure’s
so-called discoveries could be deconstructed into the implicit biases that he brought
to the analytical task at hand, because a science of language can never succeed since
it must be carried out through language itself, and thus will partake of the slippage
(as he called it) it discovers. As Nesselroth (2007, p. 442) has remarked, Derrida’s
approach was one that “constantly decenters fixed meanings and puts into question
the ontological status of language (both written and spoken) and of communication
in general.” However, the Prague school linguist Roman Jakobson (1942) argued
early on that the notion of opposition could, actually, be used to explain the psychol-
ogy of language ontogenesis, arguing that it was hardly just a construct. He showed
that sound oppositions that occur frequently are among the first ones learned by
20  The Semiotics of the Mass Media 495

children. Nasal consonants—/n/ and /m/—exist in all languages; significantly, they

are also among the earliest sounds acquired by children. On the other hand, con-
sonants pronounced near the back of the throat are relatively rare and, seemingly,
are among the last sounds to be acquired by children. In other words, the theory of
opposition predicts the sequence of sound acquisition in children.
Another critique of opposition theory is that it ignores associative meaning and
structure. The study of such structure came, actually, to the forefront starting in the
late 1970s within linguistics itself (Pollio et al. 1977; Lakoff and Johnson 1980,
1999; Fauconnier and Turner 2002). The American linguist George Lakoff and phi-
losopher Mark Johnson are primarily responsible for this paradigm shift, claiming
in 1980 that a simple linguistic metaphor, such as “My brother is a tiger,” cannot be
viewed as a simple idiomatic replacement for some literal form, but, rather, that it
revealed a conceptual systematicity. It is, more specifically, a token of an associa-
tive structure that they called a conceptual metaphor. This is why we can also say
that Sam or Sarah or whoever we want is an animal—a gorilla, snake, pig, puppy,
and so on—in attempting to portray his or her personality. Each specific linguistic
metaphor (“Sam is a gorilla,” “Sarah is a puppy,” etc.) is an instantiation of an ab-
stract metaphorical formula—people are animals. Now, does the existence of such
formulas in the brain lead to an invalidation of opposition theory? Conceptual meta-
phors are formed through image schemata, as Lakoff and Johnson have cogently
argued (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987). The image schematic source for the people
are animals conceptual metaphor seems to be an unconscious perception that hu-
man personalities and animal behaviors are linked in some way. In other words,
it is the output of an ontological opposition: humans as animals. It constitutes an
example of how opposition manifests itself as an associative phenomenon, not just a
polar one. In this case, the two parts of the opposition are not contrasted (as in night
vs. day), but equated: humans as animals. This suggests that oppositional structure
operates in a non-contrastive way at the level of figurative meaning.
Seen from the vantage point of contemporary semiotics, post-structuralism’s
main ideas were already implicit in the many ideas of Peircean semiotics and in
the fledgling views of early conceptual metaphor theory. The fact that logocentrism
characterizes semiotic practices themselves, is part of the infinite semiosis prin-
ciple in Peirce. For Derrida, because written language is the fundamental condi-
tion of knowledge-producing enterprises, these end up reflecting nothing more than
the writing practices used to articulate them. But this whole line of deconstructing
discourses does not take into account the functions of language as a metasystem
of understanding. Already in the 1930s, the German psychologist Karl Bühler
(1934, 1951) posited that language served understanding through three main func-
tions—the cognitive, the expressive, and the conative (or instrumental). The cogni-
tive function allows speakers to employ language for the transmission of factual
information, the expressive to convey mood or attitude, and the conative to influ-
ence the persons being addressed or to bring about some practical effect. These are
subsidiary to human intentionality, not its congeners. The debate is, of course, still
open; but the post-structuralist perspective has not, as yet, provided an alternative
to the study of semiosis.
496 M. Danesi

Post-structuralism has, nevertheless, had several interesting applications to the

study of the media. One of these is its claim that all texts have rhetorical structure.
Roland Barthes had already described media texts as fundamentally rhetorical, con-
sisting of two levels: the linguistic and the mythical. The linguistic level conveys
a denotative or referential meaning; the mythical is ensconced in unconscious
connotative (rhetorical) meanings. The meaning of a media text, thus, oscillates
back and forth between the linguistic (denotative) and rhetorical (mythic) levels.
The name Sonata refers to a specific car model, denoting, at the linguistic level, a
specific automobile. But, at a rhetorical level, the same sign connotes classic aes-
thetic qualities associated with classical music. All media texts are read in this way,
as Barthes claimed.
The above discussion is not meant to imply that structuralist techniques are no
longer used in media semiotics. The technique of opposition, as mentioned, contin-
ues to have widespread utilization. Like archetype theory in Jungian psychology,
which started rather simply as a way of understanding the recurrence of symbols
and rituals in cultures across the world, opposition theory is still useful in showing
how certain notions relate to each other throughout the human intellectual land-
scape. And, of course, the concept of mythic code is still a primary one. Consider
the case of the Star Wars set of six movies (1977–2005), which recycle many ele-
ments of the Greek myth. The set is divided into individual episodes, released in a
sequence that starts in medias res with the fourth episode being the first one put out.
Homer’s Iliad is structured in this manner. The unifying theme of all the episodes
is the universal struggle between good (the rebel alliance) and evil (the tyrannical
empire)—one of Lévi-Strauss’s basic mythic oppositions. The saga reverberates, in
fact, with other ancient mythic oppositions and themes (Danesi 2007).
Actually, media semiotics and media studies generally have discovered, in a
roundabout way, Charles Peirce’s notion of the interpretant, which is essentially
a process of infinite semiosis—that is, the process of deciphering what something
“stands for.” The Peircean approach to semiosis has become a dominant one in cur-
rent media semiotics, defining its current Zeitgeist. It has been particularly useful
in explaining the ways in which certain texts are designed to produce semiosis. A
common technique in Peircean-based media semiotics is to identify how iconicity
shapes the form and content of texts—iconicity (signs that resemble their referents)
being the primary force in semiosis. Iconic brand names and logos, for example,
dominate the marketing scene—Splash (detergent) evokes what is done with the
product through sound imitation (“splashing”); the Polo logo, which represents the
sport of polo visually with a horse and a rider dressed in polo garb; etc.

20.6 Simulacra

The term simulacrum is associated with the ideas of the late Jean Baudrillard (1973,
1975, 1981, 1983, 1987 ) who used it to claim that contemporary people have been
exposed so thoroughly to the media that they can no longer distinguish, or want to
20  The Semiotics of the Mass Media 497

distinguish, between reality and fantasy. In his view, the mind-world produced by
the media is perceived as hyperreal—that is, as more real than real. Simulacrum
theory is used often in media semiotics today.
Baudrillard insisted that a simulacrum effect is not the result of a simple copying
or imitation, but a form of consciousness that emerges on its own after a long ex-
posure to the media. Gilles Deleuze (1968, p. 69), on the other hand, saw the emer-
gence of simulacra effects in our mediated world as emerging on their own, without
reference to the media. An example that Baudrillard often used was that of Disney’s
Fantasyland and Magic Kingdom, which are copies of other fictional worlds. They
are copies of copies, and people appear to experience them as more real than real.
They are “simulation machines” which reproduce past images to create a new cog-
nitive and social environment for them. One thus constructs his or her identity in
this simulated world, perceiving himself or herself on its own terms and relating
to others accordingly. Eventually, as people engage constantly with the hyperreal,
everything—from politics to art—becomes governed by simulation. Only in such a
world is it possible for advertising—the maximum manufacturer of simulacra—to
become so powerful.
The simulacrum effect would explain the rise in popularity of the so-called real-
ity TV programs (Bignell 2005; Hill 2005; Huff 2006; Essany 2008). Sometimes
labeled “popular factual television,” this genre produces the simulacrum effect
because it blends information, entertainment, documentary, and drama into one
hyperreal form of representation. Reality television goes back to 1948, when Allen
Funt’s Candid Camera first aired, a program that was itself based on a previous
radio show. The program showed everyday people in contrived situations, tricking
them into doing or saying things unknowingly. The idea was to show how funny
people could be in the world of the simulacrum. A radio series called Nightwatch
in the early 1950s, that followed Californian police officers in Culver City, was
also very popular. In 1973, a 12-part series called An American Family was aired.
The series put the Loud family’s private lives on display. The program drew more
than ten million viewers and became a pop culture landmark. In 1992, MTV’s The
Real World debuted. It took place in a house, where seven strangers from different
backgrounds were supposed to live together for several months. Their daily lives
were captured on film. The program thus demonstrated what happened when the
characters on screen were not acting, but being themselves. The term reality TV
came into use in 2002, when CBS’s Survivor was aired, becoming an instant hit,
with contestants projected into an isolated setting facing challenges in order to win
prizes. Since then, the number of reality TV shows and websites has proliferated,
from real-life cop investigations (as in The First 48) to job interview sessions con-
ducted by Donald Trump.
The popularity of the genre, which blurs the distinction between the real and
the imaginary, seems to validate the notion of simulacrum theory. Having become
accustomed to looking at all kinds of screens, from television to computer screens,
it is really a small cognitive step into the world beyond the looking glass (to use a
Carrollian metaphor) and to believe that it is as real as the world outside the screen.
The 1999 movie, The Matrix understood this perfectly, portraying a world in which
498 M. Danesi

life is shaped by the screen. Like the main protagonist, Neo, we now experience
reality “on” and “through” the computer screen, and our consciousness is largely
shaped by that screen, whose technical name is the matrix, as the network of circuits
that defines computer technology is called. The same word also meant “womb,”
in Latin. The movie’s transparent subtext is that people are now born through two
kinds of wombs—the biological and the technological one. It is instructive to note
that the producers had approached Baudrillard to be a consultant for the movie.
Apparently, he turned them down.

20.7 Overall Perspective

Overall, media semiotics is all about the meaning structures inherent in media and
how they evolve over time through technological and social changes. It fleshes
out meanings from media texts through a series of notions discussed here, such
as opposition theory, code, text, iconicity, interpretant, deconstruction, and a few
others. It has provided a lexicon and manual of notions that allow analysts from
various disciplines to extract from media analysis relevant findings and theories
of their own. On the one hand, the semiotic study of media culture is fundamen-
tally an exercise in unraveling the psychological reasons why such things as sports
spectacles, hula hoops, recipes, posters, cars, songs, dances, television programs,
clothing fashions, and the like gain popularity. On the other hand, it is fundamen-
tally the same approach taken by literary critics to the study of literary texts. Like
literary critics, media semioticians identify and dissect the various genres that make
up their subject and also explore the nature of audiences for each genre.
The appeal of interdisciplinary study is that it leaves the interpretation of a text or
spectacle flexible and open to variation. This openness to interpretation is the main
reason why there is really no one overarching semiotic theory of media culture, but
many. Semiotic notions and techniques are currently being applied to the study of
digital media, especially social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. The structure
of the media texts and the nature of their contents, not to mention their psycho-
logical functions, are being investigated with the microscope of media semiotics
more and more (see, for instance, Mazzali-Lurati 2007). The Internet has already
morphed into the primary platform for enacting new forms of media semiosis. The
Internet has already led to a redefinition of the roles of the author and the reader
of a text. The “popular” in popular culture is now taking on a literal meaning, as
readers interact with authors, scholars, artists, and others in determining how they
will ultimately be informed, engaged, or entertained. One area of particular interest
is that of how the new technologies are shaping codes and traditional sign systems.
One of the most conspicuous features of online communication is miniaturization,
as evident in the constant production of compressed forms (abbreviations of words
and phrases, acronyms, etc.) in the language used in chat rooms and other virtual
linguistic communities. Is this a new linguistic phenomenon responding to new
technologies? Is it spreading to language generally? What does this foretell for the
20  The Semiotics of the Mass Media 499

future of writing, given that there are few, if any, corrective forces at work in cyber-
space? Will media texts become reshaped as a consequence? As mentioned at the
start of this discussion, media semiotics can provide relevant insights into the inter-
connection between technology and culture, perhaps like no other discipline can.
Many are concerned about cyberspace and its influence on true culture and on
the human psyche. As a result, some are prepared to take interventionist action.
There is nothing new here. As Stan Cohen (1972) observed in his study of mods and
rockers, new trends tend to be perceived with “moral panic,” that is, as indicative of
a decline in morality and traditional values. As it turns out, however, as these lose
their impact, blending silently into the larger cultural mainstream or disappearing
altogether, the moral panic also evanesces. The idea that mass media culture is det-
rimental to human beings ignores not only history but also the fact that people can
discriminate between levels of culture. Moreover, history also teaches us that inter-
ventionism has never worked. Prohibition did not work. Censorship does not work
and can even backfire. As Peter Blecha (2004) has documented, some of the most
famous songs of Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Woody Guthrie, the Beatles, the Roll-
ing Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, The Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Public Enemy,
Ice-T, 2 Live Crew, Nirvana, Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, The Dixie Chicks, and
many more, were either censored or stifled in some way at the start. But all this did
was to make them even more popular than they otherwise would have been. Even if
it were possible in a consumerist culture to control the contents of media texts, this
would invariably prove to be counterproductive. The answer is to become aware of
the meanings that are generated by pop culture representations. When the human
mind is aware of these, it will be better able to fend off any undesirable effects that
they may cause. That is where media semiotics has proved itself to be the most
useful.

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Marcel Danesi  is professor of semiotics and communication theory, and coordinator of the Uni-
versity of Toronto Undergraduate Program in Semiotics and Communication Theory at Victoria
College. Professor Danesi was, for many years, a distinguished member of the Department of
Italian Studies where he taught applied linguistics and semiotics. He is presently a member of the
502 M. Danesi

Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Professor Danesi is editor and coeditor of several book
series with the University of Toronto Press, St. Martin Press, Mouton de Gruyter, and Guerra (in
Italy) dealing with research and theory in the field of semiotics. Professor Danesi published pro-
fusely in the fields of linguistics, Italian studies, applied and cultural semiotics, and communica-
tion theory. Among Professor Danesi’s numerous publications on semiotic topics, there are: Vico,
Metaphor, and the Origin of Language (Indiana University Press, 1993), Cool: The Signs and
Meanings of Adolescence (University of Toronto Press, 1994), and the latest Analyzing Cultures,
with Professor Paul Perron (Indiana University Press, 1999) and The Forms of Meaning, with
professor Thomas A. Sebeok (Mouton de Gruyter, 2000).