Understanding Media Semiotics: Second Edition 9781350064171, 9781350064164, 9781350064201, 9781350064195

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Understanding Media Semiotics Second Edition

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Also available from Bloomsbury The Semiotics of Emoji, by Marcel Danesi Visible Signs, by David Crow Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics, by Tony Jappy Critical Semiotics, by Gary Genosko

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Understanding Media Semiotics Second Edition By Marcel Danesi

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2002 This edition published 2019 Copyright © Marcel Danesi, 2019 Marcel Danesi has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Olivia D’Cruz Cover image © Getty Images/xavierarnau All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Danesi, Marcel, 1946- author. Title: Understanding media semiotics / by Marcel Danesi. Description: Second edition. | London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018003673 (print) | LCCN 2018011533 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350064188 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350064195 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350064171 (HB) | ISBN 9781350064164 (PB) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media--Semiotics. Classification: LCC P96.S43 (ebook) | LCC P96.S43 D36 2018 (print) | DDC 302.23/01/4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003673 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6417-1 PB: 978-1-3500-6416-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6419-5 eBook: 978-1-3500-6418-8 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction

1

1 The mediated world

5

2 An outline of semiotic theory

37

3 Print media

71

4 Audio media

107

5 Film and video

141

6 Television

175

7 The computer, the internet, and artificial intelligence

199

8 Advertising

227

9 Impacts of the media

251

Glossary 275 Bibliography 283 Index 298

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Acknowledgments I

thank Victoria College of the University of Toronto for having allowed me the privilege of teaching and coordinating its program in semiotics and communication theory over many years. Another debt of gratitude goes to the many students I have taught over three decades. Their insights and enthusiasm have made my job simply wonderful! They are the impetus for this book.

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Introduction Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions. —C. Wright Mills (1916–62)

I

n a 1997 James Bond movie titled Tomorrow Never Dies, the evil villain, unlike the villains of previous Bond movies, seeks control over the world, not by means of brute force, but by gaining control of all mass communications media. The movie recites the exploits of Elliott Carver, a scoundrel who, at the beginning of the movie, is on the verge of taking over the minds of common people, by determining what they will see and hear. Needless to say, the forces of good, spearheaded by the dauntless hero James Bond, end up “saving the world” from the ruthless domination of a deranged and maniacal media mogul. The transparent message of that movie, and of many others similar to it in theme that have come out since 1997, is that we live in a world that is being threatened more and more by those who hold the levers of “media power,” that is, by those who control television networks, movie production studios, and computer media. But the fear of media moguls is not something that is felt exclusively by cineastes. Indeed, many are the volumes published in the last decade decrying the serious dangers that the media pose to all facets of contemporary society. Most of these scathingly criticize the individuals and groups who control media institutions. Many others seek to give a rational interpretation of the social conditions that have developed from the global spread of media culture. However, in my view the real antidote to any “media manipulation” is to understand the “meaning structures” that the media have helped to spread into the system of everyday modern life. The purpose of this book is to do exactly that—to take a close look at those structures within the conceptual framework of the science called semiotics. The particular view taken here is that these structures seem so “natural” and “meaningful” to us because, as the late Canadian communications expert Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) aptly observed, the media we make are unconscious extensions of our inbuilt sensory and cognitive processes.

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Goals of the present volume The academic study of the media traces its roots to America in the 1930s. It was not until the late 1950s, however, that semiotics ventured into this domain of investigation. That was the decade in which the French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915–80) showed, for the first time, the importance of studying media in terms of how they generate meanings. Semiotic method, as Barthes argued in his 1957 masterpiece Mythologies, is fundamental because, unlike other approaches to media, it focuses almost exclusively on hidden meanings. Incredibly, only a handful of textbooks of “media semiotics” à  la Barthes have come forward since the late 1950s. A large part of the reason for this is the fact that semiotics has never really found a niche in the academic landscape and, therefore, that very few “full-time” professional practitioners of semiotics exist. Moreover, for some reason, in the decades following Barthes’ work, semiotics quickly gained the unseemly reputation of a field that was too technical, laden with jargon, and highly abstruse. This book has been written, in large part, to show that just the opposite is true. In actual fact, semiotics consists of a handful of basic notions that can be easily applied to the study of any kind of human meaning system. This text is thus intended as an introduction to media semiotics. I have tailored it for students taking beginning courses in such fields as general semiotics, psychology, linguistics, mythology, education, literary studies, sociology, cultural anthropology, culture studies, communication studies, and media analysis in mind, so that they can have a practical manual at their disposal to help them investigate and understand media from the particular standpoint of semiotic theory. To facilitate its reading, I have avoided making constant references to the relevant literature. The works that have informed the various commentaries, descriptions, and analyses that I offer in this book are listed at the back. Occasionally, I will put forward a critical assessment of a certain type of media product. But criticism is not the primary goal of this text. There are thousands of books on the market that critique media from all kinds of ideological angles. Some of these are included in the bibliography at the back of this book. My primary goal here is simply to demonstrate how semiotics can be applied to the study of media—no more, no less. Semiotic method is characterized by two main investigative procedures: 1 Historical Inquiry. Meaning systems must first be examined historically. The reason for this is fairly obvious—to gain any true understanding of what something means, it is necessary to unravel how it came into existence in the first place. Thus, in every chapter, the discussion will constantly be informed by historical matters related

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Introduction



3

to the origin and evolution of a particular medium, as well as to the products and genres it has generated over time. 2 Interpretation. Semiotic inquiry aims to unravel the nature of the relation X = Y. The X is something that exists materially. It could be a word, a novel, a TV program, or some other human artifact. The Y is what the artifact means in all its dimensions (personal, social, historical). Figuring out what the meanings of Y are constitutes the sum and substance of semiotic method. This procedure is generally referred to as interpretation. To keep the proportions of this volume within the limits of a practical introduction, I have had to limit my choice of topics and the degree to which I would be able to treat each one. Nevertheless, I have tried to cast as wide a net as possible, so as to gather within two covers the main themes, notions, and techniques that can be assembled to show how semiotic inquiry can be a truly effective form of media analysis. Needless to say, what I have written about, and how I have gone about writing it, is bound to reflect my own background and preferences. Having issued this caveat, I wish to assure the reader that I have made every attempt possible to emphasize method of analysis, rather than my personal views. It is my sincere hope, therefore, that the reader will find my exposition of method usable in various ways. To this end, I have used a simple style and have made absolutely no assumptions about any prior technical knowledge on the part of the reader. A convenient glossary of technical terms is also included at the end. To get different, complementary, or supplementary views of the various topics I have treated, the reader is advised to consult the relevant works listed toward the end of this book. This is a second edition of the book. When it came out in 2002, there were no social media, no viral videos, no memes, no smartphones, and the like. So, this edition incorporates all the changes within the semiotic frame of analysis, expanding its reach considerably and encompassing the mediascape as it has evolved in the Digital Age. The opening chapter gives an overview of the various types of media and their historical development. It also provides an initial explication of semiotic axioms and notions. The second chapter introduces the main concepts and techniques of semiotic method that can be used to conduct a systematic examination of media representations and products. Then, in the third to eighth chapters, print, audio, film, television, computer, and advertising media and genres, respectively, are discussed from the viewpoint of semiotic inquiry. Since I live and teach in Canada, I have based most of the illustrations and examples for discussion and analysis in these chapters on the North

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American situation. However, whenever possible I have brought forth examples of genres of which I am familiar from other countries. The final chapter constitutes my own reflections on the relation between the media and contemporary culture, and especially on the impacts that the media are purported to have on the contemporary human psyche.

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Chapter 1 The mediated world The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster. —Ernst Fischer (1899–1972)

I

n his often-intriguing lectures, the late Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) would be wont to warn his students at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s that the media to which they were exposed on a daily basis constituted a blessing and a curse at the same time. While the mass media, delivered on all kinds of platforms from radios to smartphones, do in fact make information more available and accessible to larger and larger groups of people, McLuhan argued well before the advent of the Internet, that the media also engender a general feeling of alienation and “disembodiment” in people. Several decades after his death, it has become obvious to virtually everyone that McLuhan’s caveat was well-founded. Our modern mediated world is indeed a two-edged sword. The “disembodiment” that McLuhan warned about just a few decades ago has, seemingly, become widespread, at the same time that more and more people gain access to information that was once the privilege of the few. How did this come about? Do the media moguls of the world truly control the minds and souls of common people (as intimated by the James Bond movie mentioned in the introduction to this book), brainwashing them into submission day in day out with the resources of the “distraction factory,” as the cultural critic Goodwin (1992) calls the global media entertainment industry? Are the new “robber barons” the CEOs of media empires such as the Disney Corporation, Time Warner, General Electric, AOL, Google, Apple, and Yahoo, who now own and distribute a lot of what people see and hear? Clearly, these are important questions for all of us who live in the mediascape—the world as presented through and by the mass media. But these questions can hardly be answered in a simplistic way. The distraction factory was not built overnight. It is a product of technological and historical forces. So, the logical point of departure on the road to answering such questions is to cast an initial glance at some of those forces. That is the first of the two main objectives of this opening chapter. The sec-

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ond one is to delineate some of the basic semiotic notions that will guide us on our journey through the contemporary mediascape in subsequent chapters.

What is a medium? Before the advent of alphabets, people communicated and passed on knowledge through the spoken word. But even in early “oral cultures,” tools had been invented for recording and preserving ideas in durable physical forms. The forms were invariably pictographic—a pictograph is a picture representing something in the world or in the mind. So intuitive and functional is pictography that it comes as little surprise to find that it has not disappeared from our own world, even though most of our written communication is based on the alphabet. The figures designating male and female on washrooms and the no-smoking signs found in public buildings, to mention but two common examples, are modern-day pictographs. Pictography is a perfect example of what a medium (in Latin medius “middle or between”) is—a means of recording ideas on some surface (a cave wall, a piece of wood, papyrus) with appropriate technology (a carving tool, pigment, a stylus). More generally, a medium can be defined as the physical means by which some system of “signs” (pictographs, alphabet characters, etc.) for recording ideas can be actualized. Pictography did not alter the basic oral nature of daily communication, nor did it alter the oral mode of transmitting knowledge in early societies. That occurred after the invention of alphabetic writing around 1000 BCE—an event that brought about the first radical change in world order. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) called such radical changes “paradigm shifts” (1970). The move away from pictographic to alphabetic writing was, to use Kuhn’s appropriate term, the first great paradigm shift of human history, since it constituted the initial step toward the establishment of a worldwide civilization. Simply put, alphabetic writing made print the first viable global medium for storing and exchanging ideas and knowledge. The second step in the establishment of a worldwide civilization was taken in the fifteenth century after the development of movable-type technology— an event that made it possible to print and duplicate books cheaply. McLuhan designated the type of world order that ensued from that technological event, the “Gutenberg Galaxy,” after Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1400–68), the German printer who invented movable type in Europe. The Gutenberg Galaxy did indeed, as McLuhan pointed out, establish printed books as the primary tools for recording and preserving information and knowledge. But it did more than that. It also established cheaply produced books as the first true “mass

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distraction” devices of history. And, indeed, to this day we read books not only for educational or reference purposes, but also to while away our leisure hours. The third step toward the founding of a worldwide civilization was taken at the start of the twentieth century, after advancements in electronic technology established sound recordings, cinema, radio, and (a little later) television as new media for communicating information and, above all else, for providing distraction to larger and larger masses of people. Since electronic signals can cross borders virtually unimpeded, McLuhan characterized the world that was being united by electronic media as the “global village.” To paraphrase the perceptive Canadian scholar, that world can be designated as the “Electronic Galaxy.” Near the end of the twentieth century, the fourth step toward establishing a worldwide civilization was taken right after computers became widely available and the Internet emerged as a truly global mass medium. In line with the terminological style established by McLuhan, the current world can thus be called the “Digital Galaxy.” The academic study of the mass media and that of the mediascape traces its roots to America in the 1930s. It was not until the late 1950s, however, that the study of the connection between the mass media, pop culture, and social changes emerged on the academic landscape, right after the publication of McLuhan’s pivotal 1951 book, The Mechanical Bride. McLuhan warned his readers that the media to which they were exposed on a daily basis reshaped their minds. Media affect the brain because they provide environments for transmitting knowledge and information that directly influence how the brain executes its activities. The Russian Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1978) referred to this feature of the brain as its plasticity. McLuhan (1964: 300) put it perceptively as follows: “Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.”

Representation The process of recording ideas, knowledge, or messages in some physical way is called representation in various disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and semiotics. In terms of the latter, this can be defined more precisely as the use of “signs” (pictures, sounds, etc.) to relate, depict, portray, or reproduce something perceived, sensed, imagined, or felt via some physical form—a word, a story, a painting, and so on. It can be characterized as the process of constructing a form X to call attention to something that exists either materially or conceptually, Y, in some specific way, or X = Y for short. Figuring out the meaning of X = Y is not, however, a simple task. The intent of the form-maker, the historical and social contexts in which the

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form was made, the purpose for which it was made, and so on and so forth, are complex factors that enter into the picture. The purpose of semiotics is to study those very factors. In order to carry out this task systematically, it has established a distinct terminology and a set of principles. As will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, in semiotics the actual physical form of a representation, X, is generally called the signifier; the meaning or meanings, Y, that it generates (obvious or not) is called the signified; and the kinds of meanings that can potentially be extracted from the representation (X = Y), in a specific cultural ambiance, is called signification. There are other ways to designate these features of representation; but for now these will suffice. As an example of what representation entails, consider the action of kissing someone on the lips (known as osculation) to convey romantic love. Romantic love is something that exists in the world as a biological and emotional reality, but its expression through osculation does not, even in today’s global village (Danesi 2013). In the semiotic theory of representation romantic love is called a referent, because it is something to which we desire to refer in some way as it “presents itself ” to our consciousness through our senses, emotions, and intellect. Now, as a referent, it can be represented (literally “presented again”) in some physical form constructed on purpose. And that is where kissing comes into the picture as a signifier. For example, in modern-day Anglo-European cultures, the representation of romantic love through osculation can be realized with such signifiers as: (1) a photograph of two people who are obviously in love with each other engaged in kissing romantically; (2) a poem describing metaphorically various physical and emotional responses to kissing; or (3) a romantic movie depicting the physical action of kissing in a close-up. The meanings that each captures will vary somewhat, although they will converge around a basic semantic nucleus that comes from cultural convention. These constitute the signifieds of romantic love. Note that these are built into each signifier not only by its maker, but also by certain preexisting notions relative to the culture in which the signifier was made. Representations of romantic love in, say, London are likely to be different from representations of the same referent that tend to be made, for instance, in traditional tribal cultures. Moreover, the medium used to portray the referent also shapes the signified. Photographs can show fairly limited views of the referent, whereas movies can provide much more graphic detail of the kissing action. Finally, the ways in which people living in London, Calcutta, or San Francisco will derive meaning from the above representations will vary. This is because they have become accustomed in their specific cultures to different signification systems that underlie perceptions of romantic love and its kiss representations.

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There is no way to pin down the meanings of a sign or to predict what system of signification will be employed for figuring out precisely what a particular representation (X = Y) will mean to specific people. The process of deriving meaning from some representation is not a completely open-ended one, however. It is constrained by social conventions, by communal experiences, and by many other contextual factors that put limits on the range of meanings that are possible in a given situation. A task of semiotic analysis is to figure out what that range is. That aspect of semiotic methodology is known as interpretation, as pointed out in the introduction. Throughout this book little difference will be made between the medium used to construct a representation and the representation itself. So, for instance when a term such as print medium is used in this text, it can refer exclusively or jointly to: (1) the physical elements that are used to produce print signifiers (pictographs, alphabet characters), (2) the types of signifieds that these allow people to encode (words, texts, etc.), and (3) the physical materials used (paper, papyri, etc.) to make print representations.

Transmission Representation is not the same as transmission. The former refers, as we have just discussed, to the depiction of something in some specific way; the latter refers instead to the delivery, transfer, broadcasting, or communication of a message in some sensory-based way: Sensory modality

Examples

Auditory-vocal

Vocal speech, singing, whistling, crying, and so on

Visual

Pictography, sign languages for the hearing-impaired, drawings, and so on

Tactile

Braille for visually impaired or sightless people (in which varied arrangements of raised dots representing letters and numerals are identified by touch), alphabetic toy blocks used to impart familiarity with letter shapes through touch, and so on

Olfactory

Perfumes and colognes, religious incense, and so on

Gustatory

Chemical ingredients in food that attempt to reproduce certain natural tastes, and so on

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At a purely biological level, a message can be received successfully (i.e., recognized as a message) by another species only if it possesses the same kind of sensory modality used to transmit it. Of these, the tactile modality is the one that seems to cut across human and animal sensory-transmission systems. There is no doubt in my mind that my cat and I enter into a rudimentary form of tactile communication on a daily basis. Sharing the same living space, and being codependent on each other for affective exchanges, we do indeed transmit our feeling-states to each other by sending out body signals and especially by touching each other. However, even within the confines of this versatile transmission-communicative modality, there is no way for me to convey a broader range of feeling-states to my cat that are implied by words such as embrace, guide, hold, kiss, tickle, and so on. Clearly, interspecies communication is realizable, but only in a very restricted sense. It can occur in some modalities, partially or totally, to various degrees according to species. If the sensory systems of the two species are vastly different, however, then virtually no message transmission is possible. Representations can also be transmitted through technology, that is, through some artifact or invention. Early societies developed simple tools for transmitting messages, such as drums, fire and smoke signals, and lantern beacons, so that they could be seen or heard over short distances. Messages were also attached to the legs of carrier pigeons trained to navigate their way to a destination and back home. In later societies, so-called semaphore systems of flags or flashing lights, for example, were employed to send messages over relatively short but difficult-to-cross distances, such as from hilltop to hilltop, or from one ship to another at sea. A tool is an artifact that extends some sensory, physical, or intellectual capacity. An ax extends the power of the human hand to break wood; the wheel of the human foot to cover great distances; and so on and so forth. For the sake of scientific accuracy, it should be mentioned that tool-making is itself an outgrowth of bipedalism—the capacity to walk with an erect posture on two legs. Fossils discovered in Africa provide evidence that hominids walked erect and had a bipedal stride even before the great increase in their brain size millions of years ago. Complete bipedalism freed the human hand, allowing it to become a supremely sensitive limb for precise manipulation and grasping. The erect posture gave rise to the subsequent evolution of the physiological apparatus for speech, since it brought about the lowering and positioning of the larynx for controlled breathing. McLuhan (1964) claimed that the type of technology developed to record and transmit messages determines how people process and remember them. Human beings are endowed by nature to decipher information with all the senses. Our sense ratios, as he called them, are equally calibrated at birth to receive information. However, in social settings, it is unlikely that all the

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senses will operate at the same ratio. One sense ratio or the other increases according to the modality employed to record and transmit a message. In an oral culture, the auditory sense ratio is the one that largely shapes information processing and message interpretation; in a print culture, on the other hand, the visual sense ratio is the crucial one. This raising or lowering of sense ratios is not, however, preclusive. Indeed, in our own culture, we can have various sense ratios activated in tandem. For example, if one were to hear the word cat uttered by someone, the auditory sense ratio would be the operational one in processing the meaning of the word. If, however, one were to see the word written on a sheet of paper, then the visual sense ratio would be activated instead. A visual depiction of the cat accompanied by an utterance of the word would activate the auditory and visual sense ratios in tandem. In his 1967 book, The Medium is the Massage (with Quentin Fiore), McLuhan developed his notion of sense ratios on the basis of the concept of the sensorium. In strictly print culture, the visual sense ratio not only dominates how we glean information from written texts, but also leads to an extension of vision into other media. The case-in-point is comic book art, which McLuhan saw as a true emblem of sensory blending or synesthesia. We extract content from a comic book through both images and text, with one implying the other in an interconnected hybrid fashion. The comic book is also an example of how we create a sensorium through mass mediation. The term sensorium was coined in the seventeenth century to refer to the sensory nature of human thinking. In medicine it refers to the sensory environments that affect how the brain processes information, including the interpretation of the world. It is this latter meaning that McLuhan adopted. The lack of balance of the sense ratios leads to movements and artistic styles that are, essentially, attempts to restore the balance. So, in an alphabet-using culture, artistic movements of all kinds emerge to attempt a restoration. Indeed, movements such as classicism, romanticism, and the like are attempts to restore sensory equilibrium. This is why in the Renaissance artists were also mathematicians, integrating the two sides of their brain through sensorial blending, which is the essence of what we call the “aesthetic” experience, which means that we literally sense and feel the meaning of a work of art as a whole.

Types of media Media can be divided into three basic categories: ll

a natural medium is one by which messages are transmitted in some biologically based way (through the voice, facial expressions, hand gestures, etc.);

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ll

an artifactual medium is one by which messages are represented and transmitted by means of some artifact (books, paintings, sculptures, letters, etc.);

ll

a mechanical medium is one by which messages are transmitted by means of mechanical inventions such as telephones, radios, television sets, computers, and so on.

Obviously there is much slippage between the artifactual and mechanical media. Indeed, the former subsumes the latter, since mechanical media are really particular kinds of artifactual media. These are, more generally, “nonbiological” media that can be subdivided into three broad rubrics: print, electronic, and digital. These differ in what has been called enunciative mode, that is, in the way in which they encode their messages. Print media allow people to “enunciate” verbal messages on stone, murals, papyrus, paper, and other print-retaining surfaces or materials. Electronic media allow people to enunciate them instead through the electronic channel by means of such devices as records, radio, and television. Records are objects that register sound, such as audiocassettes and compact discs (CDs). Radio is an audio medium that allows for the sending and reception of radio signals (electromagnetic waves). Television is a visual medium that allows for the sending of visual images, with accompanying sound, as electromagnetic waves that are reconverted into visual images by receiving devices known as television sets. Digital media are computer-based systems such as the Internet—a matrix of networks that connects computers around the world—and the World Wide Web—an information server on the Internet composed of interconnected sites and files, accessible through a program known as a browser.

Interactivity Vocal communication unfolds as an interactive medium since there is a backand-forth among the interlocutors via the spoken word. Traditional print and electronic media, on the other hand, are largely noninteractive since there is no possibility of such back-and-forth mode of contact between senders and receivers. If there is some interaction, it occurs in a delayed time fashion, that is, via a written response by someone at a later date. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, interactivity has become the norm in the contemporary mediascape, rather than the exception. In sum, the term interactivity refers to media systems in which there is the possibility of responding to, participating in, or affecting the information delivered or contained in the system directly and immediately (in real time). So, media in the Internet Age are now conceptualized as follows: (1) nonin-

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teractive, which refers to media in which a message cannot be related immediately to previous messages; (2) reactive, which refers to media in which a message can be related to an immediately previous message; and (3) interactive, which refers to media in which a message can be both related to a number of previous messages and to the relationship among them. Essentially, interactivity in human-to-human contexts involves a sense of collaboration between the interlocutors in the interest of guaranteeing a successful outcome to the transmission-communication. Human-to-machine interaction, on the other hand, involves exchanging information or instructions between a human individual and a computer (or some other device, such as a television set). The notion of interactivity has been extended to embrace consumer-to-user and user-to-user interactions in the marketing and advertising worlds. In this area, the media are seen as channels that consumers can interact with, in contrast to the noninteractive media of the past. And in media studies generally, the term refers to the ability of audiences to directly interact with producers of cultural content through websites and other digital formats.

Development of the mediascape The mass media largely define the world in which we live—a world often referred to as the mediascape, a term coined by Arjun Appadurai (1990) to refer to the images and messages produced constantly via mass media representations. These can subtly influence all of us since we are constantly adapting to them, in the same way that we adapt physically to the landscape in which we live. In a fundamental sense, the mediascape was forged in antiquity via the invention of writing and other early transmission media. It can be said, using this notion, that human history is a progressive attempt to expand the reach and scope of the mediascape. One of the first civilizations to institutionalize pictographic writing as a means of recording ideas, keeping track of business transactions, and transmitting knowledge was the ancient Chinese one. According to some archaeological estimates, Chinese pictography may date as far as back the fifteenth century BCE. It was, more specifically, logographic, since it employed pictorial symbols to represent entire words (without reference to their pronunciation) in addition to pure pictographs. Another fully developed ancient pictographic system, called cuneiform because it consisted of wedge-shaped picture symbols, was the Sumerian-Babylonian one that was developed more than five thousand years ago. The Sumerians recorded their messages on clay tablets, making cuneiform writing a very expensive and impracticable means of communication. For this reason it was developed, learned, and used pri-

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marily by rulers and clerics. From about 2700 to 2500 BCE another type of pictographic writing, called hieroglyphic, was invented in Egypt. The Egyptians used papyrus (a type of early paper made from reeds) to record their writings. The hieroglyphic system eventually developed phonographic elements within it—phonographs are forms standing for parts of words, such as syllables or individual sounds. A complete phonographic system for representing single sounds is called alphabetic. The first alphabetic system emerged in the Middle East, and was transported by the Phoenicians (a people from a territory on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, located largely in modern-day Lebanon) to Greece. It contained symbols for consonant sounds only. When it reached Greece, symbols for vowel sounds were added to it, making the Greek system the first full-fledged alphabetic one. The advent of alphabetic writing brought about, as mentioned, a true paradigm shift, because it allowed societies to store and preserve knowledge in a more stable manner.

Paper and printing The first lightweight material used to record writing was, as mentioned, papyrus, made by the Egyptians from grasses called reeds. From as early as the second century BCE, people throughout the Middle East and in parts of early European culture wrote on thin layers of tanned and scraped animal skins called parchment or vellum, with quill pens made from bird feathers. Parchment was not as light as papyrus; but it was more durable. It thus made it possible to store information and knowledge for longer periods of times. Many parchment manuscripts and books from the Middle Ages still exist today. But parchment was expensive, and thus literacy remained largely the privilege of the few, as it did in antiquity. Paper was invented in the second century CE by the Chinese, who developed it from silk fibers. The Arabs took the Chinese technology to Europe in the eleventh century CE. Paper was lighter than parchment, and thus more portable. It was also relatively inexpensive. Paper was, in effect, the first event that made it possible to transform print into a mass medium, and this expanded the mediascape considerably with respect to previous eras. Until the 1400s, paper documents were written by hand. Copyists called scribes, many of whom were monks, made duplicates of documents and books. The term manuscript, meaning literally “written by hand,” acknowledges the fact that medieval books were handwritten. By the fifteenth century, however, the need arose for an easier way to reproduce documents. In 1450, the German printer Johannes Gutenberg perfected movable metal-type technology, introducing the first mechanical device, the printing press, for print-

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ing and producing numerous copies of paper documents. The “Gutenberg Galaxy,” as McLuhan designated the world after the invention of print technology, had come, ipso facto, into being. The number of printing shops grew dramatically over the next century. Printers published books, newspapers, pamphlets, and many other kinds of paper documents. Because they were cheap, they became extremely popular. As a result of the printing press, more books became available and more people gained literacy. With literacy came exposure to new ideas and independent thinking. And with independent thinking came many revolutions of a religious, political, social, and scientific nature. Moreover, since cheaply printed books could be sent all over the world, scientists, philosophers, artists, educators, historians, poets, and storywriters read and translated each other’s books. Ideas started crossing borders and vast spaces, uniting the world more and more. Standardized ways of doing things in the scientific and business domains emerged. In a phrase, the invention of the printing press was the technological event that paved the way to the establishment of a true global civilization. In the twentieth century, printed documents became even more inexpensive and available en masse. Photocopying, for instance, made document duplication easier and more rapid. And in the mid-1980s, computer typesetting and printing became so efficient and economical that it largely replaced the typesetting technology that had been in place, virtually unchanged, since the fifteenth century. Sophisticated word-processing and graphics software are used today to set type and compose pages on the screen, just as they will look in the final print version. Page layouts are also transmitted via all kinds of digital networks and satellite systems to other locations for editing, redesign, and printing. The spread of digital print technologies has led to the growth of desktop publishing. Today, almost anyone can prepare books, newsletters, newspapers, or magazines on a personal computer (PC), and then transmit the publication almost anywhere at the speed of light. Early advocates of business computers prophesied, in fact, the eventual coming of a “paperless world.” But their predictions have proven so far to be inaccurate and somewhat premature. The ease of copying, printing, and transmitting print documents made possible by digital technology has, ironically, led to more demand for paper, not less, although this may be changing more and more as all our previous media are converging with the digital media, as will be discussed below.

Telegraphy The first electrical device for the transmission of written messages was the telegraph—a system that could send and receive electrical signals over

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long-distance wires. The first commercial telegraph technology was developed in Great Britain in the early nineteenth century. A little later, in 1844, the American inventor Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) introduced a code that came to be adopted internationally. The code—known logically enough as the Morse Code—utilized “on” and “off ” signals to represent individual letters of the alphabet. The telegrapher at one end of the line would tap on an electrical key, and the telegrapher at the other end would decode the taps as they came in, write down the message, and send it to the recipient by messenger. Telegraph cable was laid under the Atlantic Ocean in 1858, and regular transatlantic service began in 1866. It was the first interconnected global communications system. Telegraphy was gradually replaced by telex systems in the early twentieth century. These gradually eliminated the need to use a code, such as the Morse Code. Users could type in a message, and the identical message would appear at the recipient’s end, carried over telegraph and telephone lines to telex machines anywhere in the world. As early as the 1930s these lines were also used to transmit pictures, an event that introduced so-called Wirephoto service in international communications. Today, with the Internet, all these previous media have either become obsolete or integrated with Internet transmission devices.

The telephone In 1876, the Scottish-born American inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847– 1922) patented the first practical telephone, a device with the capacity to transmit sound over wires. In actual fact, Bell’s invention was the culmination of previous inventions, not a completely original one. Bell believed it would be used to transmit musical concerts, lectures, and sermons. But after founding his own company, he quickly discovered that the appeal of the phone lay much more in allowing ordinary people to talk to each other. So, in 1878 the Bell Telephone Company established the first telephone exchange—a switchboard connecting any member of a group of subscribers to any other member. By 1894, roughly 260,000 Bell telephones were in use in the United States, about one for every 250 people. By the 1960s the telephone was perceived in many parts of the world as an “essential service.” Near the end of the twentieth century, the telephone played a critical role in ushering in the Digital Galaxy, providing subscribers with access to the Internet and the World Wide Web by means of devices called modems (modulators-demodulators). And, needless to say, the cellular (cell) phone and the smartphone have greatly enhanced the functionality and regularity of distance communication in our contemporary system of everyday communal life.

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Smartphones Cell phones are giving way (if they have not already done so) to smartphones, which is a cell phone in a handheld computer with connections and apps that make visual and voice communication, access to Internet data, and more available at the touch of a screen. The smartphone is a communication-transmission-information system in a box—a box that would have been considered magical not too long ago. Smartphones can run all kinds of apps (calendars, cameras, web browsers, etc.) and they have a touchscreen display and a graphical user interface. What is truly amazing about these devices is their ability to represent objects realistically. Known as skeuomorphism, a smartphone makes features in its interface resemble real-world objects, thus improving their recognizability and usability. Smartphones are also connected to the iCloud, which provides the synchronization of data via the Internet between multiple devices. The iCloud was developed by the Apple Company. It stores music, photos, apps, contacts, calendars, and much more, pushing them to all digital devices; that is, the iCloud is integrated with apps and systems, so that everything happens automatically. The mediascape has become a mindboggling “nano-scape,” physically speaking, since virtually all media can be stored on a simple mobile device, literally allowing everyone to carry the mediascape in a digital bottle, so to speak. The larger psychological mediascape, the real-world landscape, and the nano-scape constitute a three-point mirror of each other. We truly live in the world of the matrix, as will be discussed subsequently.

The radio The earliest system for sending electrical signals through the air without wire (via electromagnetic waves) was at first called wireless, and a little later radiotelegraphy (abbreviated to radio). The background scientific principles for its development were those elaborated by the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79). It was the Italian-born American electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), however, who applied them to the invention of the world’s first practical wireless radio device in 1895. His radio system could send and receive a signal at a distance of close to three kilometers. In 1901, Marconi developed an alternator device that could send signals much farther and with much less background noise. This led, about two decades later, to the commercial technology that established the radio as the first electronic mass medium. In the United States, the first regularly scheduled public radio broadcasts were made in 1920 from station KDKA in

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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Other stations sprung up shortly thereafter across the country, and companies such as the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and Westinghouse established radio networks for producing and sharing programming. By the mid-1920s, radio had become, alongside film, a highly popular mass medium, shaping trends in music, drama, advertising, and verbal communication generally. Radio could reach many more people than print, not only because it could span great distances instantly, but also because its audiences did not necessarily have to be print literate. Programming could thus be designed with mass appeal. As a consequence, radio spawned popular culture—a culture for all, not just the literati and the cognoscenti. Radio ushered in the Electronic Galaxy, a galaxy in which an increasingly standard form of distraction became available to virtually everybody, as radio receivers became more and more inexpensive and thus highly affordable to the masses.

Television The scientific principles underlying the technology leading to the invention of television were established by John Logie Baird (1888–1946), a British electrical engineer. A workable television camera was developed by the Russian-born American engineer Vladimir K. Zworykin (1888–1982) in 1923 and the American inventor Philo T. Farnsworth (1906–71) in 1927. The first television sets for mass utilization became available in England in 1936 and in the United States in 1938. After the Second World War, technical improvements and prosperity led to a growing demand for these sets. In the United States, six television stations were established at first, each one broadcasting for only a few hours each day. By 1948, thirty-four all-day stations were in operation in twenty-one major cities, and about one million television sets had been sold. By the end of the 1950s, national television networks were established in most industrialized countries. TV had emerged, in effect, to replace radio as the primary source of mass distraction, information, and even aesthetic engagement (since there were broadcasts of contemporary dramas and symphonic music alongside lighter fare) virtually across the world. As the twentieth century came to a close, TV entered the Digital Galaxy with the advent of digital TV—television that is transmitted in a digital (computer-based) format. Today, TV can be streamed and programs can be viewed in delayed time, rather than necessarily in real time (or both), extending greatly the section of the mediascape in which TV has always resided. With the widespread growth of cable television in the 1960s and then of Direct-Broadcast-Satellite (DBS) services in the 1990s, many new channels and types of programming are now available to people across the globe. Today, with HBO, Netflix, and other pay-TV services, television has become

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a major source of new artistic and philosophical programming. As a consequence, debates about TV’s impact on world culture, politics, and community life have become common and widespread. On the one side, critics say that television feeds a constant stream of simplified ideas and sensationalistic images to unwitting viewers, that it negatively influences politics and voting patterns, that it destroys local cultures in favor of a bland distraction culture, and that it encourages passivity in people. On the other side, defenders say that television provides a great deal of high-quality educational and cultural programming, and that it is the major source of local, national, and international news for many modern-day citizens who would otherwise remain uninformed. Whatever the truth, one thing is for certain—TV has turned out to be a technological invention that has consolidated McLuhan’s global village, because it has made the same pattern and kind of programs available across the globe.

Computers and the Internet The British mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage (1791–1871), designed mechanical computing machines in the 1820s and 1830s on the basis of principles that anticipated the modern electronic computer. In the 1890s, Babbage’s ideas were applied to the building of calculating machines that could be operated automatically with punched cards. In the 1930s, electromechanical punched-card operating systems were developed. The International Business Machines Company (IBM) in the United States produced the first of these for widespread business usage. Incidentally, during the Second World War, the British Secret Service used IBM’s design principles to build ten electronic computers, called Colossus, to help it crack the Germans’ secret military codes. The first general-purpose computer in the United States, called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), was built shortly thereafter in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. As computer technology improved steadily after the war, smaller and cheaper computers could be built for all kinds of purposes. By the 1970s, it even became economically feasible to manufacture a PC for mass consumption. The first PCs were mainly “word processors”; that is, they added computer processing capacities to typewriters so as to make typing and changing printed text significantly easier and more sophisticated. In 1975, the first true microcomputer was introduced to the world. It had the power of many larger machines, but could fit onto a desktop. This was accomplished because of new miniaturization technologies that allowed manufacturers to compress the memory and processing power of thousands of circuits onto tiny chips of materials called semiconductors. Sophisticated word-processing software appeared shortly thereafter in 1978.

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At the same time that computers were becoming faster, more-powerful, and smaller, networks were being developed for interconnecting them. In the 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense, along with researchers working on military projects at research centers and universities across the country, developed a network called the ARPANET for sharing data and mainframe computer processing time over specially equipped telephone lines and satellite links. Used at first for military purposes, the ARPANET became the first functional major electronic mail network right after the National Science Foundation connected universities and nonmilitary research sites to it. ARPANET was renamed the Internet—a term conveying that it was designed as an “interconnected” network serving many different functions, not just military ones. Today, the Internet is the largest and most prevalent computer network in the world. Commercial online service providers sell Internet access to individual computer users and companies. Smaller networks for specific utilization are also available. Called Local Area Networks (LANs), these can be installed in a single building (or in several buildings) for the exclusive usage of a single organization. Wide Area Networks (WANs), on the other hand, are “organization-specific” networks that can be used over a large geographical area. They can also interconnect users to the Internet. Today, most computer networks can carry any type of digital signal, including video images, sounds, graphics, animations, and text. And virtually everywhere one can access anything on the Internet because of Wi-Fi technology. Wi-Fi, or Wireless Fidelity, allows all kinds of digital devices to connect to the Internet easily, via a wireless access point. In effect, one does not need wires, plug-in locations, or the like with Wi-Fi, making the use of computer technologies instant and ubiquitous. The computer and the Internet have transformed business, education, the arts, and virtually everything else in human affairs radically. People can use computers to design graphics and full-motion video, send electronic mail, make airline or hotel reservations, search for all kinds of information, play games, listen to radio, watch some television programs, and even visit “virtual rooms” to chat with other people over the World Wide Web. In the history of human communications, no other medium has made it possible for so many people to interact with each other, irrespective of the distance between them.

The World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW) is a system of computer files linked together on the Internet. The first web software was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research

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(CERN) physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. It became part of the Internet in 1991. In its original version, now known as Web 1.0, a website, or a location on the WWW could contain a home page that document makers and users could see when they entered the site, and which could also contain additional documents and files. Each site was owned and managed by an individual, company, or organization. Access to websites is with browsers, software applications which allow Web users to surf the Web and to access web pages by interpreting HTML files and other languages used on the Web. The first popular web browser was NCSA Mosaic, whose version 1.0 was released in September 1993 (its development was discontinued in 1997). The term Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of the WWW that provides the ability for people to collaborate and share information online. Web 2.0 implies a way of using the Web itself, whose key component is user-generated content. Besides expanding the group of online publishers—hence moving from passive, read-only competence to active, read and write competence—the Web 2.0 also supports a different metaphor of the Web itself, not only conceived as an expanding library or mediascape (where one can go and pull as much information as desired), but also as a public place, where people go to meet other people and have shared experiences. The relevant services that Web 2.0 makes available are: social networks (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, etc.), which are services that support social exchanges within given groups, allowing users to share data and knowledge or communicate routinely, and wikis, which are websites that support collaborative document editing, such as Wikipedia.

Media convergence In the Digital Galaxy, it is no longer correct to talk about “competing” media. Advances in digital technology and in telecommunications networks have led to a convergence of all media into one overall system of communications—a veritable uniform mediascape. This has led, in turn, to the emergence of new lifestyles and careers, to the creation of new institutions, and to radical paradigm shifts in all domains of social organization and of artistic communication. Convergence is manifest, first and foremost, in the digitization of all media technologies and in the integration of different media into computer networks: ll

Telephone The first telecommunications medium to be digitized was the telephone in 1962, with the installation of high-speed lines in phone networks capable of carrying dozens of conversations simultaneously.

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Phone equipment of all kinds is now fully digitized. Moreover, the phone is now a technological device that permits people to gain access to the Internet. Smartphones and other mobile devices have the capacity to transmit and access audio, video, and computer data over Wi-Fi and satellite systems. ll

Print Media The digitization of print media started in 1967. Today, most major newspapers are produced by means of digital technology and are available in online versions. In fact, many newspapers and magazines now publish only in online platforms.

ll

Film The special effects created for the movie Star Wars in 1977 introduced digital technology into filmmaking. The first computer-generated movie, Toy Story, debuted in 1995. Such movies are now common. In the domain of home video technology, the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), which had replaced the VHS tape, is now also largely obsolete. New ways of seeing movies, such as on Netflix, on social media sites, and through various streaming services have now become the norm.

ll

Recordings The digitally produced compact disc (CD) started replacing vinyl records and audiocassette tapes in the mid-1980s, shortly after its introduction in 1982. The CD has now become virtually obsolete, as downloading technologies, as well as social media sites such as YouTube, make music, not only accessible for listening purposes, but also increasingly as a means for publishing it.

ll

Television Cable TV went digital in 1998, allowing broadcasters to increase their number of channel offerings. This technology was introduced primarily to meet competition from the Direct-Broadcast-Satellite (DBS) industry, which started producing digital multichannel programming for reception by home satellite dishes in 1995. TV broadcasting has also become digitized. High-Definition Television (HDTV), which consists of transmitters and receivers using digital formats, became commercially available in 1998. Other high-definition technologies now exist. Also, viewing TV, which was based on real-time viewing, now can be carried out in delayed time via various technological options.

ll

Radio Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) is the corresponding technology in radio broadcasting to television’s DBS system. Radio stations now use

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digital technology for creating their programs. Online radio stations are also common, including podcasting, which makes a multimedia digital file available on the Internet for downloading to a portable media player or computer, and which offers an alternative to the traditional radio channels. Media convergence is a consequence of developments in computer, satellite, and nano-technologies. The computer is to the movement of ideas today, what the automobile was to the movement of people at the start of the twentieth century. As the “roads” on the digital “highway” continue to converge, we may well end up living in one global digitized mediascape. The above brief trek through the history of media holds a very important lesson—namely, that any major change in how information is represented and transmitted brings about a concomitant paradigm shift in cultural systems and world orders. Ancient cuneiform writing, impressed indelibly into clay tablets, allowed the Sumerians to develop a great civilization; papyrus and hieroglyphics transformed Egyptian society into an advanced culture; the alphabet spurred the ancient Greeks on to make extraordinary advances in science, technology, and the arts; the alphabet also made it possible for the Romans to develop an effective system of government; the printing press facilitated the dissemination of knowledge broadly and widely, paving the way for the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment; radio, movies, and television brought about the rise of a global pop culture in the twentieth century; and the Internet and the World Wide Web ushered in McLuhan’s “global village” in the latter part of the twentieth century. Our historical journey has also made it obvious that three media-based events in particular have transformed the course of human history. The first one was the invention of writing and the spread of literacy. Reading and writing activate linear thinking processes in the brain, because printed ideas are laid out one at a time and can thus be connected to each other sequentially and analyzed logically in relation to each other. Orality, on the other hand, is not conducive to such precise thinking, because spoken ideas are transmitted through the emotional qualities of the human voice and are, thus, inextricable from the “subject” who transmits them. Literacy engenders the sense that knowledge and information are disconnected from their human sources and thus that they have “objectivity”; orality does not. This perception is bolstered by the fact that printed information can be easily categorized and preserved in some durable material form such as books or online wikis. Simply put, without the advent and institutionalization of writing, the spread of philosophy, science, jurisprudence, and the many other human intellectual activities that we now hold as critical to the progress of human civilization would simply not have been possible in the first place.

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But orality has not, of course, disappeared from human life. The spoken word comes naturally; literacy does not. Through simple exposure to everyday dialogue, children develop the ability to speak with little or no effort and without any training or prompting whatsoever. Literacy, on the other hand, does not emerge through simple exposure to printed texts. It is learned through instruction, practice, and constant rehearsal. Schools were established, in fact, to impart literacy and print-based knowledge. The second event that changed the course of history occurred in the twentieth century—millennia after the advent of writing—with the emergence and diffusion of the electronic mass media. These not only facilitated distance communications, but they also brought about a global form of culture anchored in the “distraction factory.” Known generally as pop culture, it constitutes a system of everyday life that is implanted in movies, television shows, detective novels, fast-food chains, pop musical styles, and the like, blurring the line between what is meaningful and what is merely entertainment. All this has generated two social phenomena pointed out by various social critics. One was called neomania by semiotician Roland Barthes (1957). Barthes defined it as a constant craving for new objects of consumption and new forms of entertainment inculcated into the modern psyche by media images, messages, and spectacles of all kinds. The other phenomenon can be called juvenilization—the widespread tendency of people to think of themselves as “forever young,” both physically and socially, just like the actors and personalities they see every day in various media. Of course, this did not come about exclusively because of the media. Advances in medicine and in health care delivery, and a diffusion of affluence in society at large, have been primary factors in its emergence, given that they raised the average life expectancy considerably. Since it became possible to live longer, it also became possible to think of oneself as being youthful for a longer period of time. These two effects have defined modernity since at least the 1920s. Whatever their import on social life, the point here is that they are connected with changes in the mass media. The third event occurred with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies—an event that has made it possible for people to be in constant contact with each other through cyberspace, connecting everyone in the globe through digital media. Such technologies have virtually eliminated space and time constraints for communication between people to occur. As a result, the current world of digital communication technologies impels all of us to become more involved with one another, no matter what language we speak, what culture we come from, where we live physically, and who we are. We are all denizens of the same global village. Everything from purchasing goods, accessing and recording information, seeking recreation and even courtship takes place through the space in which the village exists—cyberspace. This has engen-

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dered a new perception of what information, communication, and literacy are. The new media have, indeed, become the new message—to paraphrase McLuhan. They have offset the individualistic and privatizing forces of the Print Age, allowing people to engage with each other in a more communal way, deconstructing authorship and the primacy of canonical texts, such as religious and philosophical ones. Even sources of authoritatively coded knowledge, such as print encyclopedias, have now become open to the participation and collaboration of everyone, not just individual experts—as can be seen by the advent and spread of the various wikis on the Internet, which, going against all traditions of the past, allow for the collaborative editing of content by users.

Basic notions The study of the mediascape and its impacts on human history can be undertaken in various ways. One could, for example, focus on the social conditions that led to the invention of a world-changing technology. One might, also, investigate the interconnection between the technology and social systems. One could also look at the ways in which a medium represents ideas and how these tend to become part of groupthink. The latter direction is the one emphasized in this book, although the other two will be subsumed under it. So, commentaries related to social conditions and technology will be interspersed throughout the discussion to follow in this chapter and in subsequent ones. The main approach taken in this book is a semiotic one. Semiotics is an academic discipline in its own right that studies what is the most critical feature of human sapience—the capacity for creating and using signs (words, symbols, etc.) for thinking, communicating, reflecting, transmitting, and preserving knowledge. Since it is an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry, it also uses ideas and notions from cognate disciplines in an integrated fashion. More specifically, our approach comes under the rubric of media semiotics. It was Roland Barthes who first applied semiotic techniques and notions to media study in his now classic 1957 book Mythologies. Barthes saw media culture as a “bastard form of mass culture” beset by the “humiliated repetition” of previous texts and especially mythological ones. Mythologies heralds, in effect, the establishment of media semiotics proper, bringing out the significance of studying media texts (spectacles, movies, consumer products, websites, podcasts, etc.) in terms of how they recycle second-order (connotative) structures of meaning. A photograph in a newspaper, for instance, does not simply capture a fact or event directly. It involves a process of dual processing. At what

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he called the uncoded level, a photograph shows something in reality. This is the linguistic message. However, at a second-order level, the photo evokes a series of socially based meanings that bear upon how the text is interpreted. A photo of a dog might, for example, not only capture the image of a canine being, but also bring with it all the features we associate socially with dogs (as pets, as companions, etc.). This is done by anchoring the meaning of the text in some way, such as a caption (“A Friendly Companion”).

Mediation Signs never really tell the whole truth. They mediate reality for us, because they constitute convenient selections from the infinite realm of the knowable. For instance, by calling some creature rabbit, we have in effect singled out that creature as distinct from all other creatures. When we use the word rabbit, consequently, we highlight a chosen portion of the animal realm, in the same way that, by analogy, we highlight a chosen portion of an on-screen document on our computers. By doing this regularly, we eventually come to see that portion as having some necessary raison d’ê tre, rather than constituting a convenient or historically motivated selection. The representation of anything is, thus, a mediated process. Consider, for example, how three different American TV sitcoms have represented gender in different eras. The 1950s sitcom called I Love Lucy, for instance, portrayed the female gender through the character of Lucille Ball as a strongwilled, independent woman, in charge of her situation. On the other hand, the 1980s–1990s sitcom Married with Children depicted the traditional wife mockingly through the character of Betty as a boorish, sex-starved female who lived out her existence mindlessly day after dreary day. The Big Bang Theory, which debuted in 2007, revolved around four male geeks who had sophisticated knowledge about physics and engineering, but are socially inept and awkward, especially with respect to situations involving women. When an attractive waitress and aspiring actress, Penny, moves in next door to two of the male roommates, their world is turned around, as Penny brings the “real” social world into the geeks’ cerebral one, teaching them what social-gender relations are all about. Penny is a kind of “earth mother” who brings a downto-earth wisdom into the lives of the brainy males. The point to be emphasized is that the three sitcoms portrayed the meaning of the same gender in differential ways, through nuances in character portrayal, situation, and overall view of gender relations. In effect, through the medium of each sitcom, the meaning of gender was anchored (to use Barthes’ notion) in a specific social substratum that had relevance in the era in which the sitcom was popular—that is, the way something is represented, and the

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medium chosen to do so, can greatly influence how people perceive it. As the great twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1944: 25) once remarked, humans live no longer only in a physical world, but also in a mediated symbolic one. As their representational activities advance, their direct contact with physical reality recedes in proportion.

Messages The terms message and meaning are often used interchangeably. But from a semiotic standpoint this is incorrect. To grasp the difference, consider a simple greeting such as “Nice day, today!” It is, of course, an orally transmitted message from one person to another. However, the meaning of that message can be literal, whereby the speaker is acknowledging the kind of day it is simply to make contact; or, on the other hand, it could be ironic, if uttered on a rainy and miserable day. More will be said about this distinction in the next chapter. Suffice it to say at this point that, as this example shows, the notion of message is not coincident with that of meaning—a message can have more than one meaning, and several messages can have the same meaning. In the mass media, as in art, it is often the case that many layers of meanings are built into the same message. Semiotically speaking, a message is a signifier and its meanings are its signifieds. The former is, essentially, the message itself, which can be transmitted physically from one person or device to another. It can contain blocks of text as well as various types of information cues (such as to whom or to what it is directed and what the nature of its content is). A message can be routed directly from sender to receiver through a physical link, or it can be passed, either in whole or in part, through intervening electronic, mechanical, or digital media. The signified is the meaning that can only be determined in reference to other messages. Studying the relation of the signifier to the signified, known as signification, constitutes basic semiotic practice. More will be said about this in the next chapter. Needless to say, there are always problems of interpretation and comprehension of various sorts in the identification of what signification system is involved in a message. These are common at all levels of semiotic analysis. The dictionary definition of cat, for instance, as “a small carnivorous mammal domesticated since early times as a catcher of rats and mice” is said to be the meaning of the word. But this is a problematic strategy because it employs the word mammal to define cat, thus making the unwarranted assumption that mammal somehow explains what a cat is. Looking up this term in the dictionary is also of little value because mammal is defined as “any of various warm-blooded vertebrate animals of the class Mammalia”—a definition

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that begs yet another question: What is an animal? The dictionary defines an animal as an organism, which it defines in another listing as “an individual form of life,” which it defines further as “the property that distinguishes living organisms.” At that point, the dictionary has gone into a conceptual loop, since it has employed an already-used word, organism, in the definitional process. To avoid such looping problems, semioticians often employ the technique of “binary opposition” to flesh out what something means in relation to something else. This approach assumes that meaning is something that cannot be determined in the absolute, but only in relation to other signs: for example, cat versus dog; cat versus bird; and so on. From such oppositions we can see, one or two features at a time, what makes a cat unique among animals. In effect, such oppositions cumulatively allow us to pinpoint what cat means by virtue of how it is different from other animals, if we indeed need the concept of cat in our specific world.

Information In psychology and communication science, the terms information and meaning are often used as substitutes for each other. But, again, semiotically speaking this assumed equivalence is not correct. Information is data that can be received by humans, animals, or machines, differentially of course. The amount of information in a message, moreover, can be “measured” in terms of its probability—a ringing alarm signal carries “more” information than one that is silent, because the latter is the “expected state” of the alarm system and the former is its “alerting state.” The one who first developed the mathematical aspects of information theory was the American telecommunications engineer Claude Shannon (1916–2001). He showed, essentially, that the information contained in a signal is inversely proportional to its probability. The more probable a signal, the less information “load” it carries with it; the less likely, the more. Information and meaning are, clearly, not the same thing. The former refers to uninterpreted data or sensory states whose probability in a certain situation can be easily measured; the latter refers to the interpretation of the data or sensory states, including the special kinds of nuances and values that the information entails, or is intended to have, in the given situation. This applies to any type of information, from alarm signals to sophisticated statements. Take, for instance, a coin-tossing game in which it is decided that throwing three heads in a row constitutes a win. If a certain player ends up consistently with the desired outcome, defeating all who challenge that player, then we tend to interpret the outcome either as the work of Fortune, or else as clever

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and undetectable cheating on the part of the winning player. Interpretation is at the core of everything we do, think about, and feel.

Communication Shannon devised his mathematical model of information in order to improve the efficiency of telecommunication systems. But shortly after it was formulated, psychologists and communication scientists started applying it en masse to the study of human communication. Known as the bull’s-eye model, Shannon’s model of communication essentially depicts information transfer between two humans as a systematic process dependent on probability factors, that is, on the degree to which a message is to be expected or not in a given situation. It is called the bull’s-eye model because a sender is defined as someone aiming a message at a receiver as if they were in a bull’s-eye target range.

Sender ⟶  Message ⟶  Receiver Shannon also introduced several key terms into the general study of communication: channel, noise, redundancy, and feedback. The channel is the physical system carrying the transmitted signal. Vocally produced sound waves, for instance, can be transmitted through the air or through an electronic channel (e.g., radio). The term noise refers to some interfering element (physical or psychological) in the channel that distorts or partially effaces a message. In radio and telephone transmissions, noise is equivalent to electronic static; in voice transmissions, it can vary from any interfering exterior sound (physical noise) to the speaker’s lapses of memory (psychological noise). However, as Shannon demonstrated, communication systems have redundancy features built into them for counteracting noise. These allow for a message to be decoded even if noise is present. For instance, in verbal communication the high predictability of certain words in many utterances (“Roses are red, violets are . . .”) and the patterned repetition of elements (“Yes, yes, I’ll do it; yes, I will”) are redundant features of language that greatly increase the likelihood that a verbal message will get decoded successfully. Finally, feedback refers to the fact that senders have the capacity to monitor the messages they transmit and modify them to enhance their effectiveness on the basis of the reactions that receivers display. Feedback in human verbal communication includes, for instance, the physical reactions observable in receivers (facial expressions, bodily movements, etc.) that indicate the effect that a message is having as it is being communicated.

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The bull’s-eye model was expanded in 1954 by the American communication theorist Wilbur Schramm (see Schramm 1982). Schramm broke down the bull’s-eye model into four major components: 1 a source (S) or originator of the communication 2 a message (M) and its information content 3 a channel through which the message is transmitted from one place or person to another 4 a receiver to whom the message is directed Logically, it has come to be known as the Source-Message-Channel-Receiver model, or SMCR model in short. Schramm also retained the feedback and noise components of the original bull’s-eye model. He defined the former as any mechanism between the source and the receiver that regulates the flow of the communication; and the latter as any distortion or errors that may be introduced during the communication exchange. Schramm completed his model with two other components: (1) the encoder, which converts the message into a form that can be transmitted through an appropriate channel; and (2) the decoder, which reverses the encoding process so that the message can be received successfully. The SMCR has been used in traditional media studies, because of its simplicity and generalizability to all types of the traditional media. In the case of oral verbal communication, the source and receiver are also the encoder and decoder, respectively. Encoding and decoding in this case involves knowledge of the language code used, as well as facial expression, gesture, and other nonverbal codes. The channel is the vocal apparatus that transmits the message through the medium of air. The message is adjusted according to the feedback behavior observable in a receiver; noise in this case can be of both a physical and psychological nature. In recent work, the notion of delivery mode and interactivity have been added to the basic SMCR model. For example, the tone of voice with which the word “Yes” is uttered will carry different meanings. If one delivers it with a normal tone of voice, it will be understood as a sign of affirmation (“Yes, you’re right. I agree with what you just said”). If, however, one delivers it with a raised tone (“Yes? You’re kidding, no? I just can’t believe it!”), it would be interpreted as conveying doubt or incredulity instead. It has also been adapted to the advent of the digital interactive media, since in this case the feedback can be instantaneous, as in oral communication, and the delivery mode consists of various modalities and supporting media. That is to say, digital communications are multimedial and multimodal. The former allows a user to manipulate and use different types of media, such as text, sound, video, graphics, and animation. Commercial interactive multimedia systems include cable television services with computer interfaces that allow viewers

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to interact with TV programs, high-speed interactive audiovisual systems, such as video game consoles, and virtual reality (VR) systems that create artificial sensory environments. Multimodal is a term used broadly to refer to the amalgamation of various modalities of communication, from audio to video. Essentially it refers to the mixing of media forms: for example, the mixing of sound, image, and graphics on television news programs or on websites.

The audience In media studies, the receiver in the SMCR model is commonly called the audience. The audience is defined as the type of reader, spectator, listener, or viewer attracted to a certain media genre. In broadcasting theory, most audiences are divisible into “segments” defined by specific sociological and lifestyle characteristics. The contemporary specialty radio stations and private TV channels in particular have taken this aspect of broadcasting seriously into account by providing programming that is aimed at audiences with specific kinds of interests tied to age, gender, class, and other kinds of social variables. To describe this type of programming, the term narrowcasting, rather than broadcasting, is now used. Typically, specific audiences relate to certain types of media genres, rather than to others. Some kinds of audiences perceive, say, a certain type of TV program as representing real life and thus tend to interpret it in terms of personal life experiences; others may view the same program more critically, in terms of the assumptions that it makes. For example, a nonreligious viewer of a televangelism program will tend to interpret it critically and skeptically, whereas an audience of faithful viewers will perceive it as relevant directly to personal life experiences. With the advent of the Internet, audiences around the globe can now access virtually the same programs, spectacles, ideas, and so on. The traditional, localized (nationalistic) audiences are being replaced more and more by a more global, intercultural one. Thus the forms of culture to which audiences are exposed today are shaped not only by those living in a specific area of the world, but increasingly by people in different parts of the globe. Some analysts claim that the Internet has obliterated the distinction between target and global audiences, between media producers and consumers, and between passive and interactive audiences.

Media genres The types of books, movies, TV programs, YouTube videos and channels, podcasts, and the like that are produced for mass consumption are called

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genres. The term originated within literary criticism but was adopted by media studies in the 1960s. Genres are identifiable by certain conventions, which audiences come to recognize through regular exposure. A soap opera, for instance, is a serial drama, involving stock characters and situations; a talk show involves an announcer who interviews people, such as authorities in a particular field or else common people with specific kinds of problems or issues that they wish to discuss publicly; and so on. Since each media genre attracts a particular kind of audience regularly, its programs are sponsored ordinarily by specific types of advertisers. Indeed, the term soap opera comes from the fact that the genre was originally sponsored by detergent soap companies, and was designed to appeal to homemakers who stayed at home to do house chores, such as washing dishes and clothes (which, of course, requires the use of soap products).

Semiotic method The study of media genres from the semiotic perspective was initiated, as mentioned, by Roland Barthes in the 1950s. Barthes applied basic sign theory, introduced briefly above, to the analysis of all kinds of media spectacles and genres, showing how it can expose the implicit meanings built into them. Recall that a sign is defined as something physical (X) standing for something else (Y), material or conceptual, in some particular way (X = Y). The sign can be a simple form such as a word, or a complex form such as a novel or radio program. The latter is designated more specifically a text in semiotic theory. But a text is still a sign. This is why, for instance, we read and remember a novel as a singular form (X), not as an aggregate of its individual words, having a specific type of meaning or range of meanings (Y), that we derive from it on the basis of personal, social, and other kinds of experiences (X = Y). Barthes’ goal was to expose mass capitalist culture as a huge distraction factory, aimed at uprooting the traditional forms of art and meaning-making. In so doing, he showed that it constitutes an overarching system of signs that recycles deeply embedded meanings within mass culture, subverting them to commercial ends. These are called structures. The primary goal of media semiotics is to catalog and analyze these structures as they manifest themselves in media products. Of course, one does not have to take Barthes’ ideological stance or critique to be a media semiotician. Indeed, many semioticians put aside the ideologies behind notions such

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as neomania and commoditization, to get at the truth of the matter, so to speak. For the sake of historical accuracy, it should be mentioned that Barthes’ so-called Marxist stance on modernity did not come about without precedence. It is found in other schools of analysis, including the so-called Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School of Social Research was originally located at the University of Frankfurt (1923–33). But with the rise of the Nazi party, it was relocated to Geneva, Switzerland (1933–35), and then to New York (Columbia University, 1935–49), before returning to the University of Frankfurt in 1949. The influential members of the Frankfurt School included Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903– 69), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Erich Fromm (1900–80), Lee Lowenthal (1900–93), and Friedrich Pollock (1894– 1970). The members of this school were primarily Marxist in their interpretation of cultural and social trends. Its leading members wanted to understand the way in which human groups create meaning collectively under the impact of modern technology and how modern societies have come under the control of capitalism and its commodity culture that is tantamount to the production of material goods. The Frankfurt School was highly pessimistic about the possibility of genuine culture under modern capitalism, condemning most forms of popular or mass culture as channels of consumerist propaganda that indoctrinated the masses and disguised genuine social inequalities. The school’s main contention was that typical pop culture fare was vulgar, functioning primarily to pacify ordinary people. Some contemporary critics of contemporary pop culture and media draw heavily upon the general arguments made by it. However, as a science of meaning, semiotics attempts to avoid ideological biases in its analysis of mediated meanings, even though these may come up occasionally.

Three basic questions In identifying and documenting media structures, the semiotician is guided by three basic questions: 1 What does a certain structure (text, genre, etc.) mean? 2 How does it represent what it means? 3 Why does it mean what it means? Take the following figure as a simple example of how semioticians would go about the work of formulating answers to such questions:

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As discussed several times, in semiotic terminology, the figure is classified as a visual signifier, that is, as a form, X, constructed with elements that can be seen (rather than heard, felt, smelled, etc.). The answer to the question of what it means, Y, is “a bright idea.” As mentioned, this is called the signified. Now, the answer to how it represents this meaning (X = Y) is by means of a bright light bulb in a balloon (= an analog for the mind). Finally, looking for an answer as to why it means “bright idea” is where the real work of semiotic analysis begins, since it involves delving into the origin and history of this specific visual sign—something that need not be done here. Suffice it to say that figuring out the signification system that underlies the X = Y relation in this case involves knowing that (1) light bulbs are sources of light, (2) light is a metaphorical construct for knowledge, and (3) balloons in comic books encircle words or thoughts which issue from the mouth or head of the character speaking. The “bright idea” is known also as a referent. There are two general kinds of referents that signs encode, concrete and abstract. A concrete referent, such as “rabbit,” is something that is physically demonstrable and thus perceptible by the senses; an abstract referent, such as the “bright idea” concept designated by the light bulb figure above, is something that is formed in the mind and is thus not demonstrable as such. Now, as the psychologist-semiotician Charles Morris (1938, 1946) suggested, the sign is a powerful mental tool precisely because its X part can evoke any type of referent, concrete or abstract, whether or not the referent is at hand for demonstration or for explication. This is known technically as displacement, and is defined as the ability of the mind to conjure up the things to which signs refer even though these might not be physically present for the senses to perceive. The displacement property of signs has endowed the human species with the ability to think about the world beyond the stimulus-response realm to which most other species are constrained, and thus to reflect upon it at any time and in any situation whatsoever within “mind-space.” Signs allow us, figuratively speaking, to

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carry the world around with us in our minds. But this is not the actual world; it is a mental world that has been brought into being by the selected domains of reference that signs have delineated.

Semiotic analysis Consider two types of texts—a recipe and a poem. The latter is what the late semiotician Umberto Eco (1979, 1990) called an open text—a representation that elicits interpretations that are open or boundless. For example, T. S. Eliot’s marvelous 1922 poem, The Waste Land, does not have a fixed discernible interpretation or meaning. It can be read as a representation of the disillusionment of an era, brought about by a state of suffering after the First World War; it can also be read as a eulogy to existential despair; and the list of interpretations could go on and on, even though they seem to converge toward an emotional center involving desolation, anguish, and hopelessness. On the other hand, it could also be ironic, critiquing feelings of nihilism that were coagulating at the time broadly among writers. In effect, Eliot’s poem is an open text, subject to a variety and potentially infinite number of interpretations that revolve around a thematic center. A closed text, on the other hand, is one that evokes a singular meaning, or a very limited range of meanings. A recipe elicits a fairly straightforward interpretation of what it means, since it constitutes a set of instructions on how to bake something. It is not completely closed, however, since knowledge of how to mix ingredients, what they entail in a gustatory fashion, and other mitigating interpretative factors might enter into the overall meaning of the recipe. Clearly, the semiotician must have knowledge of the culture in which a representation is created in order to put forward an interpretation of it. Rather than calling it culture in this book, it is more appropriate to call it a signifying order so as to highlight the fact that it constitutes a network of meaning structures. Michel Foucault (1972) characterized this network as an “interrelated fabric” in which the boundaries of meanings are never clear-cut. Every signifier is caught up in a system of references to other signifiers; it is a node within a network of distributed signifieds—the actual meanings used. As soon as one questions its unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself. To extract meaning from a text, therefore, one must have knowledge of this network and of the meanings that constitute it. For instance, in the Western signifying order, biblical themes are interconnected with literary practices and with the style and content of everyday discourse, even though Western society now largely defines itself as secular (Frye 1981): for example, the expression “He fell into disgrace” has its roots in the story of Adam and Eve (note as well that the word disgrace is composed with the word grace, which

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refers to a state of being protected or sanctified by the favor of God); similarly, the expression “She has just started out on her life journey” is based on biblical journey stories such as the one of Noah’s Ark. The network of interconnected meanings that constitute a signifying order is configured with domains known as codes. These are “organizational grids” within the network. As a concrete example of a code, take 1950s rock and roll music. This constitutes a specific type of musical code because it provides a system of musical structures that were developed over time from previous musical sources. From this system, an infinite variety of songs were composed that were easily recognizable as exemplars of the code. Differences in actual songs are attributable to stylistic difference, that is, to the specific way in which a particular song has been composed. Thus, one can talk of an “Elvis Presley style” or a “Little Richard style,” or a “Patsy Cline style,” which are characteristic actualizations of the same musical code by particular artists. By the way, because of stylistic variation, codes are constantly changing. Nevertheless, all such codes retain the essential structures from which they have been derived. Only when the structures become radically transformed can one talk of a totally “new musical code” as having emerged.

Further reading In these Further Reading sections, only those books or other sources that involve the use of semiotics will be listed; more general references can be found in the bibliography at the end. Berger, Arthur Asa. 2014. Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics. CreateSpace Independent Publishing. This is a revision of one of the most widely read introductions to the field of semiotics, originally published in 1980. Berger’s book is a clear and comprehensive one that shows how semiotics can be used by anyone to understand everyday life. Eschbach, Achim, and Jü rgen Trabant. 1983. History of Semiotics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. This is still the only book treating the history of semiotics integratively. It focuses primarily on the historical connection between linguistic semiotics and the overall study of signs and sign systems. Nö th, Winfried. 1990. Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. As both a reference manual and an introductory text, this book is an authoritative introduction to semiotics, from its history in antiquity to its branches and applications.

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Chapter 2 An outline of semiotic theory A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable. It would be part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from Greek semeion “sign”). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. —Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

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uman intellectual and social life are based on the production, use, and exchange of signs. When we gesture, talk, write, read, watch a TV program, listen to music, navigate through YouTube, or look at a painting, we are engaged in sign-directed or meaning-based behavior. To study this behavior, the nineteenth-century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Peirce proposed an autonomous discipline. The former called it semiology; the latter semeiotics (as had the seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke before him). Today, Peirce’s term—spelled semiotics (without the “e”)—is the preferred one, as is his definition of semiotics as a “doctrine of principles” for the study of signbased behavior. The term doctrine is used in its basic sense of a stated set of principles. A clever, yet perceptive, definition of semiotics was put forward by the late writer and semiotician Umberto Eco (1932–2016). Eco (1976: 12) defined it as “the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie, because if something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot, in fact, be used to tell at all.” This is, despite its apparent facetiousness, a rather insightful definition, since it underlines the fact that we have the capacity to represent the world in any way we desire through signs, even in misleading and deceitful ways. This capacity for artifice allows us to conjure up nonexistent referents, or to refer to things without any back-up empirical proof that what we are saying is true. In the era of so-called fake news, Eco’s definition rings particularly important—a phenomenon that truly needs semiotics to deconstruct it and bring out the “truth” of the matter. As the character, George Costanza, aptly stated in an episode of the sitcom Seinfeld: “It’s not a lie, if you believe it.”

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A large part of the increase in the popularity of semiotics today was brought about by the popular fictional writings of Eco himself. The success of his best-selling novels (The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before) has stimulated considerable curiosity vis-à -vis semiotics among the public at large. The efforts of Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001), a distinguished professor of semiotics at Indiana University, have also been instrumental in showing the relevance of semiotics to large audiences. But, as mentioned, it was Roland Barthes who first introduced semiotic method in the 1950s as a tool for gaining a discerning understanding of our mediated world. The goal of this chapter is to describe the basic aspects of semiotic method, since these will inform and guide the remainder of our journey through the mediascape in subsequent chapters.

Background and general notions As a matter of historical fact, it was Hippocrates (460–377 BCE), the founder of Greek medical science, who coined the term semeiotics, defining it as a branch of medicine for the study of symptoms—a symptom being, in effect, a semeion “mark, sign” that stands for something other than itself. The physician’s primary task, Hippocrates claimed, was to unravel what symptoms indicate in physiological-anatomical terms. Diagnosis was thus a semeiotic method. The study of how “things stand for other things” became the prerogative of philosophers around the time of Plato (c. 428–347 BCE), who suggested that signs were ideal mental “forms” that did not “stand for” reality directly, but as idealized mental approximations of it. Plato’s illustrious pupil Aristotle (384–322 BCE) took it upon himself to investigate the “stands for” (X = Y) phenomenon more closely, laying down an early implicit theory of the sign that has remained basic to this day. He defined a word, for example, as consisting of three dimensions: (1) the physical part of the word itself (e.g., the sounds that make up a word such as rabbit); (2) the referent to which it calls attention (a certain category of animal); and (3) its evocation of a meaning (what the referent entails psychologically and socially). As we saw in the previous chapter, nowadays (1) is called the signifier, (2) the signified, and (3) signification. The next major step forward in the study of signs was the one taken by St. Augustine (354–430 CE), the philosopher and religious thinker who classified signs as natural, conventional, and sacred. A natural sign is one that is found, literally, in nature or produced by natural processes. Bodily symptoms, the rustling of leaves, the colors of plants, and so on, are all natural signs, as are the signals that animals emit in response to physical and emotional

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states. A conventional sign, on the other hand, is one that is made by humans. Words, gestures, and symbols are examples of conventional signs. In modern-day semiotic theory, these are classified as verbal and nonverbal—words and other linguistic structures (expressions, phrases, etc.) are examples of verbal signs; drawings and gestures are examples of nonverbal signs. As St. Augustine emphasized, conventional signs serve a fundamental need—they allow humans to refer to and, thus, remember the world. Without them we would have to experience things anew each time we came across them or each time we imagined them. Signs make thinking and recognition fluid and routine. Finally, St. Augustine defined sacred signs as miracles conveying messages from God. These can only be understood on faith. St. Augustine’s views lay largely forgotten until the eleventh century, when interest in the nature of human representation was rekindled by scholars who translated the works of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek thinkers. The result was the movement known as scholasticism. Using classical Greek ideas as their intellectual framework, the scholastics wanted to show that the truth of religious beliefs existed independently of the signs used to represent them. But within this movement there were some—the nominalists—who argued that “truth” was a matter of subjective opinion and that signs captured, at best, only illusory and highly variable human versions of it. The French theologian Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142) proposed an interesting compromise to the debate, suggesting that the “truth” that a sign purportedly captured existed in a particular object as an observable property of the object itself, and outside it as an ideal concept within the mind. The “truth” of the matter, therefore, was somewhere in between. It was the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) who introduced the formal study of signs into philosophy in his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690), anticipating that it would allow philosophers to understand the interconnection between representation and knowledge. But the task he laid out remained virtually unnoticed until the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) became the basis for circumscribing an autonomous field of inquiry. Saussure suggested that the study of signs be divided into two branches— the synchronic and the diachronic. The former refers to the study of signs at a given point in time, normally the present, and the latter to the investigation of how signs change in form and meaning over time. As a simple case-inpoint of what semiotically focused diachronic analysis entails, consider the word person. In ancient Greece, the word referred to a “mask” worn by an actor on stage. Subsequently, it came to have the meaning of “the character of the mask-wearer.” This meaning persists to this day in the theater term dramatis personae “cast of characters” (literally “the persons or masks of

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the drama”). Eventually, the word came to have its present meaning of “living human being.” This diachronic analysis of person explains, incidentally, why we continue to use theatrical expressions such as to play a role in life, to interact, to act out feelings, to put on a proper face (mask), and so on, in everyday discourse. Saussure saw the sign as a “binary structure,” namely a form that consisted of two interrelated parts—the signifier (“le signifiant” in French) and signified (“le signifié ”). The relation between the two is conceptual, arbitrary, and determined by social convention. A word such as rabbit evokes, Saussure claimed, a “mental sound image” that is tied to an “idealized” social picture of the animal in question. At about the same time that Saussure was elaborating his version of sign theory, Charles Peirce was doing virtually the same thing. He defined the sign as consisting of a representamen (literally “something that does the representing”), referring to some object (whatever the representamen calls attention to), eliciting a meaning, called the interpretant (whatever it means to someone in some context). The relation among the three dimensions is not a static one, but dynamic, whereby one suggests the other in a cyclical manner. Peirce also provided a typology of sixty-six species of signs, classifying them according to their function. For example, he defined a qualisign as a sign that draws attention to, or singles out, some quality of its referent. In language, an adjective is a qualisign since it draws attention to the qualities (color, shape, size, etc.) of referents. In nonverbal domains, qualisigns include the colors used by painters, the harmonies and tones used by composers, and so on. In the twentieth century, semiotic theory was developed by a host of semioticians, linguists, psychologists, and culture theorists. Among these, one can mention, in addition to Barthes, Sebeok, and Eco, scholars such as Charles Morris (1901–79), Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965), Roman Jakobson (1896– 1982), Algirdas J. Greimas (1917–92), Claude Lé vi-Strauss (1908–2009), Juri Lotman (1922–93), Jacques Lacan (1901–81), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2009). However, the basic Saussurean-Peircean paradigm, with its foundations in the writings of Aristotle, St. Augustine, the medieval scholastic philosophers, and John Locke, has remained intact to this day. To conclude this brief historical overview, it should be mentioned that the terms significs, coined by Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912), and sematology are also sometimes used (Petrilli 2009). The term semiotics was adopted by the International Association for Semiotics Studies in 1969, becoming, ever since, the main one to designate the discipline. There is an ongoing debate today as to whether semiotics is a science and if it should encompass the study of nonhuman as well as human sign systems. This has led to the rise to prominence of biosemiotics, which aims to do exactly that.

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There are also several theoretical debates that have characterized semiotics proper for more than a century and are still ongoing in the present day. The most important one has been whether sign construction is, in its origin, an arbitrary process, producing sign forms with no sensory, experiential, or affective connection to their referents, or if it is a “motivated” process, generating sign forms that do. Saussure was the one who introduced “arbitrariness theory” into semiotics, claiming that the connection established between the physical structure of a sign (its signifier) and its meaning (the signified) is an arbitrary one, developed over time for some specific social purpose. There was no evident reason for using, say, tree or arbre (French) to designate “an arboreal plant,” other than to name it as such. Indeed, any well-formed signifier could have been used in either language—tree is a well-formed signifier in English; tbee is not (for obvious phonetic reasons). Saussure did admit, however, that there were some signs that were fashioned in imitation of some sensory or perceivable property detectable in their referents. Onomatopoeic words (drip, plop, whack, etc.), he granted, were indeed put together to simulate real physical sounds. But he maintained that the coinage of such words was the exception, not the rule. In contrast to Saussure, Peirce saw motivated structure as the “default” mode of sign construction. In other words, when we construct a sign we attempt to make it resemble something perceived, imagined, or felt. Eventually the motivated sign will resolve itself into a conventional form that allows us to classify and understand a certain part of the world in a relatively stable fashion. In this book, Saussurean terminology will be used in the main, not because of any partisanship toward that particular version of sign theory, but because: (1) it is much more prevalent in the research literature related to media semiotics, and (2) it can be complemented by Peircean notions if the analytical situation should require it. I should say, however, that the paradigms of Saussure and Peirce are not isomorphic, nor so transparent that one can fill in the gaps to render them translatable. The “cut and paste” approach adopted here is envisioned simply for convenience. Indeed, a perusal of the relevant literature today shows a tendency within semiotics to amalgamate Saussurean and Peircean notions, especially when it comes to the analysis of the mediascape.

The object of media semiotics As mentioned several times, it was Roland Barthes who drew attention to the value of studying the mediascape with the theoretical tools of semiotics. After the publication of his pivotal book Mythologies in 1957, semiotic theory became widely used within the fields of critical analysis, a branch of cultural

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studies that examines the relationship between audiences and media genres, and functional analysis, a branch of sociology that studies media institutions and their effects on group behavior. Scholars from both these fields were attracted particularly by Barthes’ thesis that the meaning structures built into media products and genres were derived from the ancient myths, bestowing upon media events the same kind of significance that is traditionally reserved for ritualistically based structures. They also tended to side with Barthes’ trenchant critique of this ploy as a duplicitous and morally vacuous one that was ultimately subversive of true cultural evolution. As early as the 1960s, another well-known French semiotician, Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), continued from where Barthes left off. Like his compatriot, Baudrillard scathingly attacked the entire consumerist mass culture industry as one large distraction-producing factory intent on lulling the masses into soporific stupor, so that they will acquire material objects habitually and for no other purpose than to possess them (Genosko 1999). However, it is my opinion that the critiques of Barthes and Baudrillard, as well-meaning as they were, may have unintentionally “politicized” semiotics far too much, rendering it little more than a convenient tool of social critics. Semiotics is, as argued here, a discipline aiming to study sign-based behavior, not a tool for carrying out critiques of political and social systems. So, while the truly brilliant insights of these two semioticians will certainly be incorporated into the present treatment, their more acerbic critiques of Western society will be largely ignored, unless they can be seen to inform the discussion at hand. The primary object of media semiotics is, in effect, to study how the mass media create or recycle signs for their own ends. It does so, as we saw in the previous chapter, by asking: (1) what something means or represents, (2) how it exemplifies its meaning, and (3) why it has the meaning that it has. Of course, ideological structure in media representations cannot be ignored; and indeed it will be considered part of the whole process of analysis. On the other hand, there is no need to “ideologize” the process of semiotic analysis. As a simple case-in-point, consider the comic-book figure of Superman, who was introduced in 1938 by Action Comics, and published separately a little later in Superman comic books. What or who does Superman represent? The answer is, of course, that he stands for “a hero” in the tradition of mythic superhuman heroes, such as Prometheus and Hercules. As a heroic figure Superman has, of course, been updated and adapted culturally—he is an “American” hero who stands for “truth,” “justice,” and “the American way.” Like the ancient heroes, Superman is indestructible, morally upright, and devoted to saving humanity from itself. Moreover, like some heroes of yore (such as Achilles), he has a “tragic flaw”—exposure to “kryptonite,” a substance that is found on the planet where he was born, renders him devoid of his awesome powers.

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Now, answering the question of why Superman (or any comic-book action hero for that matter) appeals to modern-day audiences requires us to delve into the origin and history of the archetypal heroic figure. In mythology and legend, a hero is an individual, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and sent by the gods to Earth to play a crucial role in human affairs. Heroes are character abstractions, in short, who embody lofty human ideals for all to admire—truth, honesty, justice, fairness, moral strength, and so on. Modern-day audiences feel a need for heroism as intuitively as did the ancient ones who watched stage performances of Aeschylus’ (c. 525– 456 BCE) Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer in Greece. Rather than being sent by the gods from the heavens to help humanity (something that would hardly be meaningful in a secular society), Superman came to Earth instead from a planet in another galaxy; he leads a “double life,” as Promethean-Herculean hero and as Clarke Kent, a “mild-mannered” reporter for a daily newspaper; he is adored by Lois Lane, a reporter for the same newspaper who suspects (from time to time) that Clark Kent may be Superman; and he wears a distinctive costume. This “Superman code” was used from one issue to the next by the creators, making Superman extremely popular to modern audiences in search of a hero mythology. The character continues, in fact, to be a favorite in contemporary pop culture. The gist of the semiotic story of Superman, therefore, is that he is a “recycled” or “mediated” ancient hero figure. The “signification system” that undergirds the Superman figure can be summarized in chart form as follows: Mythic Hero

Superman

Sent by the gods to Earth

Comes from another planet

Helps humans run their affairs

Helps “good” people in trouble and defeats the “bad guys”

Has a tragic flaw

Is rendered powerless and vulnerable by exposure to kryptonite, a substance that is found on his home planet

Exemplifies virtue, honesty, and all the ideals that humanity looks up to, but which common people rarely embody

Represents “truth,” “justice,” “the American way,” and all the virtues that modern-day people aspire to have, but often fail to manifest

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As this concrete example shows, media representations are, more often than not, recycled mythic codes, dressed up in contemporary garb to appeal to contemporary audiences. As Barthes correctly observed, this is precisely why media characters, such as movie cowboys and detectives, and spectacles, such as wrestling matches, have enduring appeal. Like their ancestors, modern-day people need heroes subconsciously to “make things right” in human affairs, at least in the world of fantasy.

Mediated meanings The “heroic figure” meaning associated with Superman is an example of a “mediated meaning,” that is, of a sign or signification system that has been recycled by the modern media. This meaning is, of course, not derivable directly by someone who has never been exposed to Superman, to action comic books, or to the notion of hero—which is, of course, rather unlikely. Assuming that such an uninformed onlooker exists, then to that person Superman would appear to be a “man in tights and red cape, who has the unusual ability to fly, and who possesses superior physical powers.” This “literal” perception of Superman is known, technically, as the denotation of the sign-figure as observed without a signification system behind it. As the psychologist C. K. Ogden and the philosopher and literary critic I. A. Richards argued in their classic 1923 work, titled appropriately The Meaning of Meaning, like the axioms of arithmetic or geometry, the notion of denotative meaning is best left undefined. Essentially, it is the “face value” linkage established between a sign and its referent. Ancient audiences probably believed that Prometheus was a real being and, thus, would have interpreted his stage character denotatively. Children, too, might tend to interpret Superman in this way today. But modern-day adult audiences would not; they would know that Superman represents an imaginary figure, not a real one. Incidentally, to use Peircean theory, it can be said that the difference in meaning between Prometheus and Superman occurs at the interpretant level. Recall from above that the interpretant encompasses the specific designations that a sign evokes for a person or group at a certain point in time (Peirce 1931–58, II: 228). Denotative meaning, despite its apparent “obviousness,” is not something that can be pinned down exactly. It is a generalization that transcends literalness (as just discussed). The comic-book, television, and movie versions of the Superman figure are similar, yet different. The details vary from one medium to the other, but the general qualities associated with Superman remain intact. As long as he is indestructible, wears the same suit, has the ability to fly, and so on, he will instantly be recognizable as Superman—no

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matter which particular actor portrays him in a movie, and no matter which particular artist draws him. The interpretation of Superman as an “imaginary heroic figure” is known instead as connotation. This can be defined as a meaning that has a particular “cultural history behind it”—that is, it can only be understood in terms of some signifying system. In connotative terms, everything about Superman has connotation built into the figure: Denotative features

Connotative interpretations

Superman has unusual physical powers He acquired these powers by virtue of the (he can fly; he can see through fact that he is not of this world. substances; he cannot be harmed by human weapons; etc.). He helps good people in trouble and defeats the villains.

Superhuman heroes come from another world to help humans run their affairs. They embody human ideal virtues.

He is rendered powerless and vulnerable by exposure to kryptonite.

Some of the ancient heroes have a tragic flaw, which is an acknowledgment of the belief that all things of this world (including good things) are ultimately imperfect.

He wears an unusual costume.

Clothing sets heroes apart from common folk. This is also why military personnel and clerics, for instance, wear different types of clothing. Clothing sets heroes apart from those who depend on them.

Connotation is the operative mode in the production and decipherment of creative texts such as poems, novels, musical compositions, and art works. And, of course, all mass media texts and genres are grounded in connotation, since they are designed to generate culturally significant meanings. Indeed, the whole mediated world in which we live is characterizable as one huge connotative signifying order. Unless one watches the weather channel simply to find out what the weather will be that day, there is very little on TV or on the Internet for that matter that is designed to impart straightforward, denotative meaning. And even weather forecasts are hardly ever completely denotative events. TV announcers often line their forecast with connotative remarks such as “Mother Nature has not been very good to us this winter,” “Where has the sun gone to?,” and the like.

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Connotation is powerful because it evokes feelings and perceptions about things. As the American philosopher Susanne Langer (1948) argued, artistic forms are effective because we “feel” that they have much to say to us, far beyond what they at first appear to convey. Media messages are powerful too because we react to them in terms of feeling. Superman is emotionally appealing to many people, especially children, because he is a figure imbued with mythic connotation. His actions in stories literally “make sense” to us because they are consistent with what heroic figures are wont to do. To show that connotation evokes emotions and perceptions, the psychologists Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum developed a technique which they called the semantic differential in 1957. It consists in posing a series of questions to subjects about a specific concept—Is it good or bad? weak or strong? and so on—as seven-point scales, with the opposing adjectives at each end. The answers are then analyzed statistically in order to sift out any general pattern from them. Suppose that subjects are asked to rate the concept of “ideal American president” in terms of the following scales: for example, Should the president be young or old? Should the president be practical or idealistic? Should the president be modern or traditional? and so on (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1  The concept grid

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A subject who feels that the president should be more “youngish” than “oldish” would place a mark toward the young end of the top scale; one who feels that a president should be “bland,” would place a mark toward the bland end of the attractive-bland scale; and so on. If we were to ask a large number of subjects to rate the president in this way, we would get a “connotative profile” of the American presidency in terms of the statistically significant variations in sense that it evokes. Interestingly, research utilizing the semantic differential has shown that the range of variations is not a matter of pure subjectivity, but forms, rather, a socially based pattern. In other words, the connotations of many (if not all) abstract concepts are constrained by culture: for example, the word noise turns out to be a highly emotional concept for the Japanese, who rate it consistently at the ends of the scales presented to them; whereas it is a fairly neutral concept for Americans, who tend to rate it on average in the mid-ranges of the same scales. Connotation is not, therefore, open-ended; it is constrained by a series of factors, including conventional agreements as to what signs mean in certain situations. Without such constraints, our signification systems would be virtually unusable. All signification (whether it is denotative or connotative) is a relational and associative process—that is, signs acquire their meanings not in isolation but in relation to other signs and to the contexts in which they occur. A technique also used in semiotics to flesh out the connotative meanings built into signs is that of opposition. Take, as a simple example, the connotative differences that are associated with the white-dark dichotomy in many cultures. The color white connotes “cleanliness,” “purity,” “innocence,” and so on, while its counterpart dark connotes “uncleanness,” “impurity,” “corruption,” and so on. This dichotomy is used with such regularity by mass pop culture that it goes generally unnoticed. From early cowboy movies, in which the heroes wore white hats and the villains black ones, to contemporary advertisements in which such items as “dark leather gloves” evoke impressions of night life, the set of opposing connotations associated with the white-dark dichotomy is being constantly recycled through the mediascape. On the other hand, this same opposition could be utilized for the reverse purpose: that is, to link the connotations associated with darkness to heroes so that they can be perceived as mysterious and dauntless, fighting Evil on its own terms. This is why the Zorro character of cinema fame wears black, as did several Hollywood cowboy characters of the past. Technically, oppositions are said to show paradigmatic structure—a term which indicates, essentially, that signs bear meaning in relation to other signs. We recognize the qualities that Superman possesses as being distinctive and meaningful because they contrast paradigmatically with those possessed by the “villains” or “opponents” he encounters during his many escapades:

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Superman . . .

His Opponent . . .

is actively friendly and conscientious.

is actively hostile and unscrupulous.

is benign.

is malicious.

is selfless and considerate.

is self-serving.

embodies Goodness.

embodies Evil.

is honest, frank, and open.

is cunning, insincere, and deceitful.

is brave.

is a coward.

Note, moreover, that the above “paradigmatic features” are not preclusive of each other. Rather, they allow us to form a composite mental portrait of Superman: Superman = physically powerful, honest, selfless, considerate, brave, and so on. Technically, such compositions are said to be syntagmatic. This refers to the fact that signs are put together in some consistent way. As a linguistic example of syntagmatic structure, take the words pin, bin, fun, run, duck, and luck. These are legitimate signifiers because the combination of sounds with which they are made is consistent with English syllable structure. On the other hand, mpin, mbin, mfun, mrun, mduck, and mluck would not qualify as legitimate verbal signifiers in English because they violate its syllable structure. In essence, something is a legitimate sign if it has a discernible (repeatable and predictable) form and is constructed in a definable (patterned) way. Signs are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. These have features on their “faces” that keep them distinct from each other, as well as differently shaped “edges” that make it possible to join them together in specific ways to complete the overall picture.

Types of signs Various classifications of signs have been elaborated since Aristotle and St. Augustine. Of these, the most comprehensive is the taxonomy developed by Charles Peirce. Of the sixty-six species he identified, there are three—icons, indexes, and symbols—that have revealed themselves to be highly useful for the investigation of media products. An icon is a sign that resembles its referent in some way. Portraits of people are visual icons showing the actual faces of people from the perspective of the artist. Onomatopoeic words such as drip, plop, bang, and screech are vocal icons designed to replicate or imitate the sounds that certain things, actions, or movements are perceived to make. Perfumes are olfactory icons simulat-

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ing natural scents. Chemical food additives are gustatory icons approximating the tastes of natural foods. A block with a letter of the alphabet carved into it is a tactile icon that can be figured out by touch. Superman also has well-defined “hero-iconic” qualities: that is, he has been devised to look, act, and think like past heroic figures. And indeed like Prometheus, Hercules, Achilles, and Samson, he is muscular, tall, and attractive; he is brave; and so on. He is a recycled icon of past heroes. An index is a sign that stands for, or points out, something in relation to something else. Indexes do not resemble their referents, as icons do; they identify them or indicate where they are. The most typical manifestation of human indexicality is the pointing index finger, which people the world over use instinctively to point out and locate things, people, and events. Many words, too, manifest an implicit form of indexicality: for example, words such as here, there, up, and down refer to the relative location of things when speaking about them. Indexicality is also a feature of identity-construction. A name, for example, identifies a separate individual and, usually, the person’s ethnic or social origin. This is why Superman, not being of this world, but having to live in it, takes on an alter ego with a human name, Clark Kent. The latter identifies him moreover as a member of American society rather than, say, of French society. A symbol is a sign that stands for something in a convention-based way. Words in general are symbolic signs, as are some hand gestures. But any signifier—object, sound, figure, color, musical sound, and so on—can have symbolic meaning. A V-sign made with the index and middle fingers can stand symbolically for the concept “peace”; the color white, as we saw above, can stand for “purity” and “innocence”; and the list could go on and on. The thing to note is that symbolic meanings are established by history and social convention, and thus cannot be figured out directly. Here is a list of a few color connotations used to symbolize an array of referents in common representational practices: ll

white = purity, innocence, virtuous, chastity, goodness, decency, and so on

ll

black = evil, impurity, guilt, vice, sinfulness, indecency, immorality, and so on

ll

red = passion, sexuality, fertility, fecundity, anger, sensuality, and so on

ll

green = hope, insecurity, naiveté , candor, trust, life, existence, and so on

ll

yellow = liveliness, sunshine, happiness, tranquility, peacefulness, and so on, but also cowardice

ll

blue = hope, sky, paradise, tranquility, calmness, mysticism, mystery, and so on

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ll

brown = earthiness, naturalness, primordiality, constancy, and so on

ll

gray = dullness, mistiness, obscurity, mystery, nebulousness, and so on

The colors of the costume Superman wears are symbolic. His red cape suggests “noble blood” and his blue tights the “hope” he brings to humanity. Of course, the red and blue combination is also indicative of “American patriotism”—these are, after all, colors of the American flag. Superman himself is a symbol. As discussed several times, he represents the embodiment of all the heroic virtues that human beings aspire to possess but, being weak, fail to possess—honesty, valor, and so on. The overall figure of Superman has thus been assembled with iconic, indexical, and symbolic features or meanings: Iconicity

Indexicality

Symbolism

He resembles in physical He takes on a human name, He symbolizes the embodiappearance heroes Clark Kent, so that he ment of virtues such as of the past: he is tall, can fashion an alter honesty, valor, considerhandsome, muscular, ego and thus fit in with ateness, and so on. and so on. American society.

Codes How Superman acts, how he behaves, how he looks, and what he does, are all predictable aspects of the “Superman story,” no matter who tells it or in what medium it is told. These aspects constitute a “Superman code”—a set of basic “ingredients” or “notions” for making representations of Superman in comic-book, television, or movie form. Some of these include the following, as we have seen several times above: ll

Superman lives a double life as hero and as reporter Clark Kent.

ll

He is adored by Lois Lane. As Superman he ignores her advances. However, as Clark Kent he shows amorous interest in her.

ll

As Clark Kent he dresses like a typical American male. He changes into his Superman costume (away from the public eye) only when the situation calls for heroic intervention.

ll

Superman never shows favoritism. He is always straightforward and honest.

ll

Given his tragic flaw, Superman may become momentarily overpowered by some villain who comes into possession of kryptonite.

ll

He has all the qualities and virtues of heroes.

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Codes are “organizational systems or grids” for the recurring elements and meanings that go into the constitution of anything that humans make, including rituals, spectacles, and representations of all kinds. They can be highly formal as, for example, the code of arithmetic in which all the structures (numerals) and rules (addition, subtraction, etc.) are firmly established. Or they can be highly flexible as, for example, the code for greeting people, which varies according to who the participants in the greeting ritual are. A code can be compared to a recipe. This consists of information (a set of directions for preparing something to eat or drink) that must be converted into another form (the actual food or drink item) by someone. Note that the end result will vary according to the user of the recipe. But all results are still recognizable as having been made from the same recipe. Generally speaking, for some particular representational need, there is an optimum code or set of codes that can be deployed. For example, the composer of a work of operatic art will need to deploy at least three code-making sources in the construction of the operatic text—the musical code, the verbal code, and the theater code (all in place at the time of the composition). Needless to say, knowledge of most codes is culture-specific, unless they are constructed for international usage, such as mathematical and scientific codes. In these latter cases, the codes are part of a global system of education. In other words, people throughout the world have agreed on certain symbols to serve as a shorthand system for recording and recalling information. Every branch of science has its own system—astronomy uses a set of ancient symbols to identify the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars; in mathematics, Greek letters and other symbols make up an abbreviated language; and so on and so forth. Specific kinds of symbols appear in such fields as commerce, engineering, medicine, packaging, and transportation. A common strategy of mass marketing is to build “coded meanings” into representations—that is, to fashion something on the basis of some inherent or unconscious code or codes. Take, as an example, the name Acura given to a Japanese automobile first built in 1986. The name is culturally coded—it is imitative of both the structure of some Japanese words (such as tempura) and of Italian words, which end typically in a vowel. This inbuilt coding generates a system of connotations that are based on two sets of perceptions: (1) the popular view that Japanese technology and manufacturing is accurate and advanced; and (2) the common view of Italian culture as “artistic, poetic,” and so on.

Texts The “Superman code” can be used in various ways to generate a “Superman story.” The actual story is called a narrative text. Conversations, letters, speeches, poems, television programs, paintings, scientific theories, and

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musical compositions are other examples of texts. A text constitutes a specific “weaving together” of elements from a code (or codes) in order to express something. A novel, for instance, is a verbal text constructed with a set of codes, including the language code, the narrative code, and many other codes and subcodes. Note, however, that the novel is interpreted not in terms of its constituent parts, but rather holistically as a single meaning structure. This is why when we ask someone what a novel means, the person does not refer to the novel’s actual words used in the sequence in which they occur, but rather to the overall meaning that can be extracted from it: for example, “The novel Crime and Punishment paints a grim portrait of the human condition.” A text is, in effect, a composite blending of sign structures, organized to produce a message and a set of meanings. The stories that are written about Superman’s adventures are narrative texts, which recount his exploits in a specific way according to the “Superman code.” So, in any specific comic-book story we can expect to find that Superman will be involved against some villain; that he may flirt at some point with Lois Lane as Clark Kent; that he will come across a crisis that he must resolve with his extraordinary powers; and so on. The meaning of a text is conditioned by context. The context is the situation—physical, psychological, and social—in which a text is constructed or to which it refers. If read in its action comic-book format, a Superman text will be interpreted as an adventure story. However, if a satirist were to portray Superman in a movie, then the filmic text would hardly be construed as an adventure narrative, but rather as a satire or parody of the Superman figure, of its media representations, or of some other aspect related to the “Superman code.” As another example of how context conditions the meaning of something, consider a discarded cigarette butt. If one were to come across this item on a sidewalk on a city street, one would interpret it as “rubbish.” But if the exact same cigarette butt were displayed in a frame in an art gallery, then the same person would be inclined to interpret its meaning in a vastly different way. Clearly, the object’s physical context of occurrence and social context of reference—its location on a sidewalk versus its display in an art gallery—will determine how one will interpret it. Context determines how the code will affect the mind’s interpretive functions. The semiotician and linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) argued persuasively that context is a key component of any model of communication, along with the notions of addresser, message, addressee, contact, and code. Using Superman as a case-in-point, these terms can be defined as follows: ll

The addresser is the creator of a particular Superman story.

ll

The message is what the specific story is designed to convey.

ll

The addressee is the audience, that is, the intended receiver of the Superman episode.

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ll

The context is the actual medium used, permitting an audience to recognize that the episode is authentic and leading to an interpretation. If the story is found in an adventure comic book, then it will be interpreted as a genuine Superman story. If the episode is found in a satirical movie, then it will be interpreted instead as a “parody of the Superman story.”

ll

The mode of contact is the actual way in which the addresser and addressee are linked through the medium used. A Superman story can be delivered in comic-book, TV, radio, movie, or website form. Each one allows for the addresser to make contact with the addressee in some specific physical or psychological way.

ll

The code, as we saw above, is the system of recurrent story elements that allow audiences to decipher a Superman text as an adventure story extolling heroism.



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Jakobson suggested, moreover, that each communicative act (e.g., each Superman episode) serves or entails a specific function. A specific Superman story can: (1) reveal the writer’s particular slant on the theme or plot, (2) produce a different effect on its audiences, (3) refer to specific aspects of the Superman story, (4) produce a different aesthetic effect on audiences, (5) maintain interest in the Superman story by exposing the audience to a version of it, or (6) make a reflective commentary on the Superman story itself. These functions were labeled, respectively, (1) emotive, (2) conative, (3) referential, (4) poetic, (5) phatic, and (6) metalingual by Jakobson.

Signifying orders Needless to say, signs, texts, and codes do not exist independently of each other. They are interconnected cohesively. So, they are discussed separately only for convenience. In effect, the interrelationship of these signifying components creates what we commonly call a culture, defined by anthropologists as the totality of socially transmitted behavioral patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. These patterns, traits, and products are considered to be the expression of a particular period, class, community, or population. In strictly semiotic terms, as we have seen, culture can be defined as a complex system of different types of signs that cohere into codes which individuals and groups can utilize to construct texts in order to make meanings or exchange messages. The system can be called the signifying order, as mentioned. It is characterizable as a kind of macro-code that supplies the signs, the various codes, and the texts they make possible to the members of a society or group of societies.

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It is truly amazing to ponder that, without any training whatsoever, infants intuitively grasp what signs are and what they allow them to do; this suggests that signification is part of the brain’s ability to make sense of things in a semiotic way. The brain is, in large part, a semiotic organ. When infants hear a string of sounds, such as those that constitute the word r-a-b-b-i-t, for instance, they perceive them not as random noises, but rather as standing for “a long-eared, short-tailed, burrowing mammal with soft fur”; all we have to do is show children an image of a rabbit. Just as remarkable is the fact that, well before the age of two, children start using the word rabbit purposefully and intelligently to refer not only to real rabbits, but also to representations of rabbits, such as drawings of them in picture books. In effect, every child is “programmed” by nature, so to speak, to recognize and use signs, and, in a short period of time, to acquire effortlessly the system of signs and codes of the culture in which the child is being reared. Signifying orders allow people to encode and store knowledge. But such orders always leave gaps, offering up only a portion of what is potentially knowable in the world. The great British writer of children’s books Lewis Carroll (1832–98) invented his own language, which he called Jabberwocky, to show that the English language, as constituted, does not tell all there is to tell about reality. Jabberwocky words such as brillig, slithy, tove, and wabe (from Through the Looking Glass, 1871: 126–29) were needed, Carroll argued cleverly, to refer to common things, concepts, or events that would otherwise go regularly unnoticed by speakers of English: brillig = “the time of broiling dinner”; slithy = “smooth and active”; tove = “a species of badger, with smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns”; and wabe = “the side of a hill.” Carroll’s argument also shows, on the other hand, that even though gaps exist in signifying orders, humans have the ability to fill them any time they wish. They do so not only by creating new signs, as Carroll did,

Figure 2.2  A signifying order chart TYPES OF

TYPES OF

TYPES OF

TYPES OF

SIGNS

CODES

TEXTS

CONTEXT

words

language

used to

discourse

constructed

physical

figures

cohere

music

make or

gestures

and

psychological

symbols

into

gesture

interpret

songs

interpreted

social

¼

codes

narratives

texts

paintings

in context

historical

¼

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¼

¼

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but also by altering already-existing ones to meet new demands, by borrowing signs from other signifying orders, and by many other means. Signifying orders are “organizational templates” that make a manageable set of signs available for people to use and remember. Take, as an example, color terminology. The light spectrum consists of a continuous gradation of hues from one end to the other. There are potentially millions of gradations that the human eye is capable of distinguishing. If one were to put a finger at any point on the spectrum, there would be only a negligible difference in gradation in the hues immediately adjacent to the finger at either side. Yet, a speaker of English describing the spectrum will list the gradations as falling under such labels as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This is because the speaker has been conditioned by the specific lexical categories the English language makes available to them for classifying the content of the spectrum. Without this restricted set of categories English speakers would have to refer to each perceived gradation in some way, thus needing millions of signs to do so. Note, however, that there is nothing inherently “natural” about the organizational scheme that English imposes on the spectrum. By contrast, speakers of Shona, an indigenous African language, divide it up into cipswuka, citema, cicena, and speakers of Bassa, a language of Liberia, divide it into hui and ziza. When an English speaker refers to something as blue, a Shona speaker might refer to it as either cipswuka or citema, and a Bassa speaker as hui. Bassa speakers would refer to a purple and green object as hui. But this does not stop them from seeing the difference in gradation encoded by the two English terms. Bassa speakers have many resources at their disposal to do so, as do speakers of all languages. Also, we have at our disposal analogies and figurative means to expand our color terminologies. In English, for example, the words crimson, scarlet, and vermilion make it possible to refer to “shades” or even “types” of red, as do constructions such as bright red, dark red, and so on. Shona and Bassa speakers have similar resources at their disposal to differentiate between what we in English refer to as purple color and green color. The term signifying order as used here coincides with the widely used term semiosphere, due to the great Estonian semiotician Juri Lotman (1991), implying a link between the physical biosphere and the signifying orders of humanity. The biosphere sustains biological life on the basis of genetic information available to the species; by extension, the semiosphere sustains semiotic life (based on nongenetic information) through expressive, communicative, and representational activities, forming a kind of symbiotic partnership with the biosphere to regulate human behavior and to shape human evolution. But it is not a deterministic partnership. Humans have the capacity to redesign aspects of semiotic life and thus completely refashion the semiosphere.

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Cognate or complementary approaches As an interdisciplinary method of analysis, semiotics reaches beyond its own set of principles and notions, such as those discussed above, to domains that investigate the human mind and its expressive products. The interweaving and blending of ideas, findings, and discourses from different disciplinary domains is a distinguishing feature of semiotics. So, it is not unusual to find that in any act of semiotic analysis one might find complementary ideas and findings from related or cognate disciplines, especially linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. It should be noted, however, that this “interdisciplinary” mode of inquiry is a two-way street, since many ideas developed within semiotics proper are now found scattered in cognate fields. It was actually Saussure who originated the interdisciplinary orientation of contemporary semiotics by claiming that semiology should be considered a part of psychology and linguistics a part of semiology. To keep the present discussion within reasonable limits, three main cognate approaches to the study of meaning will be looked at here, namely discourse theory, visual rhetoric, and the work in embodied cognitive science.

Discourse theory We hardly realize the presence of unconscious mechanisms of thought that manifest themselves in the words and phrases we use during conversations or in our written texts. The nature of such mechanisms is studied in linguistics under the rubric of pragmatics, a term coined by Peirce (1931) and applied by Charles Morris (1938) to the study of communication. Today, pragmatics investigates the ways in which we use language for establishing, maintaining, defining, and cueing social relations, roles, and above all else, of conveying worldviews. A derivative of pragmatics is Discourse Theory (DT), which studies the unconscious implementation of language forms to convey a specific perspective or worldview, an idea that was put forward as early as the 1920s by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), who anticipated many key notions of current DT. He was the first one to use the term to denote the particular way in which language is used ideologically and perspectivally. This is the meaning of the term in expressions such as “political discourse” or “sports discourse.” The kinds of linguistic cues, known as keywords, used by people or groups such as politicians, academics, sports casters, philosophers, doctors, and so on reveal shared values, worldviews, beliefs, and biases. They provide the bits and pieces of the ideological or social system at play.

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Discourse manifests itself in speech acts throughout the social spectrum— in families, schools, corporations, universities, the media, and so on. In each environment, styles of usage emerge to allow members to speak meaningfully both within and outside the group. A particularly crucial element in discourse is intertextuality, or the ability to directly or indirectly allude to ideas and texts that have special value to the group. The strategy ranges from direct citation and imitation, to presupposition, critique, and parody. For instance, the citations from, or allusions to, biblical figures, events, and sayings figure prominently in religious discourse; on the other hand, allusions to acts of violence by prisoners is part of a generic prison discourse. Some ideas and texts are especially critical for the discourse community. These are called canonical. For example, Martin Luther King’s brilliant speeches are important for activist political discourse, while citations from Shakespeare are canonical to English literary discourse. Intertextuality allows speakers in groups to acknowledge that they belong to the same realm of shared understanding through the kinds of themes and topics broached in conversation, as well as the linguistic structures used that deliver them. Discourse can be subdivided generally into specialized, common, ritualistic, and critical. The former is the type of discourse that is characteristic of specialized groups—doctors, lawyers, mechanics, and the like. It involves the use of specialized jargon as well as specialized intertextualities. Common discourse is the type that emerges from sharing or cohabiting (physically, intellectually, etc.) a common social setting, such as the family, and is incorporated into the speech habits of people in that setting. Media discourse, sports discourse, and other discourses to which most of us have access fall under this rubric. Ritualistic discourse characterizes rituals and rites, such as religious ceremonies, political rallies, debates, formal academic lectures, among others. In rituals, speech acts revisit the past and its relevance to the present. In many ritualistic ceremonies the words, narratives, and canonical references are designed to weave a sort of magical protective aura on the members of the group. The term bricolage was used by Claude Lé vi-Strauss in his 1962 book, La pensé e sauvage, to describe tribal rituals and the discourse employed in them. To outsiders the formulaic language may appear to be meaningless but, to insiders, it is part of a system of meaning embedded in the ritual that evokes magical emotions. All societies, he went on to claim, create solutions to their dilemmas by using the linguistic resources that they already have in a collective fashion. The use of language in ritual is not to create new meanings, but to assert communal sense-making and to ensure cultural cohesion. People typically love to hear the same speeches, songs, and stories at specific times during the year (at Christmas, at Passover, etc.) in order to feel united with the other members of the group. These create a “word magic” aura that keeps people bound to each other through the power of performed words in rituals.

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Finally, critical discourse refers to the type of speech that reflects power relations and ideologies—for example, “conservative discourse,” “neoliberal discourse,” “Marxist discourse,” and so on. The dominant critical discourses are those associated with education, the law, the government, and other authoritative agencies. These are reproduced and reinforced constantly. For critical discourses to be effective they must be highly intertexual, alluding to canonical texts, which form a chain of texts that members of a discourse community perceive as crucial to understanding reality. This chain creates belief in a cause by virtue of the fact that it resounds with authority. The assumption is that social structures, power structures, and discourses intertwine. Many linguists pinpoint Leo Spitzer’s Stilstudien (1928) as the starting point for DT, or at least for DT to develop subsequently. In it, Spitzer looks at how language varies along several social axes, including those that now fall under the category of critical discourse practices. His focus was on the particular style used in various situations. In the 1970s, Michel Foucault (1972) exposed how institutions and academic disciplines were embedded in discourse practices that largely filtered information or packaged it ideologically. In effect, the way people and especially groups in authority talked about something, predisposed everyone to perceive it according to the ways it was presented and packaged in language. To change institutions and social practices implies changing the language used to talk about them. Clearly, the concepts derived from DT are of relevance to the study of media, since discourse practices guide and characterize media texts and media outlets. Today, one can easily see that the type of discourse used on cable news channels will vary considerably, from liberal to conservative to ultra-right. The connection established between consumers of the media-based news and its makers, between audiences (addressees) and telejournalists (addressers), is implanted in specific discourse practices. The process of decoding the meanings that emerge from these can be bolstered by the insights from DT.

Visual rhetoric A field of analysis, known as Visual Rhetoric (VR), aiming to analyze all kinds of visual images and texts as rhetorical structures is, actually, an offshoot of both visual semiotics and of the psychology of visual thinking, as opposed to verbal thinking—defined as the capacity to extract meaning from visual images (Arnheim 1969). The basic method of VR, which can be traced back to Roland Barthes’ pivotal 1964 article, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” is to unravel the connotative meanings embedded in visual images. The key insight of VR for the present purposes is that visual media signs and texts are anchored in rhetorical structure, that is, in associative processes such as met-

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aphor, analogy, and allusion, which are imprinted not only in verbal expressions, but also in visual images. So, the image of a lion in, say, a logo design for men’s clothing would bear rhetorical-connotative meaning and affect the way in which the clothing brand is perceived in terms of the historical connotations and figures of speech associated with lions. This same approach is applied to all visual expressive artifacts, from traditional visual art works to the design of web pages and comic books. VR is showing that visual objects are rhetorical objects and that, therefore, they can be used to influence and persuade people as effectively as rhetorical oratory, if not more so. Visual-rhetorical thinking is the phenomenon of forming thoughts in terms of mental images rather than words and their meanings. Phillip Yenawine (1997: 845) defines it as “the ability to find meaning in imagery.” It involves a set of skills ranging from simple identification (naming what one sees) to complex interpretation on contextual, metaphoric and philosophical levels. Many aspects of cognition are called upon, such as personal association, questioning, speculating, analyzing, fact-finding, and categorizing. Objective understanding is the premise of much of this literacy, but subjective and affective aspects of knowing are equally important.

Strictly speaking, the primary investigative object of VR is the visual text. So, its methodological reach spans all visual media, from the visual arts and advertisements to websites, social media, apps, blogs, viral videos, and so on. VR provides critical insights into how rhetorical structure affects us emotionally and cognitively. The approach is always the same—connect the rhetorical force of the visual images to each other in a chain of connotations that lead to a coded meaning. It is this chain that has persuasive force. In No Caption Needed (2011), Hariman and Lucaitis used this approach to demonstrate how photographs are powerful rhetorical texts capable of influencing public opinion on all kinds of social matters—recalling Barthes’ own analysis of photography (Barthes 1977, 1981). Photos may seem to have many meanings, but given the context in which they occur (in a particular part of a newspaper, for example) they are anchored in such a way that viewers will be led to the intended message unconsciously. It should be mentioned that work of the Belgian Groupe µ , founded in 1967, cannot be underestimated in the emergence of VR. They related verbal discourse to “visual discourse” showing how visual literacy was as critical to understanding human activities as was verbal literacy. The logic of visual literacy is as inescapable as the rhetorical logic of verbal arguments. Groupe µ’s 1970 publication, A General Rhetoric, reformulated classical rhetoric in semiotic ways, and it classified images according to their different iconic modalities. In their Traité  du signe visuel (1992) they elaborated a grammar of the image. Their main point was that images cut across all systems and modalities—the same ones that are expressed as visual signs occur as verbal percepts in language.

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Embodied cognitive science Today, the movement within general cognitive science, known as the “embodied cognition” movement, has relevance to semiotic analysis, since it also embraces the idea that mind and body are interactive agents in the production of signifying structures. To the best of my knowledge, the movement started with Maturana and Varela’s 1973 book, Autopoiesis and Cognition. The main premise on which embodied cognition theory is based is that human thought is shaped by aspects of the body beyond perception and cognition. Rosch, Thomson, and Varela (1991: 172–73) defined the term “embodied” as follows: By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context.

Without going into the many points of contact between semiotics and embodied cognition theory, suffice it to say here that the two disciplines have converged on a basic principle of human life—signs and signifying structures are extensions of the human body, allowing it to do more than it was programmed to do by biology. Of particular relevance, is the notion of autopoiesis, which claims that an organism participates in its own evolution, since it has the ability to produce, or at least shape, its various biochemical agents and structures, thus ensuring their efficient and economical operation. In the case of the human mind, autopoiesis seems to know no bounds. It has produced and continues to produce signifying structures that undergird cognition and reflect it at the same time.

Narrative structure What makes comic books, TV programs, movies, best-selling novels, and other media products highly popular and entertaining is the fact that they generally tell stories, not unlike those that were told orally in villages before the advent of print and electronic technologies. There is no culture without its stories; and there is no human being alive who does not understand what a story is. Indeed, people think of their very lives as stories and proceed to recount them as such. This is why autobiographical stories impart sense and meaning to people’s lives, functioning as “narrative signs” standing for some kind of purposeful existence.

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Narratives may be fact-based, as are the stories in newspapers, or fictional, as are those in a novel, a comic strip, a film, and so on. Needless to say, it is often difficult to determine the boundary line between narrative fact and fiction. Indeed, even in the recounting of life stories, fiction is often intermingled with fact in order to give the stories more coherence. Psychologists call this the “Othello effect.” It is a kind of lying in order to emphasize the truth. Narratives are texts (composite signifiers) that are distinguished by several features. The plot is basically what the narrative is all about—it is the “narrative signified,” encompassing the sequence of events to which the narrative draws attention. Character is a representation of the people who are the perpetrators and/or participants in the plot. The setting is the location where, and the time when, the plot takes place. The teller of the story is referred to as the narrator, who can be a character of the narrative, the author of the narrative, or some other person. Each type of narrator provides a different perspective of the story.

Narratology The branch of semiotics that studies narratives systematically is called narratology, a term proposed by various semioticians, including Algirdas Greimas (1987) and Tzvetan Todorov (1977). Narratology is based on the idea that narrative texts are implanted on a universal code of meaning that generates stories that vary only in detail, not in substance. Vladimir Propp (1928) was among the first semioticians to put forward this view with his analysis of Russian folktales. Propp argued, moreover, that ordinary discourse was built upon the same units that make up the narrative code. In a phrase, narrativity undergirds fictional texts and conversations equally. This idea was pursued, by Greimas, who showed how narrative unfolds, typically, as a sequential set of steps, as shown in the graphic below (see Figure 2.3). Greimas named each step an actant and the sequence itself a “generative trajectory,” by which the actants are projected onto the actual narration in a specific way (according to language and culture). An actant can be converted into various fundamental roles along a certain number of specified positions of its trajectory. At the actual level of telling, one actant can be represented by several characters, and several actants by one and the same character. In a mystery novel, for instance, the subject, or hero, may have several enemies, all of whom function as a single opponent. In a love story, a male lover may function as both object and sender. A simple example of how actantial theory might be applied to a novel such as Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) goes somewhat like this: subject = Emma, object = happiness,

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Figure 2.3  The Greimas flowchart In a typical story, there is . . .

a subject (the hero of the plot)

who desires an object (a soughtafter-person, a magic sword)

who encounters an opponent (a villain, a false hero, a trial situation)

and then finds a helper (a donor)

who then gets an object from a sender (a dispatcher)

giving it to a receiver

leading a conclusion

sender = romantic literature, receiver = Emma, helpers = Lé on and Rodolphe, opponents = Charles, Yonville, Rodolphe, Homais, and Lheureux. The actants and oppositions that they entail are, upon close analysis, the same ones found in the ancient myths. As the foundational narrative texts of humanity, therefore, the myths continue to provide the subtexts and intertexts that constitute narrativity.

Mythology As Barthes argued, the themes of humanity’s earliest stories or myths continue to permeate and inform contemporary storytelling efforts. As in the myths of Prometheus, Hercules, and other ancient heroes, Superman’s exploits revolve around a universal mythic theme—the struggle of Good versus Evil. This is what makes Superman, or any action hero for that matter, so intuitively

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appealing to modern audiences. Barthes (1957) argued that such implicit narratives are embedded regularly in the texts that our mediated culture produces for mass consumption. This is why people rarely challenge the authority of ads, commercials, and other “mediated products.” They seem intuitively to have intrinsic validity. And the reason for this, Barthes argued, was that they continued the oldest and most meaningful tradition of all—the telling of basic mythic stories about human actions and motivations. The word myth derives from the Greek mythos “word,” “speech,” “tale of the gods.” In the beginning stages of human cultures, myths functioned as genuine “narrative theories” of the world. This is why all cultures have created them to explain their origins. The Zuñ i peoples of America, for instance, claim to have emerged from a mystical hole in the earth, thus establishing their kinship with the land. Myths function as a “metaphysical knowledge system” for explaining human origins and actions. And this system is the one we instinctively resort to even today for imparting knowledge of the world initially to children. But even in contemporary adult life, the mythic personification of natural events continues to be an instinctual strategy for making sense of things. Climatologists, for example, refer to the warming of the ocean surface off the western coast of South America that occurs every four to twelve years when upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water does not occur as a person, El Niñ o, “the little one” in Spanish. This makes the climatological condition much more understandable in human terms. Although people do not think of El Niñ o as a person, they nonetheless find it convenient to blame it for certain weather repercussions. This is how original myths worked cognitively—the difference being that the personified conditions of the past were actually believed to be real gods or mythical beings. The use of mythic themes and elements in media representations has become so widespread that it is hardly noticed any longer, despite Barthes’ cogent warnings in the late 1950s. Implicit myths about the struggle for Good, of the need for heroes to lead us forward, and so on and so forth, constitute the narrative underpinnings of TV programs, blockbuster movies, advertisements and commercials, and virtually anything that gets “media air time.” We will return subsequently to both narratological and mythological aspects of media analysis.

Online mythologies The study of narrative today within semiotics includes examining narrative structure in broader terms. One of the domains that is germane to the present purposes is the emergence of mediated mythologies, such as urban legends and online myths. These are powerful cognitively and, thus, require serious study, since they can often lead to unwanted behaviors.

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A horrific example of the latter is the so-called Slenderman case consisting of an attempted murder induced by a form of “screen paranoia,” suggesting that the Web has become our source of myth-making and of narratively shaped beliefs. It has become, in a sense, our mythological storyteller and maker of legends. Ideas no longer spread primarily by the written word or word of mouth but by Internet memes and viral videos. Slenderman is a meme. Unfortunately, he jumped from the screen to real life as a famous case in Wisconsin demonstrated. Slenderman is a fictional mythological character, resembling a thin very tall man with a featureless face, created on the Internet in 2009, quickly becoming a creepypasta Internet meme—a horror-based meme that is copied and pasted an enormous number of times throughout the Internet. Like the traditional stories of the bogeyman and other sinister characters of children’s fable literature, Slenderman is commonly featured in online venues as a scary and menacing figure who stalks and abducts children. There are variant narratives, depictions, and videos online that relate to the Slenderman legend. The near-fatal stabbing of a twelve-year-old girl in Waukesha, Wisconsin is attributed to the Slenderman meme. As this case saliently showed, the world of the matrix is more real and perhaps more meaningful to people today than the real world. Two twelve-year-old classmates of the Wisconsin girl stabbed her nineteen times claiming under interrogation that they had become proxies for the Slenderman, fearing that he would kill their families if they did not obey his behest to murder their classmate. The victim survived, and the two perpetrators have been deemed to suffer from mental illness. One wonders, though, whether the illness was not induced, or at least triggered, by the Slenderman meme. As Richard Dawkins (1976), the originator of the term meme long before the Internet, claimed, memes are just as transferable to others as are genes. It could well be that nasty memes such as the Slenderman one are particularly transferable to susceptible organisms, like pubescent children whose emotional system may be out of whack and needing balance, not meme-induced paranoia bordering on psychosis. Clearly, cyberspace and its meme structure might be changing—or mutating—human evolution, taking it back to its mythic form of consciousness where anything that appears in cyberspace is believable, whether or not it is real or true.

Metaphor As we saw above, the figure of Superman symbolizes “mythic heroism.” Superman is, in effect, a metaphor of idealized human virtues, representing them in a concrete way through his personality, through his actions, and so on. Slenderman, on the other hand, symbolizes fear and bogeyman horror.

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Both representations are fundamentally metaphorical. Metaphors pervade media representations, symbolizing psychological or social themes concretely through character portrayals (in comic books, on TV programs, on websites, etc.) and situations that are familiar and understandable. The comic-book and movie character Wonder Woman, for instance, is a metaphor of feminine prowess. Interpretation is essentially metaphorical, since it is based on making associations and analogies that are designed to bring out concretely what something means or entails. Needless to say, the study of metaphor within linguistics, philosophy, and psychology is of special relevance to media semiotics. It has now become an intrinsic component in many areas of semiotic analysis, revealing that metaphorical cognition guides how we link forms together and extract meaning from them. Metaphorical structure is not equivalent to syntagmatic structure, as some theorists would claim. For one thing, it is not constrained structurally, as is, for example, the syntagmatic choice of a verb in a sentence by the co-presence of a specific kind of subject. Rather, it is a type of linkage made by inferring a commonality in meaning among seemingly disparate concepts.

Metaphor as a sign In a compelling 1978 book, Illness as Metaphor, the writer Susan Sontag argued rather persuasively that, although illnesses are not metaphors, people are invariably predisposed to think of them in metaphorical ways. Using the example of cancer, Sontag pointed out that in the not-too-distant past the very word cancer was said to have killed some patients who would not have necessarily succumbed to the malignancy from which they suffered: “As long as a particular disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease, most people with cancer will indeed be demoralized by learning what disease they have” (Sontag 1978: 7). Sontag’s point that people suffer more from conceptualizing metaphorically about their disease than from the disease itself is, indeed, a well-taken and instructive one. It was Aristotle who coined the term metaphor—itself a metaphor (meta “beyond” + pherein “to carry”). Understanding abstract things generally involves metaphorical reasoning, Aristotle contended. However, he also affirmed that, as knowledge-productive as it was, the most common function of metaphor was to spruce up literal ways of speaking. Strangely, this is the view that became the dominant one in Western society at large. But since 1977, when a seminal study (Pollio et al. 1977) showed that speakers of English uttered, on average, 3,000 novel verbal metaphors and 7,000 idioms per week, it has become clear that metaphor can hardly be considered an option to literal language. It would seem, on the contrary, to constitute the core of everyday discourse.

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Defining metaphor semiotically poses an interesting dilemma. In the metaphorical sentence “The professor is a snake,” for instance, there are two referents, not one, that are linked to each other through concrete ­association: ll

There is the primary referent, professor, called the topic of the metaphor.

ll

Then there is another referent, snake, which is known as the vehicle of the metaphor.

ll

The correlation of the two referents creates a new meaning, called the ground, which is not however the simple sum of the meanings of the two referents.

Note, moreover, that it is not the denotative meaning of the vehicle that is transferred to the topic, but rather the connotative ones that it evokes. So, in the above metaphor it is not the meaning of snake as an actual reptile that is implied, but rather the characteristics that such a reptile is perceived to symbolize—“slyness,” “danger,” “slipperiness,” and so on. It is this complex of cultural connotations that constitute the ground of the metaphor. Metaphor is, in effect, a complex sign that stands for an abstract referent by associating it with something concrete. Metaphor reveals a basic tendency of the human mind to think of certain referents in terms of others. The question now becomes: Is there any psychological motivation for this? In the case of “The professor is a snake,” the probable reason for correlating two seemingly unrelated referents is the deeply ingrained perception within us that humans and animals are interconnected in the natural scheme of things. In other words, we create metaphors if we feel that referents are related or interconnected in some way.

Conceptual metaphors In their groundbreaking 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson showed meticulously how metaphorical reasoning is the cornerstone of everyday thought and discourse, not just a device of poets and orators. The main claim made by the two scholars is that most abstract concepts have a metaphorical origin. To distinguish “metaphorically constructed” concepts from other types, Lakoff and Johnson introduced the term conceptual metaphors. For example, the above expression “The professor is a snake” is really a token of a conceptual metaphor, that is, of something more general that has the underlying form people are animals. The same mental formula can, in fact, be seen to under-

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lie any other construction in which animal vehicles are used to describe human beings: ll

John is a gorilla.

ll

Mary is a puppy.

ll

My friend is a pig.

ll

Greedy people are insects.

Each specific metaphor (“John is a gorilla,” “Mary is a snake,” etc.) is not, therefore, an isolated example of poetic fancy. Rather, it is a manifestation of the general metaphorical idea (people are animals). Such an idea is what Lakoff and Johnson call a conceptual metaphor:

People

Are

Animals

↓ 

↓ 

John

A gorilla

Mary

A puppy

My friend

A pig

Greedy people

Insects

↑

↑

Specific topics

Specific vehicles

Each of the two parts of the conceptual metaphor is called a domain: (1) people is the target domain because it is the abstract topic itself (the “target” of the conceptual metaphor); and (2) animals is the source domain because it is the class of vehicles that can be used to create specific metaphors (the “source” of the metaphorical concept). Lakoff and Johnson then assert that cultural groupthink is largely based on linkages that are established over time among conceptual metaphors. They call such linkages idealized cognitive models. Consider, as a case-in-point, several conceptual metaphors that are commonly deployed in English-speaking cultures to deliver the topic of ideas: ideas are geometrical figures ll

Those ideas are circular.

ll

I don’t see the point of your idea.

ll

Her ideas are central to the discussion.

ll

Their ideas are diametrically opposite.

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ideas are things that are to be seen in the light ll

I was illuminated by that speaker.

ll

Your idea is very clear.

ll

Her example shed light on several matters.

ll

That lecture was enlightening.

ideas are buildings ll

Hers is a well-constructed theory.

ll

Your idea is on solid ground.

ll

My theory needs more support.

ll

Their theory collapsed under criticism.

ll

She put together the framework of a very interesting theory.

ideas are plants ll

Her ideas have finally come to fruition.

ll

That’s a budding new theory.

ll

Saussure’s ideas have contemporary offshoots.

ll

Euler’s idea of networks has become a branch of mathematics.

ideas are commodities ll

That man certainly knows how to package his ideas.

ll

Her idea just won’t sell.

ll

There’s no market for that idea.

ll

That’s a worthless idea.

The constant juxtaposition of such conceptual formulas in common discourse produces, cumulatively, an idealized cognitive model of ideas that has associative conceptual structure. In the area of media studies, conceptual metaphor theory, as it is now called, has started producing many interesting insights. For instance, the narrative content of such 1950s TV sitcoms as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best was structured, in effect, by a metaphorical model of the family as an institution in which roles were assigned firmly. The father was portrayed as “all-knowing,” as someone “in charge” of the household, as a reliable “provider,” and so on. Those were the source domains on which the sitcoms were grounded conceptually. On the other hand, the narrative content of the 1950s sitcom Honeymooners and of the 1980s–1990s sitcom Married with Children was structured on a contrasting metaphorical model of the family. In those programs, the male character was portrayed

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as a “selfish boor,” as a “moronic adolescent,” as a “lazy provider,” and so on. Those were, in effect, the source domains on which the sitcoms were grounded. Completely different conceptual metaphors undergirded sitcoms such as Seinfeld (1990s) and Big Bang Theory (2007–ongoing). In the case of the former, the metaphorical structure was an oppositional one to previous structures based on an inherent family narrative; it was based on a nihilistic metaphor, life is a series of random events, which occur when life is viewed as existing outside of the family-centered narrative. In the latter, the metaphorical structure was based on a practical metaphorical notion, life is an ongoing problem to be solved through friendships. Before Lakoff and Johnson’s trend-setting work, the study of metaphor fell within the field of rhetoric, where it was viewed as one of various tropes— that is, figures of speech. But since the early 1980s the practice has been to use the term metaphor to refer to the study of all figurative language and to consider the other tropes as particular kinds of metaphor. But there are two types that are regularly considered separately from metaphor—metonymy and irony. Metonymy involves the use of an entity to refer to another that is related to it. Unlike metaphor, it consists in the use of a part of a domain to represent the whole domain: for example, in “The White House spoke out today on the issue” one part of American government is employed to stand for the whole of it. In parallelism with the notion of conceptual metaphor, the idea of conceptual metonym can be suggested. Particularly fruitful in our culture is the conceptual metonym “the face is the person,” which manifests itself not only in discourse (“He’s just another pretty face”; “Let us speak face to face”; What face are you putting on today?”; etc.) but also in nonverbal domains of representation—it is the reason why portraits, in painting and photography, focus on the face. Irony is a representational strategy that satirizes or parodies something so that it can be understood indirectly or reflectively. Most TV sitcoms are fashioned ironically, since they typically present common situations in satirical, parodic, or sarcastic ways.

Further reading Several books provide good, core introductions to the field of semiotics. The most comprehensive treatment remains Nö th 1990, discussed in the previous chapter. Others are the following ones. Barthes, Roland. 1994. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang. This is Barthes’ classic elaboration of semiology in which he develops the difference between denotation (initial referential domain of the sign) and connotation (the extended senses attached to it). Barthes explains connotation

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as the result of an unconscious secondary system that is constantly at work in producing meaning. Although this dichotomy was well known before him, Barthes integrated it into semiology once and for all. Cobley, Paul (ed.). 2010. The Routledge Companion to Semiotics. London: Routledge. Each chapter in this anthology deals with a specific aspect or theme of semiotic analysis, from sign theory to the mass media. It also includes a glossary of technical terms and of major figures, thus constituting a general overview of the field and a reference volume. Lotman, Juri. 1991. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lotman traces the origin of signification to energeia, which he defines as a kind of “creative potency” that undergirds how we relate to the world, encoding it into the meaning-bearing forms that constitute a culture, which he characterizes as part of a semiosphere. Trifonas, Peter Pericles (ed.). 2015. International Handbook of Semiotics. New York: Springer. This anthology is a broad survey of semiotics and its applications, from literary studies and the visual arts to contemporary media. The chapters are written by experts in each of the areas, but they are composed in a nontechnical style so that anyone interested in semiotics can easily read them.

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Chapter 3 Print media Tis pleasant, sure, to see one’s name in print. A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t. —Lord Byron (1788–1824)

A

“

book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there—that of the pulse, the heart beat.” With these eloquent words, the American author Henry Miller (1891–1980) expressed what virtually everybody feels intuitively when they read a book. It also makes clear why books seem to have such an impact on people. Without books, human life as we know it today would indeed be vastly different, even if we do not read them for some reason. The vast repository of written words contained in books, which has preserved human ideas throughout the ages, and to which we can have access if we know the appropriate language codes, constitutes the “print memory system” of human civilization. If somehow all the books in the world were to be destroyed overnight, human civilization would be in serious danger. Writers, scientists, philosophers, educators, lawmakers, and many others throughout the world would have to start all over literally “rewriting” knowledge in some orthographic form. But “knowledge-storage” is not all that print allows humans to do. Since the late medieval period, fictional books have provided entertainment and enlightenment for masses of people across the world. Even in the Digital Galaxy, the great fictional works of history continue to hold the fascination of all kinds of audiences. As crass as they might appear to be, contemporary “bestsellers” are among the most popular items produced by pop culture. In this eclectic era of “anything goes,” paper-based books continue to thrive, even as they are being transferred, more and more, to the digital medium. Print is the target of interest of this stop on our journey through the mediascape. The goal here is not, however, to unravel the specific meanings of a book such as Crime and Punishment, or a newspaper such as the Times of London. This would be the goal of literary criticism and journalism studies, respectively. Rather, the objective here is to focus on the types of meanings that print artifacts encode and the “semiotic effects” they produce in contem-

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porary cultures. Needless to say, in order to conduct a semiotic analysis of print, it is necessary to take into account the history and development of each type of print artifact and genre throughout the discussion.

The development of print media Many culture historians argue, and with good cause, that print technology and print literacy are essential conditions of advanced civilizations. But it must not be forgotten that, long before the advent of the printing press, orality served many of the same cognitive and social functions of literacy, as we saw in the opening chapter. Moreover, even oral cultures utilized pictographic writing to give expression to, and record, ideas, sentiments, and knowledge. Incidentally, the earliest pictographic artifacts that have been discovered to date are over 30,000 years old. Essentially, ancient oral cultures preserved their cultural histories and traditions through the oral communication and transmission of stories, songs, and wise sayings. By retelling a tale learned from one another, people passed on what they knew and considered to be of lasting value to subsequent generations. Although each time a story was told it changed according to the storyteller, the essential “knowledge system” of such cultures survived nonetheless, as ideas, values, and essential skills were passed on in much the same way as they are today by parents to pre-literate children—by word of mouth. Moreover, even though children’s stories are now also written down, the same story varies according to author and according to when it is told. The tale of Cinderella, for example, is told and retold in various versions, as are tales about fairies, legendary heroes, and mythic animal characters. It all depends on who tells them and where and when they are told.

Oral mythologies The underlying narrative structure of the earliest oral stories was fundamentally mythological. Mythic narration is universal, and may thus be said to mirror the structure of a large part of human cognition. This would explain why essentially the same stories told to children in early cultures are told to children today, albeit in different versions and in different media such as illustrated storybooks, cartoons, and animated movies. The first oral myths were “theories of the world,” as mentioned previously. Known as cosmogonic, these had the function of explaining how the world came into being and what role humans were assigned by the gods in the cosmological scheme of things.

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To explain the origin of life, for instance, some myths portrayed the creation of the world as proceeding from nothing; others depicted it instead as emerging from some metaphysical realm. To explain death and the end of the world, the early cultures also told eschatological myths. These usually predicted the destruction of the world by a divine being who would send human beings either to a paradisiacal existence or to one of eternal torment, depending on the ways in which they had lived their lives. The theme of an apocalyptic final battle of the gods was a common one as well in eschatological traditions. To counteract the apocalypse, many cultures also told myths of birth and rebirth, which informed people either about how life could be renewed or else about the coming of an ideal society or of a savior. The implicit idea embedded in all myths is that there is life beyond death. This is perhaps why the early storytellers were considered to have the gift of prophecy, receiving the substance of their stories from supernatural beings directly. As a consequence, they were thought to possess magical powers that allowed them to cure diseases and to influence the course of events in the world. Early ritualistic practices were invariably organized and supervised by storytellers. The early mythological and religious accounts of human origins and destiny continue to be a part of the signification systems of modern-day secular societies, even if people living in such societies are no longer aware of their presence. The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912–91) argued, in his book The Great Code (1981), that the themes of the early myths are latent in the artistic practices and in the everyday discourse patterns of even those societies that define themselves as largely secular. Frye showed how the Bible is the implicit “code” sustaining and informing Western literature, art, and social institutions. Anyone who has never been exposed to this code, Frye suggested, will simply not understand the Western world. The stories of Adam and Eve, of the Tower of Babel, of Paradise lost and regained, of the Flood and Noah’s Ark, and many others have supplied not only the themes for the great artistic and literary works of Western civilization, but also the symbols shaping the daily thought and discourse patterns of Western peoples, even if most have never read the Bible. Similarly, the anthropologist Claude Lé vi-Strauss argued that mythic ideas continue to exercise an unconscious control over humanity because they have become, in effect, the parts of speech. Lé vi-Strauss (1978) maintained, for instance, that certain clusters of relationships in myth match the systematic order of words in sentences. The earliest “subjects” of myths were divine beings who acted physically and “verbally” upon human and terrestrial “objects.” From this subject-verb-object structure of myth, the first sentences emerged. That very structure was subsequently extended to encompass non-metaphysical referents. As radical as this mythic explanation of grammar may seem, it certainly would explain why language appears to have an intuitive natural connection with the things to which it refers.

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The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) saw the mythic stories as “theories of mind,” claiming essentially that they were invented to give expression to unconscious desires and impulses. For example, he interpreted the myth of Oedipus as giving narrative expression to the unconscious sexual desire in a child for the parent of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by hostility to the parent of the same sex. In Greek mythology, Oedipus was abandoned at birth. He unwittingly killed his father and then unknowingly married his mother in a self-fulfilling prophecy scenario. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961) saw myth as an unconscious form of language giving expression to universal ideas, which he called archetypes. These ideas constitute the “collective unconscious” of humanity and continue to manifest themselves in modern-day symbols, fictional characters, and the like. The “trickster” archetype, for example, is found in stories we tell children, in character roles such as jokers and comedians, and so on. We relate intuitively to this archetype, without requiring any explanation of what a trickster is, because it is buried deeply in our psyche. Whether or not Frye, Lé vi-Strauss, Freud, or Jung are right in any real sense, one thing is for certain—the ideas expressed in the early myths have hardly disappeared from modern cultures. From them we have inherited, for instance, the names of the days of the week and months of the year: for example, Tuesday is named after the Germanic war god Tir, Wednesday after the chief god Wotan, Thursday after Thor, Friday after the goddess of beauty Frigga, Saturday after the god Saturn, January after the Roman god Janus. Our planets bear a similar pattern of mythic nomenclature: Mars is named after the Roman god of war, Venus after the Greek goddess of beauty, and so on. We continue to read horoscopes, implore the gods to help us, cry out against Fate, and perpetuate numerological superstitions such as avoiding to label the thirteenth floor of a high-rise building with the number “13.” And, as Barthes pointed out, mythic themes are being constantly recycled by the mass media. Stories of heroes and villains, of legendary exploits and trials, permeate media representations, from Disney’s Snow White to wrestling spectacles and urban legends such as the Slenderman one. As the American mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904–87) aptly observed, the first myths explained the world in ways that continue to be intuitively understandable by everyone, no matter how literate or technologically sophisticated a person may be.

Writing Writing originates in pictography. The earliest pictographic systems were used, in part, to represent mythic stories, characters, and symbols. Pictographs

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are visual signs that stand for entire concepts; they are, in semiotic terms, visual signifiers representing signifieds directly (iconically). The earliest pictographs so far discovered come from the Neolithic era in western Asia. They are elemental shapes on clay tokens that were probably used as image-making casts (Schmandt-Besserat 1978). One of the first pictographic systems to be employed regularly for a variety of practical social functions, as mentioned previously, was the ancient Sumerian one around 3500 BCE. It was a highly versatile system because it contained pictorial signs for abstract notions—to sleep, for example, was represented by a picture of a person in a supine position. It was thus used for such purposes as recording agricultural transactions, chronicling astronomical observations, educating children, writing laws, and preserving knowledge. Pictographs that stand for abstractions are called, more precisely, ideographs. The Sumerian ideographs were called cuneiform, as discussed, which means “wedge-shaped.” Their shape made it easier to inscribe them on clay tablets with a stylus. To facilitate the speed of writing even more, the Sumerians eventually streamlined their cuneiform signs into abstract characters standing for various sounds of words, rather than for the words themselves. The cuneiform system was subsequently adapted by the Assyro-Babylonian language, known as Akkadian, which became the language of mass communication in the ancient Middle East. By about 3000 BCE the Egyptians also started using hieroglyphic writing (as we saw) to record hymns and prayers, to register the names and titles of individuals and deities, (hieroglyphic derives from Greek hieros “holy” and glyphein “to carve”), to annotate various community activities, and so on. The Egyptian pictographs were both ideographic and phonographic, that is, they could stand for some concept or for a consonant sound in a word representing a concept. A specific hieroglyphic sign might serve as an ideograph in one word and as a phonograph in another. Most words, moreover, were written with a combination of these two types of signs. Around 2700 BCE, the Egyptians replaced hieroglyphic script with a form known as hieratic. This was executed with blunt reed pens and ink on papyrus, rather than inscribed on tablets or on walls. A more cursive and ligatured script, called demotic, was developed a little later. Given the greater availability and affordability of papyrus, literacy came to be valued highly among common people, although it continued to be acquired mainly by privileged members of Egyptian society (priests, aristocrats, merchants, etc.). Once pictographic writing became widely used in the ancient civilizations, it began gradually to evolve into a more stylized system, with “compressed” pictorial features, so that it could be used more efficiently. From this development, the first alphabetic system crystallized. An alphabet is a system of abstract symbols, called letters or characters, that stand not for

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entire concepts but rather for the sounds that make up words. The most likely scenario to explain the transition from a pictographic to an alphabetic system can be paraphrased somewhat as follows. As the hand movements employed to make pictographs became abbreviated to increase writing efficiency, and as familiarity with the abbreviated pictographs increased in the marketplaces of the ancient world, a more condensed form of pictography emerged to make transactions more efficient. So, for example, instead of drawing the full head of an ox, it became the practice at some point to draw only its bare outline. Eventually, this outline came to stand for the word ox itself (aleph in Semitic languages), and in due time just for the first sound in the word (a for aleph). The last stage occurred around 1000 BCE. It was the ancient Phoenicians who compiled an abstract system of such signs for recording the consonant sounds that made up words. The Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet shortly thereafter, naming each character—alpha, beta, gamma, and so on. These were imitations of Phoenician words—aleph “ox,” beth “house,” gimel “camel,” and so on. The Greeks then introduced characters for vowel sounds, thus producing the first true alphabet, in the modern sense of the word. But, as this hypothetical scenario implies, in every alphabetic character that we use to record our thoughts, there is a pictographic story behind it that has become “dim” or virtually “undetectable” because our eyes are no longer accustomed to extracting pictorial content from it. The alphabet is a truly remarkable achievement. It has made possible the efficient recording, preservation, and transmission of knowledge in the form of writing. Whether they are written on parchment, papyrus, paper, or a computer screen, and regardless of what alphabet system is used, books are the basis for sustaining advanced civilizations. The first schools for the masses were, in fact, outgrowths of the invention of efficient print technologies, as were the first mass communications systems. As McLuhan (1964) remarked, book literacy is also the source of the notion of objectivity. Unlike their oral ancestors, literate societies tend to perceive knowledge and ideas as separate from those who transmit them and, thus, that knowledge systems are self-contained collections of objective data. When listening to someone speak, McLuhan argued, we are inevitably influenced by the emotion of the human voice, overtly or unconsciously. As a consequence, we tend to perceive a direct link between what the speaker says (the object) and who the speaker is (the subject). On the other hand, when we read a book, we are not influenced by vocalism. What we perceive, as we read, is a written page, with its edges, margins, and sharply defined characters organized in neatly layered rows or columns. This dupes us into perceiving the content of the book (the object) as separable from its author (the subject), as does the additional fact that the author is not present during

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the reading process. This, McLuhan concluded, is what induces a state of mind, called objectivity, that tends to see the subject (the maker of a representation) and the object (the content of the representation) as separate entities.

The Gutenberg Galaxy The first books were clay tablets. They were hard to produce and circulate. But with the advent of papyrus technology, a little later, books could be produced much more easily and circulated much more widely. Papyrus is a paper-like material made from a pith of reeds, formed into a continuous strip and rolled around a stick. The text was written on the strip with a reed pen in narrow columns on one side. It was unrolled as it was read. A little later, the scroll was subdivided into a number of shorter rolls and stored together in one container. In the first century CE, this method of producing books was replaced by the rectangular codex, a small, ringed book consisting of two or more wooden tablets covered with wax, which could be marked with a stylus, smoothed over, and reused many times. In the Middle Ages, codices were used primarily to record texts related to the observance of the Christian liturgy. Literacy remained a realizable goal only for a limited number of privileged people. All this changed, however, with the advent of paper technology and the printing press in the fifteenth century. Since books could be produced quickly and very cheaply, more and more people were encouraged to become educated and literate. The printing press also led to a major paradigm shift in cultural evolution. As we saw in the opening chapter, McLuhan designated the new world order that it brought into existence, the Gutenberg Galaxy, after the German printer Johannes Gutenberg (the inventor of the modern printing press). Through books and other print artifacts (newspapers, pamphlets, etc.) the written word became, after the fifteenth century, the primary means for propagating and storing knowledge and ideas. The printing press was, ipso facto, the technological innovation that led to the establishment of a worldwide order, or metaculture, based on print literacy, as ideas started to circulate far and wide, crossing political boundaries through the print medium. To this day, the primary means of disseminating new knowledge is through print. Paradoxically, as McLuhan (1962) observed, the emergence of a global print culture did not simultaneously eliminate orality—that is, the use of the spoken word for a variety of social functions in addition, of course, to oral conversation. We still communicate basic ideas to children orally; and within our mainstream print culture, various groups have formed “neotribal subcultures” (such as gangs), which are essentially oral in organization.

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The Print Age The spread of the written word over the spoken word in knowledge-making was designated the Print Age by McLuhan. Written materials of all kinds were devised early on after the invention of the printing press and sent all over the world, thus creating a mass communications network. Letter-writing, for example, became a new mass medium for long-distance communication. Couriers carried letters on foot, on horseback, or by boat, thereby influencing other technologies. The ancient Greeks, for example, developed a rapid way of sending messages from city to city, via the construction of a series of brick walls, which were close enough together so that each could be approached from the one next to it. Indentations along the top the walls represented the letters of the Greek alphabet. To send a message, fires were lit in the relevant places on and along the wall. A receiver at the next wall saw the fires and relayed the message onward to other receivers. The process continued on and on, like a domino effect. This was a truly ingenious mode of mass communications. The ancient Romans also devised a remarkably inventive method called the Acta Diurna, a handwritten sheet that contained messages related to daily events. For perhaps the first time in human history, a message could be literally sent around by hand delivery over broad spans of territory. Many claim this was, in fact, the first true newspaper. Officials made several copies of the sheet each day, posting them in public. It was the slaves who recopied these sheets and delivered the duplicates to people throughout the Roman Empire. Using the empire’s extensive and interconnected network of roads, the messengers carried news and mail over land every day. Of course, using the terms “mass media” and “mass communications” to describe communication technologies in the ancient world is done somewhat liberally, in comparison to today’s technologies. The point is that we have always had a penchant for extending our communication faculties with the aim of reaching as many people as possible. Throughout the ancient world, the span of communications was also constrained by the simple reason that few people were literate and by the fact that writing materials were expensive. In oral, pre-literate societies the main senses involved in the processing of information were hearing and touching. People lived in an acoustical-tactile sensorium through which they understood the world. With the advent of alphabets and the literate mind, the sensorium in which people lived and thought became highly visual and abstract. The Print Age favored the latter type of cognition, putting value on reading versus listening. In the modern-day world, which is often called “post-literate,” there is a retrieval of many of the sensory patterns of the pre-literate world, blending with the visuality of the literate

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one. As McLuhan (1995: 273) so eloquently quipped: “Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.” In sum, in the Print Age, with its emphasis on linear progression, humanity constructed linear-narrative models of history which suggested that the future was infinitely far away and that personal and social evolution was involved in finding a path toward it; in cyberspace, there is no cognitive linearity of this kind; there is only connectivity which literally makes us feel entrapped within some network structure without any possibility of individual agency. This is the same pattern of consciousness experienced by those who lived in primary oral cultures—the difference is that the space and environments in which primary orality existed was restricted and had boundaries that reassured people of their location in the world. In secondary orality environments, on the other hand, there is no sense of space and time and their reassuring boundaries. People feel suspended nowhere and everywhere. We will return to this topic subsequently.

Books Because books are material objects, they can be preserved in “book museums” known as libraries. The latter originated in the Middle East between 3000 and 2000 BCE—at about the same time that writing started playing an increasingly vital role in ancient societies. One of the largest of the ancient libraries was built by the Greeks in Alexandria in the third century. By the second century CE public and private libraries had been established in many parts of the ancient world. A few centuries later, scientific and mathematical texts were copied and preserved in libraries by Muslim scholars, leading to the rise of scholarship and, eventually, to the rise of universities in the twelfth century. With the rise of literacy came a concomitant need to organize the knowledge contained in books. This led to the invention of the encyclopedia, a term originally referring to instruction in all branches of knowledge. The oldest encyclopedia still in existence is the Natural History (79 CE) by Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE). The modern type of encyclopedia was largely the result of the Enlightenment movement in the eighteenth century, which entrenched the view of knowledge as information that could be arranged logically according to key words, names, or special topics—clearly, a view of the nature of knowledge that could only have crystallized in the Print Age. But knowledge preservation is not the only function that books have served. For at least five centuries, they have also been produced to serve as both literary art forms and mass distraction texts. The innumerable works of

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fiction known as novels that have come down to us since the medieval period have been read, and continue to be read, by millions of people for the pure enjoyment of it.

Book publishing The Sumerians and Egyptians introduced many of the conventions that we use today in producing books, such as the use of a “cover page” with the title and the author’s name on it. Professional scribes, who either copied a text or set it down from dictation, were responsible for book reproduction. The ancient Greeks, and later the Romans, became aware of the mass communication potential of books; but the books they produced were prohibitively expensive and thus were owned chiefly by temples, rulers, and a few rich individuals. Most education at the time, and for centuries thereafter, was still conducted by oral repetition and memorization. Literacy remained mainly the privilege of the rich and powerful. In the early Middle Ages in Europe, books were produced chiefly by clerics for other clerics and for rulers. They were written out with a quill pen by monks working in the scriptoria (Latin for “writing rooms”) of monasteries. They were made either with wooden covers fastened with clasps or bound in leather; and often they were adorned with gems. Such books were “objets d’art.” They were commissioned by the very small percentage of the population that could afford them and that knew how to read. As mentioned, in the fifteenth century two technological developments revolutionized the production and publication of books. One was paper; the other was the printing press. These simplified book publication and made it economically feasible and relatively easy for people to possess books. As a consequence, public literacy increased greatly. In the sixteenth century, Italian printers adopted certain conventions that have persisted in book publishing practices to this day. These included the use of light pasteboard covers, regularized layouts, Roman and Italic typefaces, a title page, and a preface. Gradually, a table of contents, list of illustrations, explanatory notes, bibliography, and index were added to scholarly books. The idea of book genres also emerged at about the same time, as books were being written not only for religious or scientific purposes, but also more and more for public edification and diversion. By the time of the Industrial Revolution vast numbers of books could be published at a relatively low cost, as printing and paper technologies became highly efficient. The book had become an item of mass consumption. While other media challenged paper-based books in the twenty-first century, they have shown a remarkable “staying power.” To this day, they remain primary

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tools for the preservation and dissemination of knowledge, as well as sources for both artistic expression and mass distraction.

The novel The first type of book designed for mass appeal emerged in the medieval period. Known as the fiction novel (from Latin fingere “to form, make, put together”), in the centuries since its invention, it has curiously developed into one of the most popular literary art forms of humanity. It also was the first true “mass distraction artifact” of the emerging pop culture at the start of the twentieth century—an era when “pulp fiction” novels were written with no other purpose in mind than to appeal to mass audiences and, thus, to be discarded and replaced by new ones regularly. To this day, pulp fiction genres— detective, crime, science fiction, romance, thriller, and adventure novels—fill the shelves of bookstores, and continue to be among the most popular sources of pleasurable reading for vast audiences. And, in the broader contemporary media context, these are the genres that have proven to be the most enduring in cinema, on radio, on television, and on the Internet. The novel is a narrative text. As such, it tells a fictional or dramatized story that represents a situation which is supposed to mirror true life or stimulate the imagination. Often, it makes direct or indirect reference to other texts in the course of the telling. This imparts upon it a sense of interconnectedness to the larger signifying order within which it is conceived. In recent semiotic theory, this aspect of narrativity is referred to as intertextuality, as already discussed. An intertext is, essentially, a text from outside the main text. A novel may also contain a subtext, a story implicit within it that drives the surface narrative. For example, the main text of the movie Blade Runner (Chapter 5) unfolds as a science-fiction detective story, but its subtext is, arguably, a religious one—the search for a creator and for immortality. This interpretation is bolstered by the many intertextual allusions to biblical themes and symbols in the movie. As mentioned, the first true fiction books were written in the Middle Ages. That was the era in which people started inventing imaginary tales and writing them down for other people to enjoy. Before the Middle Ages, people may have indeed told quasi-fictional stories, such as fables, tales, and legends, but these did not serve the same function that medieval fiction served—the telling of stories for the sake of the telling. The ancient stories, on the other hand, were imaginative portrayals (or satires) of mythic themes and legendary heroes, or they had some pedagogical function, such as instilling morals and ethics in children and adults alike. Papyri from the fourth Egyptian Dynasty reveal how King Cheops (2590–67 BCE) delighted in hearing the stories that

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his sons told him about imaginary heroes. The Greek statesman and general Aristides (c. 530–468 BCE) wrote a collection of what we would now call “short stories” about his hometown, Miletus, to celebrate the Greek victory over the Persians at Salamis. The Roman Apuleius (c. 125–200 CE) wrote a collection of stories, called the Golden Ass, in order to provide social and moral commentary. Actually, for the sake of historical accuracy, it should be mentioned that many literary scholars regard the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, by the Japanese baroness Murasaki Shikibu (c. 978–1026 CE), as the first true novel, since it recounts the amorous adventures of a fictional prince Genji and the staid lives of his descendants. The novel paints a charming and apparently accurate picture of Japanese court life in the Heian period. Its greatest strength lies in its characterization of the strong-willed and independent women in Prince Genji’s life. As the work nears its conclusion, the tone becomes mature and somber, colored by Buddhist insight into the fleeting joys of earthly existence. Fiction became a widespread narrative craft, however, only after the publication of Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313–75) Decameron in 1353, a collection of 100 fictional tales set against the gloomy background of the Black Death, as the bubonic plague that swept through Europe in the fourteenth century was called. The Decameron is the first real work of fiction in the modern sense of the word. To escape an outbreak of the plague, ten friends decide to take refuge in a country villa outside Florence. There, they entertain one another over a period of ten days by telling made-up stories in turn. Each day’s storytelling ends with a canzone, a short lyric poem. With the emergence of the so-called picaresque genre in sixteenth-century Spain—in which a hero is portrayed typically as a vagabond who goes through a series of exciting adventures—the novel became a staple of European society. The classic example of the picaresque genre is the enigmatic novel by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), Don Quixote de la Mancha (Part I, 1605, Part II, 1615), which is considered by many to be the first novel masterpiece of the Western world. Ever since, fictional writing has been considered a yardstick for probing human actions and human character. This is probably because we feel intuitively that narrative structure reflects the structure of real-life events as we experience them: that is, we feel that this structure is already implicit in the form of the actions and events that are manifest in actual human lives. We even tend to perceive bestseller novels, Harlequin romances, detective fiction, and the like as telling us something important about ourselves, even though we read them for pure entertainment or titillation. The novel became a dominant artistic medium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as more and more writers started devoting their energies and

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creative wits to it. Novels became more psychologically real, depicting and often satirizing social life and morals. During the same era, many new genres emerged, including the didactic novel, in which theories of education and politics were examined critically, and the gothic novel, in which the emotion of horror was evoked by depictions of supernatural happenings. The first gothic novel was The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97). But perhaps the most well-known example of the genre is Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851). An enduring genre of the period is the comedy of manners, which is concerned with the clash between characters from different social backgrounds. The novels of Jane Austen (1775– 1817) are considered by many to be the most important exemplars of that genre. Throughout the nineteenth century, and for most of the twentieth, the novel emerged as a powerful medium for probing human nature and human society. Novelists were as popular and well known as media personalities are today. Their critiques of society led to social change; and their portrayal of human behaviors gave the early scientific psychologists key insights into how to investigate human character. The French writer Marcel Proust (1871–1922), for instance, explored the nature of memory; the German author Thomas Mann (1875–1955) searched for the roots of psychic angst in social systems; and English authors Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and James Joyce (1882– 1941) plumbed the emotional source of human thoughts and motivations. Some writers, like August Strindberg (1849–1912) and Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), even viewed the novel as having no other purpose than to give human concepts and feelings material form. Since the end of the Second World War the novels of an increasing number of writers in developing or socially troubled countries have come to the forefront. Many of these portray, with vivid realism and eloquent language, the clash between classes and races, the search for meaning in a world where materialism reigns supreme, and the desire to reform the world. Narrative techniques in novels vary from simple first-person storytelling to complex stream-of-consciousness narration, which is designed to reveal a character’s hidden feelings, thoughts, and intentions. Not to be confused with interior monologue, stream-of-consciousness writing attempts to portray the remote, preconscious state that exists before the mind organizes sensations into conscious thoughts. Major exponents of the genre are American novelist William Faulkner (1897–1962), British writer Virginia Woolf, and Irish writer James Joyce (mentioned above), who perhaps brought the genre to its highest point of development in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). In these novels, the inaccessible corners of human memory and the hidden repertory of feelings within the psyche are laid bare before us. The conflicts, fantasies, and daydreams of Joyce’s characters are those of ordinary people.

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The French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) viewed such writing as an “escape hatch,” so to speak, from inner psychic turmoil, because he saw it as eradicating the guilt from which people ordinarily suffer, thus opening the way toward genuine emotional freedom. The serious study of fiction within semiotics can be traced to the work of Vladimir Propp (1928), as mentioned in the previous chapter. According to Propp, there exists a relatively small number of “narrative units,” or plot themes, which go into the makeup of a “plot grammar” that allows readers to immediately recognize the genre being read. The term sometimes used to refer to these units is narremes. For example, fairy tales are recognizable as such because they have the following recurring narremes: ll

They take place in an indeterminate time frame, hence they typically start with “Once upon a time . . .”

ll

Imaginary creatures and beings intermingle in the lives of human beings.

ll

The Good personages fight in a battle with the Evil doers.

ll

The setting involves both the real world and a supernatural one.

ll

A hero is tested and must overcome some challenge through trial and persecution.

ll

Having overcome the test, the story ends “Happily ever after.”

There are actually thirty-one narremes specified by Propp. Propp’s theory would, in effect, explain why narrative is the medium through which children learn about the world. Stories of imaginary beings and events allow children to make sense of the real world, providing the intelligible formats that mobilize their natural ability to learn from context. With his pivotal research on early childhood learning, the psychologist Jerome Bruner (1986) showed that narrative thinking underlies how children come to understand their relation to the social world in which they live. Narratives give pattern and continuity to the child’s raw perception and experience of things. They impart the sense that there is a plot to life, that the characters in it serve some meaningful purpose, and that the setting of their life is part of the human condition. After Propp, the scholar who most influenced the study of narrative within semiotics was Algirdas Julien Greimas, as discussed. Greimas claimed that the stories of different cultures were devised with virtually the same stock of actions and characters, called actants. These correspond very closely to Propp’s narremes. The theory of narremes or actants is interesting beyond semiotics because it implies that buried deep within us are narrative structures. This might explain why novels have such impact on readers. Children are sometimes named after characters in novels, real places after places described in novels, and so on. The general meaning of the novel, moreover,

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is often used as an interpretant for evaluating some real-life event or action. This is why we compare people to fictitious characters in novels. It is amazing indeed to contemplate that a text that is essentially a lie (fiction) is used nevertheless to get at the truth, about people, life, and the universe. Opposed to the view of fictional narrative as a mirror of life created by its author is the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). In essence, Derrida claimed that, because there are an infinite number of legitimate interpretations of a narrative text, it is useless to try to figure out what an author wanted to say. But, contrary to what Derrida believes, common sense tells us that the meaning of a text is not arbitrary and without some central purpose. Concretely speaking, it is unlikely that anyone today would interpret John Bunyan’s (1628–88) novel, Pilgrim’s Progress, as an erotic tale. While someone reading it with “modern eyes” would not see in it the same kinds of Christian meanings that seventeenth-century readers saw in it, one would still not interpret it in vastly different terms. The novel entered the domain of mass culture in the early years of the twentieth century with the rise in popularity of the detective novel and of the many subgenres that it spawned, including spy thrillers. The appeal of this genre lies in how it recycles the hero actant as a private detective or a police officer, through whom the story is told either as a first-person narration or in the third person by the author. The detective interrogates suspects, ferrets out the clues, and tracks down the criminal, sharing all the clues with the reader, but withholding their significance until the end. Detectives are heroes for the modern age. They are not “supernatural beings” as was Prometheus or Hercules, but ordinary humans endowed with extraordinary powers of logic and insight. The detective story thus has a wide appeal because it recycles the basic actantial features of the narrative—hero versus opponent, good versus evil, and so on—for audiences intrigued by crime and the psychology of evil. The originator of this genre was American short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), creator of the world’s first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin appeared in 1841 in Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. In England, novelist Wilkie Collins (1824–89) created the detective character Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone (1868). Shortly thereafter, novels about crime, espionage, mystery, and the like could literally not be kept on the bookstore shelves, on account of their rising popularity. Some cultural historians even credit this genre of storytelling as ushering in the era of pop culture. From Sherlock Holmes by British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859– 1930) and Hercule Poirot by his compatriot Agatha Christie (1891–1976), to the lawyer detective Perry Mason by American writer Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970), among many others, the detective hero is a “representamen” of the modern age. The detective is human, smart, and out to set things right, not in any metaphysical way, but in a strictly human scientific (forensic) way.

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Along with romance and science-fiction novels, the detective story and its subgenres (the thriller, the espionage tale, etc.) continue to be among the most enduring narrative distraction devices of current-day pop culture. And, as we shall see in Chapter 5, they continue to be sources of movie and other media narratives. Indeed, in today’s mediated culture, cinema and TV have taken over a large part of the novel’s narrative appeal. But paper-based novels are still a thriving business. And, in this era of media convergence, more often than not a best-selling novel is the inspiration for a movie script. In many ways, a movie can be defined as a “visual novel,” with the role of the narrator taken over by the camera, and narrative perspective by the camera’s angle. The novel was not only an early form of reading entertainment, it was also a social and ideological tool, as literary theorist and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin cogently argued. Novels are transgressive, because they depict social conditions and personages as fictitious, using verisimilitude as their ploy, so that authors cannot be directly held responsible for libel or political treason, although they can be imprisoned on various charges. Dostoevsky’s novels were particularly significant for Bakhtin because of their “polyphonic” quality, a “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” (Bakhtin 1993: 6). We can literally hear the different voices in Dostoevsky’s novels, in contrast to the monologue—speeches, laws, lectures, and so on. The battle between the monologue and the dialogue reached its culmination in the earlier work of French satirist Rabelais (Bakhtin 1993), where boisterous and libidinous language ushered forth the modern world, marking the collapse of rigid moralism. Rabelais’ sixteenth-century novel Gargantua and Pantagruel portrayed the everyday culture of the common folk that “was to a great extent a culture of the loud word spoken in the open, in the street and marketplace” (Bakhtin 1993: 182). Rabelais’ work was thus as much a sociopolitical statement as it was satire; it attacked the pompous attitudes of the self-appointed moral guardians of order and respectability, thereby undermining the already-moribund medieval system.

Electronic books Since the late 1970s, the publishing technologies available in the Digital Galaxy have had an impact on the traditional “book culture.” Not only has computer-based production largely taken over from traditional typesetting in the publication of paper books, but it is now also becoming more and more frequent to write books directly on the computer and publish them in cyberspace as e-books (“electronic books”). E-books are, by and large, electronic versions of traditional books. However, there is one fundamental difference. Known as hypertextuality, e-books are

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descendants of the CD-ROMs of the 1980s and 1990s, which first allowed readers to link different texts and images within the main text. Thus, for example, an encyclopedia in CD-ROM form allowed a user to go from one topic to another within a page of text by simply clicking them on. If a reader wanted to check, say, the meaning of a word on a page in a traditional book, that person would have to physically consult another source (such as a dictionary). Hypertextuality has made such a task much more practicable and efficient. Hypertextuality is also leading to a redefinition of the roles of the author and the reader of a text. Hypertextual novels allow for multiple plot twists to be built into a story. They also enable readers to observe the story unfold from the perspective of different characters. Readers may also change the story themselves to suit their interpretive fancies by navigating hypertextually through it as they so please. In such novels, the author sets a framework for the narrative; the actual narrative is realized by the reader. E-books can store the equivalent of myriads of paper books. To store the new digital formats, cyber-libraries have already sprung up and may eventually replace traditional libraries. Since anyone can download new books from the Internet directly, the purchase of e-books is also extremely easy and convenient. For this reason, many culture theorists predict that e-books will gradually replace traditional paper-based books. However, for the time being the paper book is still highly popular. For one thing, it is perceived by many as an “objet d’art”. It is something that people apparently want to display in their homes and offices as they would a sculpture or a photograph. It is also still comparatively convenient to hold and carry. So, traditional books will continue to have a market value, as long as paper remains cheap and available. However, the lesson to be learned from studying the development of media technologies is that there is never a “turning back the clock,” once an innovation is introduced into human life that enhances a medium’s versatility and functionality. For the present time, however, an audience for traditional books will continue to exist, because it seems that people simply continue to enjoy reading and buying them. Purchasing books at a bookstore today, moreover, is a diverting and distracting experience in itself—something that bookstore chains have come to realize, as witnessed by the fact that they have joined forces with coffee chains. There is something cultivated and recherché  about sipping an espresso coffee and reading a “real” book.

Newspapers The main function of newspapers, as the name implies, is to report the news. However, modern-day newspapers provide a lot more than news reporting—

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they give commentary on the news, express opinion through their editorial sections, pass on special information and advice to readers, and often include features such as comic strips, puzzle sections, sports sections, and serialized novels. Newspapers were once big business. In the United States, for example, about 1,700 daily newspapers were printed up till around 2010 for a total of seventy million copies, and almost every copy was read by more than one person. Many weekly newspapers are still published, even though circulation has declined considerably since the advent of online newspapers. Statistics show that nearly eight out of ten adult Americans read a newspaper every day, whether in paper or online form. Similar per capita figures exist for all industrialized countries of the world. Throughout its history, the print newspaper medium has been an intrinsic component of mass culture, functioning both as a distraction device (providing entertaining reading of all kinds) and as a source of social consciousness—newspapers such as The New York Times or The Times of London, for instance, have managed to maintain a long tradition of press freedom and to raise social consciousness on issues of general concern. The newspaper is a special kind of text which, for lack of a better word, can be called a syntext. This can be defined as a text that imparts a sense of connectivity among what would otherwise be perceived as fragmented random parts by simply synthesizing them under the same rubric of “news” or “newsworthy.” As such, newspapers provide reassurance that there is an underlying reason why things are the way they are, by bringing together crime stories, accident reports, movie and book reviews, advertisements, and many more things that are relevant to the experience of daily life. By arranging these neatly into “rubrics,” the newspaper syntext superimposes a logical structure on them, creating a sense that there is a pattern to them. Newspaper publishers know this and this is why they provide commentary to their news stories, highlighting the “human psychology” of certain crimes, the “metaphysical nature” of certain events such as storms and disasters, and so on.

Newspaper publishing Handwritten newssheets posted in public places in the ancient world are considered to be the forerunners of newspapers. One of the earliest known daily newssheets was the Acta Diurna (“Daily Events”), which was widely distributed in 59 BCE Rome. But the world’s first news-bearing textual medium was a Chinese circular called Dibao. It was produced on carved wooden blocks around 700 CE. The first regularly published paper-based newspaper in Europe was the Avisa Relation oder Zeitung, which started publication in

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Germany in 1609. By the late 1800s, newspapers had become popular in Europe, with competing newspapers reporting crimes, disasters, and scandals, along with political and socially relevant news. Few reported international news. The Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, a three-page paper, was published in 1690 in Boston, becoming the first newspaper published in the United States. It was suppressed by the government after the first issue, because it was found to contain doubtful and uncertain information. That was the reason given, but the most probable reason that it was shut down was that the government feared the power of print to sway citizens against it. In 1704, the Boston News-Letter was established. It reported local and foreign news and included births, deaths, and social events sections. In 1721, the New England Courant was founded by James Franklin in Boston. In 1723, his younger brother, Benjamin Franklin, founded the Pennsylvania Gazette and the General Magazine. The first New York City newspaper, called the Gazette, began printing in 1725. It was followed by the New York Weekly Journal, founded by John Peter Zenger, whose critiques of the British colonial governor led to his arrest and imprisonment on charges of libel. Zenger was found not guilty and his trial became the precedent for the notion of a free press in America. It became evident that the press had become a powerful forum for dissent, leading the way to the development of modern journalism as a critical practice in democratic societies. Newspapers became highly popular during the Civil War, with their graphic accounts of battlefront events. In 1783, the first regularly published daily newspaper was launched in Philadelphia. It was called the Pennsylvania Evening Post and Daily Advertiser. Its integration of news and advertisements became a model for newspapers in general. Advertising had become integral to the newspaper business, supporting it financially more so than subscriptions or individual purchases. In 1833, Benjamin Henry Day published the New York Sun, bringing about a “penny press” trend in newspaper publishing. The Sun included sensationalistic reports of crime and entertainment in the same issue and cost a penny. After the first telegraph line was built in 1844, news could be transmitted quickly across the country, leading to an amalgamation of newspapers in 1848 called the Associated Press (AP). The AP was formed because of the advent of the penny press and other cheap newspaper formats which catered to sensationalistic tastes through the use of exciting and shocking stories and language at the expense of accuracy and reflection. The AP was formed to restore objectivity and seriousness to newspaper reporting—a standard that is still pursued today in schools of journalism. As newspapers competed more and more for circulation audiences, a new populist form of journalism surfaced, developed by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, that focused on lurid coverage, catchy art design, and the incorporation of comic strips, such as The Yellow Kid, for entertainment. The

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term “yellow journalism” (in reference to the strip) emerged to describe the new form of journalism. Yellow journalism led to the tabloid genre shortly thereafter, gaining wide popularity in the 1920s. The tabloid was smaller, more condensed, and visually splashy, focusing on stories concerning the occult, the bizarre (from alien creatures to miraculous cures), and media celebrities. Tabloids to this day continue to embody these features and are considered to be part of recreational culture rather than serious forms of journalism. A tabloid is usually half the size of a newspaper, with many pictures and short, sensational news stories. Tabloids have the same function as gossip and occult storytelling assigning a carnivalesque tinge to them. They entertain readers by adorning their narrations and reports with hyperbole, confabulation, and outrageous claims. Rather than “facts” they deal with “factoids,” assumptions or speculations that are reported and repeated so often that they might become accepted as facts. Topics treated by tabloids involve such unusual things as UFOs, alien visitations, religious apparitions, alongside melodramatic exposé s of celebrity love affairs, sexual scandals, and the like. Newspapers have traditionally been powerful shapers of public opinion. The Washington Post’s revelations about the Watergate scandal helped bring about the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Newspapers have always provided a platform for debating, showcasing, and critiquing public figures and issues. But they are also entertainment, advertising, and information texts. With their comics sections, puzzle pages, sports sections, classified information, entertainment news, book and movie reviews, they constitute what can be called “collage texts” that are read not as narratives, but as collages, that is, as assemblages of items that nonetheless create a coherent syntext. Some newspapers have blurred the stylistic and content lines between tabloid and serious journalism, intentionally mixing elements of both. USA Today, which began publication in 1982, modeled itself after TV and is quickly becoming the default newspaper style, especially in online versions. Newspapers depend for their survival on advertising revenue, not circulation. This is why, on average, most newspapers allocate half of their space to advertising. More than three hundred years ago, the London Gazette was the first newspaper to apportion a section exclusively to advertising. By the end of the seventeenth century, various agencies had been set up with the specific role of creating newspaper ads. It can thus be argued that newspapers brought the modern age of advertising into existence. Layouts with big words and contrasting fonts became widespread. Language forms (words and phrases) were coined to make the ad text persuasive. Strategic repetitions of a product’s name, taglines set in eye-catching patterns (vertically, horizontally, diagonally), supporting illustrations, and the creation of slogans, were just some of the advertising techniques introduced by newspaper ad makers.

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Today it is being claimed that newspaper reading is declining and that people are now turning to websites in place of print newspapers. As Harkin (2009: 181) observes: The result, in many industries, has been to throw up a ready alternative to many hierarchies based on information and expertise, and subject everything possible to a new kind of peer-review system based on the opinion of masses of ordinary pundits. The precipitous collapse of the habit of newspaper reading among young adults, for example, has not thus far been compensated for by their gravitation towards newspaper websites.

To remedy the decline in profits, newspapers have adopted digitization technology en masse—such as computerized word-processing and layout systems—to produce issues. Reporters now typically write stories on computers and then send them to the editorial office as attachments. The processes of making up the pages and printing the paper have also changed. For example, in some newspapers, the stories, photographs, and ads are inserted into the layout while it is still on the computer. In 1980, the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch became the first electronic newspaper in the United States. In addition to printing a regular edition, the Dispatch began transmitting some of its editorial content to computers in the homes, businesses, and libraries of a small number of subscribers. Today, most papers have followed suit, offering online versions of their regular editions and even entire issues. However, as in the case of books, this has not brought about the end of paper-based newspapers. People still seem to want to read newspapers as they ride on public transport vehicles, as they wait for appointments in offices, as they sip coffee in coffee shops, in their homes, and in many other locales. Newspapers might continue to be bought by consumers, as long as they remain cheap. But the demographic that reads them is a much older one—a sure sign of the eventual demise of the print newspaper in the next generation.

The blogosphere As mentioned, perhaps the greatest impact of newspapers has been in influencing politics and public opinion on issues of social concern. Editorials, investigative reports, and the like have literally made a difference in the world, attesting to the power of the well-written word to sway people’s minds. As newspapers have gone online, or at least converging with online forms of publication, the function of the editorial is also migrating more and more to the blog format.

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The term blog (short for weblog) was coined between 1997 and 1999; since then the traditional print article has been giving way more and more to the blog medium. The first blogs originated in the chat groups of the early Internet, some of which reach as far back as the 1970s (including such online services as bulletin board systems). Blogs resemble newspaper articles or editorials, but because of the technological possibilities of the online medium, they are typically multimodal, complete with graphics, photos, audiovisual supports, and so on. Today, blogs cover the entire gamut of human interest, from politics to cartoons. Blogs have several advantages over print articles. First and foremost, they reach a broad (and potentially international) audience instantaneously and cheaply, whereas print articles take more time to release and entail many more costs to publish. Second, blogs can be edited online and thus can be updated continuously, while print articles need to be revised and republished over a period of time. Third, blogs can be maintained permanently on websites and indexed in any way one wishes (in the order in which they were written, according to themes, etc.). Fourth, blogs can easily include visual and audio material. Fifth, feedback on blogs is rapid and far-reaching, since most blogs allow for readers to respond and leave comments on the site, to which the blogger can reply. This has led to the formation of blogging communities, constituting what is called the blogosphere. A collection of “local blogs” is sometimes called a bloghood. Comments are the basis for the so-called trackback feature, which transmits alerts to previous commentators. In addition, permalinks allow users to comment on specific posts rather than on entire blogs, and this, in turn, allows the blog to create an archive of past posts. Blogs have impacted significantly on the conduct of journalism and on writing traditions generally, since they have opened up the process of publication. The Internet has made it possible for anyone to establish a blog website and promote their views freely. The value of a blog is assessed by the inhabitants of the blogosphere, not by some filtering agent or agency to decide if a blog is publishable or not. In a way, this has put the onus on writers to write honestly and accurately, since their opinions and facts can easily be checked on the Internet and discussed throughout the blogosphere. The main blogs classified according to content include: ll

Personal blogs, which contain commentaries from individuals. These are essentially personal diaries, and it is from these that the blog concept originally evolved. Although most have a low readership, some have risen to fame especially during political campaigns.

ll

Corporate blogs, which are blogs used for corporate or business purposes, such as the marketing of products and services.

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ll

Question blogs, which are websites (often maintained by experts, such as medical doctors) to which questions can be submitted.

ll

Technical blogs, which are maintained by researchers, scientists, and the like, and usually sponsored by an institution (such as a university) or a publisher (such as a scholarly journal).

ll

Genre blogs, which include writings on the whole range of topics previously covered by magazines, journals, and other print publications. These include political blogs, travel blogs, education blogs, music blogs, legal blogs, among many others.

ll

Newspaper blogs which are the online versions of the traditional articles, editorials, and so on, often published as well in paper form.



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There is little doubt that blogging has expanded the range of, and accessibility to, purposeful writing. Many print journalists now have blogs that both reproduce their original print texts and allow for updating and immediate reader commentary. The rise of the political blog to social importance is evidenced by various events in the new millennium, including swaying people’s minds during several presidential elections. As has been evident with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the persuasive impacts of blogs have been receding in the face of Twitter and the tweeting universe, suggesting that the length of written texts is more effective if kept to a minimum—a cognitive development that will be discussed subsequently. Authors of books now also use blogs to communicate with their readership about various aspects of their writing. A novelist, for example, might maintain a blog to inform readers about the background to the novel as well as to field questions from readers. Some have even used the blog format to publish their books, without going through a traditional publishing house. There are now prizes for the best blog-based book. In a phrase, the blogosphere is fast replacing the Gutenberg Galaxy. The latter had made writing the basis on which societies evolved socially and culturally; the evolutionary impulse associated with writing is now being literally transferred to the Digital Galaxy.

Impacts Print newspapers have always been a powerful force in the Gutenberg Galaxy because, as mentioned above, people read them as meaningful syntexts. This might explain why the press has always been able to influence the opinion of the masses. One of the foremost examples of the “power of the press” came in 1974 when President Richard Nixon resigned his office after revelations

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about the Watergate scandal involving his administration, which had first been brought to public attention by the Washington Post. No wonder, then, that the Watergate affair led to a rise in the popularity of investigative reporting, establishing it as a new genre within the newspaper medium. But perhaps the most prevalent function of newspapers in the world of mass communications today is not to provide a forum for a free flow of ideas, but rather to provide practical information and distraction. Indeed, to cope with the competition of instant news reports on radio and television, newspapers have become more diversified and intent on entertaining readers. They now not only give extensive background information to the news, and offer truly well-written documentaries and reviews of books, movies, and so on, but they also attempt to embellish these in the same way that TV programs do (with visual images, with catchy or sensationalistic headlines, etc.). Many people buy newspapers more for their advertising content than for the news; others read them for the comics section; others still cannot wait to solve the crossword puzzle that many newspapers put out daily. So, too, sports, lifestyle trends, classified information, entertainment news, portraits of individuals, and many more rubrics provide an array of genres that rival TV for entertainment value. Different types of newspapers attract different kinds of audiences. They are thus perceptibly different at the level of the signifier, that is, in how they are put together physically and conceptually, in what kind of language they use (in the headline style and in the actual writing of stories), and in how they present their written text (types of fonts, size of fonts, types of photography used, etc.). Some newspapers, such as the tabloid type are intended to be more “populist”; others, like The New York Times, are designed to be much more literary and linguistically refined and sophisticated. Some salient differences between the two can be charted as follows: Tabloid

“Times” Type of Newspaper

(populist syntext)

(sophisticated syntext)

Headlines are large and informal

Headlines are smaller and formal

Writing style is colloquial and characterized by slang features

Writing style is more refined and sophisticated

Reporting is sensationalistic and graphic

Reporting is subdued and rational

Many “bawdy” topics and features are included

Prurient topics and advertising are treated with discretion and prudence

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On average, newspapers devote almost half of their space to advertising. Many adults read a daily newspaper specifically to check the ads for information about products, services, or special sales. As mentioned, the London Gazette became the first newspaper to reserve a section exclusively for advertising over three hundred years ago. So successful was this venture that by the end of the seventeenth century several agencies came into existence for the specific purpose of creating newspaper ads for merchants and artisans. In general, they designed the ad texts in the style of modern classifieds, without illustrative support. But the ads nonetheless had all the persuasive rhetorical flavor of their contemporary descendants. The ad makers of the era catered to the wealthy clients who bought and read newspapers, promoting the sale of tea, coffee, wigs, books, theater tickets, and the like. The following advertisement for toothpaste dates back to a 1660 issue of the Gazette. What is captivating about it is the fact that its rhetorical style is virtually identical to the one used today for the promotion of this type of product (cited by Dyer 1982: 16–17): Most excellent and proved Dentifrice to scour and cleanse the Teeth, making them white as ivory, preserves the Tooth-ach; so that being constantly used, the Parties using it are never troubled with the Tooth-ach. It fastens the Teeth, sweetens the Breath, and preserves the Gums and Mouth from cankers and Impothumes . . . and the right are only to be had at Thomas Rookes, Stationer.

Print advertising spread rapidly throughout the eighteenth century in both Europe and America, proliferating to the point that the writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–84) felt impelled to make the following statement in The Idler: “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promise and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic” (cited by Panati 1984: 168). As print advertising became a fixture of the social landscape in the industrialized world, ad creators began paying more attention to the design and layout of the ad text to be inserted in newspapers. With the spread of newspapers in the nineteenth century, style of presentation became increasingly important in raising the persuasive efficacy of a particular newspaper’s advertising pitches. The syntactically cumbersome and visually uninteresting ads of the previous century were replaced more and more by layouts using words set out in blocks, compact sentences, and contrasting type fonts. New language forms were coined regularly to fit the needs of the advertiser. As a consequence, newspaper advertising was surreptitiously starting to change the very structure and use of language

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and verbal communication, as more and more people became exposed to advertising not only in newspapers, but also in magazines. Everything from clothes to beverages was being promoted through ingenious new verbal ploys such as: ll

strategic repetitions of the firm’s name or of the product in the composition of the ad text;

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the use of compact phrases set in eye-catching patterns (vertically, horizontally, diagonally);

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the use of contrasting font styles and formats, along with supporting illustrations;

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the creation of slogans and neologisms designed to highlight some quality of the product.

As the nineteenth century came to a close, newspaper advertisers in particular were, as Dyer (1982: 32) aptly points out, using “more colloquial, personal, and informal language to address the customer” and also exploiting certain effective rhetorical devices including “the uses of humor to attract attention to a product.” So persuasive had this new form of advertising become that, by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become a major source of influence in how people communicated with each other. As the newspaper became a part of mass culture in the late nineteenth century, newspaper writers and advertisers became the new wordsmiths for the larger society. And newspaper reading itself became a kind of prerequisite for being knowledgeable about the world. The overall signified that the newspaper syntext builds into itself is that of “information savvy.” To this day, there is a widely held perception that to know what is going on in the world one must read about it in the newspaper. However, the “credibility” of newspapers varies greatly, from such high-brow papers as The New York Times or Times of London, which attempt to explain events in objective terms, to those that have a more grassroots appeal, such as the tabloid newspapers in the United States and Britain, which present the same events in more sensationalistic and populist terms. The multiplicity of signifieds in a newspaper leads readers typically to perceive its overall content as a blur. Paradoxically, this blur becomes “focalized” after we have read the newspaper, since from the reading process we still get the sense that we know “what is going on,” even though we hardly remember any details of what we have read. In this case the textual signifier— the actual newspaper itself and its layout and appearance—is greater than its signified—what we get out of it. This is an interpretive anomaly in sign systems, and it is this structural feature that sets newspapers apart from books, especially those designed to have narrative structure.

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Magazines Magazines have an immediate and powerful visual appeal. From magazines that cater to clothing fashion aficionados to fanzines (zines), magazines by fans of a certain celebrity, sports team, and the like, magazines are media that connect readers to specific interests or hobbies. A magazine is a collection of articles or stories published at regular intervals. Most magazines include illustrations. They provide a wide variety of information, opinion, and/or entertainment. For example, they may cover current events and fashions, discuss foreign affairs, or describe how to repair appliances or prepare food. Some magazines seek simply to engage their readers with fiction, poetry, photography, cartoons, or articles about television shows or motion-picture stars; others provide professional information and advice to those working in certain areas of employment (from automobile mechanics to medical practice). Magazines, like newspapers, represent the work of various writers, not a single author. But they are designed to be kept much longer than newspapers. For this reason, most have a smaller page size and are printed on better paper. In content, magazines often have less concern with daily, rapidly changing events than do newspapers. Most have a cover featuring a photograph or a drawing rather than news headlines. Writing of different types—ranging from factual or practical to a more personal or emotional style—characterizes the magazine syntext. Some of the best writers have contributed either occasionally or regularly to magazines. And many well-known authors published their early works in them.

Magazine publishing The earliest magazines published in Europe include the German Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen (1663–68), the French Journal des Sç avans (1665), and the English Philosophical Transactions (1665) of the Royal Society of London. They were essentially collections of essays on issues and trends related to art, literature, philosophy, and science. Among the most widely read of the essay periodicals of the seventeenth century were the British publications The Tatler (1709–11) and The Spectator (1711–14)—creations of the renowned essayists Richard Steele (1672–1729) and Joseph Addison (1672–1719)—The Rambler (1750–52) and The Idler (1758–60), founded by Samuel Johnson (1709–84). In the latter part of the eighteenth century, such periodicals developed into general-purpose publications dealing with social, political, and other issues of general concern. With the printing of

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The Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1907) in England, the first use of the word magazine appears, denoting a forum for “entertaining reading.” It contained reports of political debates, essays, stories, and poems. By the mid-nineteenth century, the publication of magazines intended for general audiences grew considerably. Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–98), for example, with its colorful fashion illustrations, was vastly influential in setting the style in women’s clothing, manners, and taste. The Illustrated London News (1842), the Fortnightly Review (1865–1954), Punch (1841) in England, L’Illustration (1843–1944) in France, Die Woche (1899–1940) in Germany, and Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1855–1922) and Harper’s Weekly (1857– 1916) in the United States became staples of an emerging affluent middle class of magazine consumers. Youth’s Companion (1827–1929) and later St. Nicholas (1873–1940) were among several children’s magazines published in the same era that became highly popular for imparting literacy skills to children. To this day, children’s magazines are published for similar reasons, albeit for amusement as well. Family magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post (1821–) also became vastly popular with the public at large. With the publication of Cosmopolitan (1886–) in the United States, magazine publishing targeted primarily at a female audience gained popularity. Between 1902 and 1912, this genre spread widely perhaps mirroring the fact that women were both the main readers of magazines and who, at the time, likely stayed at home. In addition to Cosmopolitan, female readers could choose from Ladies’ (later Woman’s) Home Companion (1873–1957), McCall’s Magazine (1876–2002), Ladies’ Home Journal (1883–), Good Housekeeping (1885–), and Vogue (1892–), reinforcing the point that a large portion of magazine publication was aimed at women. Shortly thereafter, the pocket-sized Reader’s Digest (1922–) began publication, indicating that people had increasingly little time to read entire books in fast-paced urban societies. With the “digested summaries” that Reader’s Digest published regularly, readers could indulge their curiosity as to what ideas were being introduced or discussed in books and, at the same time, to make up their minds as to whether or not to buy and read a book. Since the 1950s, this periodical has been a true bestseller, reinforcing the notion that it mirrors the way some (maybe many) people tend to read—quickly and easily—given the lack of time (and perhaps interest) in drawn out book-length reading. Two other significant developments, dating from the 1920s and 1930s, were the establishment of weekly news magazines, such as Time (1923–) and Newsweek (1933–), Life (1936–72, revived as a monthly in 1978), Look (1937–71), and Ebony (1946–), which focuses on issues of African American concern. Today, magazine publishing is firmly established worldwide. In Japan, for instance, several thousand titles of all varieties are published regularly; in Africa periodicals in the African languages as well as in English and French

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are published on a regular basis. There are also many special-interest magazines today including: Consumer Reports (1936–), which offers comparative evaluations of consumer products; TV Guide (1953–), which provides TV program listings even in the Internet Age; GQ (1957–), which focuses on men’s concerns; Rolling Stone (1967–), which is devoted mainly to trends in popular music, but also to issues of political and social concern; Ms. (1970–), which presents topics of concern to women, discussing gender issues in political, social, and philosophical terms; People (1974–), which features biographical and opinion pieces on contemporary celebrities; National Geographic (1888–), which contains updated information on events from the worlds of science, history, and travel; Discover (1980–), which is a general public magazine focusing on science; Wired (1993–), which looks at issues pertaining to digital culture; and Prevention Magazine (1950), which presents information and articles on health topics, from nutrition to exercise and diseases. Predictably, in today’s Digital Galaxy the magazine has converged with other media and has itself migrated to the online medium. E-zines (magazines published on the Internet) are proliferating, and print magazines have online versions. As in the case of newspapers, the latter have various advantages over paper-based magazines. For one thing, they can be put out much more quickly and updated regularly, thus allowing readers to keep constantly abreast of current events. Moreover, given the hypertextuality capacities of e-zines, they can be linked with other sources of information. The Internet also has created magazine chat rooms, Facebook communities, for example, allowing readers to discuss issues in the magazines among themselves. In early 2000, Vogue and W magazines created one of the first magazine chat websites, Style.com, where people could click on to get the latest gossip about the fashion industry. These are now commonplace.

Textual blending Although there are myriads of magazines on the market today, there is nevertheless an overriding feature that characterizes virtually all of them. It can be called textual blending—a feature whereby the content of ads and the content of the magazine are made to blend considerably, creating a sense of continuity between the products advertised and the articles of the magazine. For example, a computer magazine attracts readers interested in digital technologies and gadgets who will undoubtedly find its ads helpful in choosing certain digital equipment. Advertisers of such equipment can thus reach many potential customers through the magazine by integrating their ad texts with the magazine’s contents. But this blending of product advertising with magazine

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contents is found not only in specialized magazines, but even in those that advertise different types of products: ll

ads of cosmetic products, for instance, are related to the interests of readers of magazines such as Vogue and are thus primary ingredients in the textual blending;

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ads for clothing and shoes are related to the interests of readers who read lifestyle magazines;

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ads for expensive cars are related to the interests of an upscale class of automobile customers who read magazines such as Esquire;

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ads for mid-class SUVs and other such automobiles are related instead to the interests of middle-class consumers who read magazines such as Look.

In no other genre is textual blending so obvious as it is in the fashion magazine. The articles, illustrations, ads, and features in such magazines are concerned primarily with body image, trendy lifestyle, and a general “fashionista” worldview, espoused equally by males and females. For example, the short-lived MH-18 magazine, contained advice to young men on how to bleach or dye their hair and on what kind of cologne and jewelry to wear in certain situations—mirroring a concern about body image that, once, was considered to be purely within the domain of the female gender.

Pulp fiction magazines One of the features of magazines, as opposed to, say, novels written by significant writers, is that they are essentially “throw-aways,” that is, they are meant to be read once or maybe twice and then thrown away, recycled, or given to someone else to read. Unless one is a collector, and unless the magazine is a periodical catering to some profession or hobby, most magazines are quickly discarded, although they may be preserved for historical reasons by libraries. The throw-away text was also introduced in the field of fiction writing with the emergence of the so-called dime novel in the nineteenth century, an inexpensive fiction medium that dealt mainly with adventure, crime, horror, or romance in sensationalistic ways. The term dime refers to the fact that the novels were originally sold for a dime. The genre can be traced to the German publishing company Tauchnitz, which produced cheap paperback editions of classic works. In the United States, these appeared in 1831. They became extremely successful after 1870. By 1885, a third of the books published were dime novels. The dime novels were printed on low-cost paper that quickly turned brown and brittle with age. Bindings were poorly glued,

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often coming apart. They were not meant to last as great literature, just as “quick and easy reads.” Dime novels reflect how the print medium was becoming an intrinsic part of the development of modern mass culture in the reading domain. They were the precursors of cheaply produced magazines known collectively as pulp fiction. These too were sensationalistic, serialized fiction magazines. They were enormously popular from the 1920s to the 1950s. The magazines were produced in bulk and with similar cheap paper; they constituted a “quick read” for fun and titillation. The word pulp refers, in fact, to the lowcost wood pulp paper, with which the magazines, like the dime novels, were produced. The first pulp magazine was Frank Munsey’s Argosy Magazine of 1896. The pulps were written in an overblown and lurid way, so as to attract a large readership. The fictional characters in them became broadly popular, gaining an ersatz celebrity status, including fictional detectives and crime fighters such as Doc Savage, the Shadow, and the Phantom. Titles of the early pulp magazines constitute a nomenclature of the thematic genres they covered: Dime Detective, Planet Stories, Adventure, Black Mask, Startling Stories, Flying Aces, Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Spicy Detective, Horror Stories, Unknown and Weird Tales, Marvel Tales, Oriental Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories. Their popularity was enhanced by cover designs, which imitated the poster art used by circuses and vaudeville theaters to attract audiences. They included dark scenes of terror, scantily dressed “damsels in distress,” and handsome virile heroes involved in fisticuffs with villains. The pulp genre was adapted early on by radio and the cinema, in the form of serials, such as those made by Republic Pictures in the 1930s and 1940s. The serials kept audiences in suspense because an episode would end typically when the hero or heroine was seen entangled in some dangerous situation from which he or she could not possibly emerge alive. The audience would come back the following week to find out how the cliff-hanger would be resolved. The term cliff-hanger is often used synonymously with pulp fiction. The pulps started losing popularity by the late 1950s, with the advent of television and its own adoption of pulp styles and genres. The bankruptcy in 1957 of the American News Company, the main distributor of the magazines, marked the end of the pulp fiction era. But the pulp genres are still part of pop culture’s DNA, as is evident in current movies, such as the James Bond movies, the Raiders of the Lost Ark films, the unending Star Wars saga, and others. Pulp fiction also attracted some of the best writers of the twentieth century, including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, H. P. Lovecraft, and Upton Sinclair. While the original pulps may have disappeared, the style and spirit of the pulps continues to define pop

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culture. Pulp fiction conventions are held every year throughout the world. In the early 2000s magazines such as Blood N’ Thunder, High Adventure, Secret of the Amazon Queen and new editions of The Phantom, Zorro, The Spider, Domino Lady, and The Avenger were attempts to bring the pulps back. Although not as successful as anticipated, the revival has stimulated interest especially in online venues, where pulp fiction now has a considerable following.

Comics In closing this chapter, a brief commentary on the comics is in order, for the reason that even today they stand out as a kind of overarching symbol of pop and mass culture. The predecessors are the caricatures and satirical portraits of famous people that became popular in seventeenth-century Italy. Caricature art spread quickly throughout Europe shortly thereafter. In the early nineteenth century, caricatures were expanded to include speech balloons, giving birth to the modern comic book form, which had its “golden age” between 1938 and 1945. Comics are narratives told by means of a series of drawings arranged in horizontal lines, strips, or rectangles, called panels, and read like a verbal text from left to right with the drawings representing the characters, the actions involved, and the visual unfolding of the plot. This layout applies to both comic strips and to comic books. Comics usually depict the adventures of one or more characters in a limited time sequence. Dialogue is represented by words encircled by a balloon, which issues typically from the mouth or head of the character speaking. One of the first American works with the essential characteristics of a comic strip was created by Richard Felton Outcault and appeared in the series Hogan’s Alley, first published on May 5, 1895, in the New York Sunday World. The setting that the comic strip portrayed was squalid city tenements and backyards filled with dogs and cats, tough-looking characters, and ragamuffins. One of the urchins was a flap-eared, bald-headed, Oriental-looking child with a quizzical, yet shrewd, smile. He was dressed in a long, dirty nightshirt, which Outcault often used as a placard to comment on the cartoon itself. Two other early comics were the Little Bears by James Guilford Swinnerton, which first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1892, and The Katzenjammer Kids by Rudolph Dirks, which first appeared in The American Humorist in 1897. Newly formed newspaper syndicates, such as King Features, founded in 1914, made the mass circulation of strips possible. Every newspaper could obtain, for reprinting, templates of the strips from the syndicates, which employed visual

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artists. Eventually American comic strips were distributed worldwide. Blondie by Chic Young became the most widely syndicated comic strip of the mid-twentieth century. Mutt and Jeff first appeared as Mr. A. Mutt in a November 1907 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle. That comic strip subsequently was introduced to a wide audience by the newspaper syndicates, and it became the first successful daily comic strip in the United States. To satisfy demand, newspapers published collections of the strips, and a 1911 Mutt and Jeff collection was one of the first comic books to be published. But the first comic book published independently of any newspaper, containing material specially prepared for it, was The Funnies, which ran for thirteen issues in 1929. Starting in 1933, a number of comic books, which were reprints of well-known newspaper comic strips such as Joe Palooka and Connie, were published and distributed as premiums with certain merchandise. The first comic book to be sold on newsstands was Famous Funnies. It appeared in 1934. While the Sunday comics were primarily for children, the daily comic strip attracted adult audiences. Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent, first published in 1914, has been called the first adult American comic strip, capitalizing on the popularity of the detective and mystery genres. One of the earliest and most influential contributors to the genre’s evolution was Roy Crane, who created Wash Tubbs in 1924. The adventure genre began with the publication in 1929 of Tarzan and Buck Rogers—the former adapted from the novels of writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950). Gasoline Alley by Frank O. King, marked a departure from the comic strip tradition whereby the cast of characters never ages; its characters aged day by day. A great impetus was given to the publication of comic books by the phenomenal success in 1938 of Action Comics, of which the principal feature was the Superman narrative, later published separately as Superman comic books. This was, as comic-book historian Bradford W. Wright (2000) has argued, the comic-book industry’s “Big Bang.” Indeed, only a year after, Superman became a fixture not only on magazine stands but on radio programs. Superman’s popularity spawned a series of comic-book superhero clones in the early 1940s—the decade which saw the debuts of Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Captain America. Since that time myriads of comic books have been published, some containing collections of noted comic strips, others consisting of new material. Some deal with contemporary life; some are condensations of literary classics; still others are adventure stories. Even before the advent of television, comics set the style for clothing, coiffure, food, manners, and social mores. They have inspired plays, musicals, ballets, motion pictures, radio and television series, popular songs,

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books, and toys. Modern discourse is permeated with idioms and words created for the comics. For example, the code word for the Allied Forces on D-Day was “Mickey Mouse,” and the password for the Norwegian Underground was “The Phantom.” Numerous contemporary painters and sculptors have incorporated comic-book figures into their art works; motion-picture directors have adapted techniques of the comics into their films. A number of strips have also found a devoted following among intellectuals. Krazy Kat, for instance, has been regarded by many as one of the most amusing and imaginative works of narrative art ever produced in America. The art of the late Charles Schultz (1922–2000), too, falls into this category. His comic strip Peanuts, which was originally titled Li’l Folks, debuted in 1950, becoming one of the most popular comic strips of history, appearing in thousands of newspapers and translated into many languages. Schultz’s characters—Charlie Brown, his sister Sally, his dog Snoopy, his friends Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Peppermint Patty, and Marcie, and the bird Woodstock— have become icons of the modern world. Needless to say, the comics have gone digital. Many digital comics, as they are called, are essentially animated comics, featuring or parodying various traditional representations. For example, the short-lived e-toon Gary the Rat, from June to December of 2003, was about a ruthless New York lawyer who gets turned into a huge rat, in obvious parodic imitation of Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) horrifying masterpiece Metamorphosis. The rat was hated by his landlord, who wants to evict him, and chased by an exterminator who is out to eliminate him. Yet, Gary the rat is adored by his boss because clients are eager to work with him. Queer Duck (2002–04) satirized the gullibility of people who listen to “radio shrinks.” It was about a gay duck and his animal pals who are frequent crank callers to a well-known “radio psychologist.” The God and Devil Show (1999–2001) was a cartoon talk show hosted by a bearded ruler of heaven and a sexy leader of hell. These online-produced comics were short-lived. They were part of the early Internet (Web 1.0), foretelling how the Web 2.0 world would eventually evolve away from print culture toward a digital reading one. In sum, the print medium has been a critical one in human social evolution. It was, as discussed, central to the foundation of a world civilization, since print could cross borders and insert itself into all kinds of ideologies, transforming them radically (at times). The Print Age truly changed humanity on many levels, from enhancing the preservation of knowledge across time, thus creating history beyond mythology, and greatly extending the ability of people to communicate with each other in a physically displaced (distant) way. But in all things human, the print medium has also introduced a profane carnivalesque tinge to reading, as discussed in this chapter. Already in 1732,

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Benjamin Franklin fingered booksellers as bringing about the demise of “true books” because of the “trash” they dealt in. More recently, tirades against a “dumbing-down” of reading materials by social critics have led to similar dire predictions of literacy’s demise (Epstein 2000). If traditional print products are indeed ever going to vanish, it will not be on account of the qualities (or lack thereof) of writing itself, but because of the inevitable paradigm shifts that technology brings about. And that would be indeed ironic, for the shift from orality to writing that occurred in antiquity was at first denounced as a threat to reason, memory, and the soul by philosophers such as Plato. As Eric Jager (2000: 15) has observed, the signs of literacy’s demise may ironically have been captured by a media slogan of a late 1990s literacy campaign, “Find Yourself in a Book,” which signaled “not only the book’s demise as an actual medium for understanding ourselves and the world but also its fading relevance as a symbol in our collective imagination.”

Further reading As mentioned, the books listed in this section are related to semiotics in some way or other. More general reading on print media can be found in the books listed in the bibliography at the end. Eco, Umberto. 1979. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). The late and renowned semiotician, Umberto Eco, explores the relation between a text and its interpretation. Where is the text’s meaning? Does it lie in the author or in the reader? Or does it reside in some cultural code that directs the reading process? Eco, Umberto. 1989. The Open Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. In this book, Eco presents his famous distinction between open and closed texts. The latter leads to a singular or fairly limited range of interpretations already built into the text; the former allows readers to make up their own minds as to what it means. Propp, Vladimir. 1928. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press. As discussed in this book, Propp was the one who identified the presence of a relatively small number of “narrative units,” or plot themes, that go into the makeup of a universal “plot grammar.” These fall into discernible oppositions (e.g., hero vs. villain).

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Scholes, Robert. 1982. Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. This is a classic introduction to literary semiotics showing how it is virtually impossible to determine the meaning of a literary text by trying to assay what its author intended; but rather, true literary analysis would attempt to determine how a text is constructed through semiotic analysis.

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Chapter 4 Audio media I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn’t. I have always found moralizing intolerable. —Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)

F

rom the swing dancing of the 1930s to the “mosh pit” scenes of the 1990s, where teens hurled themselves from the stage into the crowd, passed hand over hand in front of the stage, the essence of pop music has always been a corporeal form of music engaging everyone, regardless of their musical backgrounds or aesthetic tastes. The rise of music as a mass art was made possible by the advent of recording and radio broadcasting technologies at the start of the twentieth century. These brought the Electronic Galaxy into existence. In this galaxy, records and radio brought music to large audiences, transforming it as essentially an art for the é lite or a ritualistic part of folk and traditional cultures to a commodity for one and all, apart from any claims to artistry or any folkloristic functions. What print technology did for the written word, recordings and radio did for music—they made it available cheaply to everyone, not just a privileged few. Despite its apparent lack of “classical good taste,” people have always loved pop music, no matter how controversial or crass it appeared to be to some. But ultimately, most pop music is designed to be highly ephemeral, so that new songs and new musical styles can be sold to mass audiences virtually overnight. With few exceptions, along with TV programs, blockbuster movies, bestseller novels, fashion shows, and most commercial products, pop songs and styles come and go quickly. Discussing the reason for this is one of the objectives of this chapter. As in previous chapters, the focus of media semiotics is on the meanings of music genres, and especially the larger signifying order implications that these entail. Music itself is a medium—an invention that greatly enhances a human faculty and its uses and reach, extending the ability of emotions to find expressive channels and means of affecting people directly through organized sound (melodically and harmonically).

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Recorded music Thomas Edison (1847–1931) invented the phonograph in 1877. A decade later, in 1887, the German-born American inventor Emile Berliner (1851– 1929) improved Edison’s model, producing the flat-disk phonograph, or gramophone, which was used shortly thereafter for recording music. About 1920, Berliner’s mechanical technology began to be replaced by electrical recording and reproduction, in which the vibrations of the phonograph needle were amplified by electromagnetic devices. By the 1920s, the cheapness and availability of mass-produced vinyl records led to a true paradigm shift in musical art—the entrenchment of pop music as mainstream music. New musical styles and idioms such as jazz, swing, country-and-western, soul, and rock are among the best-known genres that recording technology helped to institutionalize and spread. Since the 1920s, in fact, music has been perceived as a source of entertainment and engagement for mass audiences, not primarily as an art for the cognoscenti. Inevitably, as pop music styles proliferated throughout the social landscape, so too did the tendency for audience fragmentation. Today, with so much music “out there,” music artists and producers know full well that their music will appeal primarily to specific audiences. As in the case of modern-day print media (Chapter 3), the fragmentation of music audiences is a salient characteristic of the digital mediascape in which we live.

The emergence of pop music The origin of pop music, defined as music intended for mass consumption and sold in the marketplace cheaply, can be traced to late-eighteenth-century America, when catchy tuneful music was composed on purpose by professional musicians for performance in parks in front of large gatherings of people (generally on Sunday afternoons). By the early nineteenth century, Italian opera had also become popular, influencing the development of the soft, sentimental type of singing known as crooning, which became widespread in America. Before the advent of sound recordings, the primary medium of disseminating such music was printed sheet music. At the threshold of the twentieth century, the growing popularity of the crooning idiom created a flourishing music publishing business centralized in New York City, in an area of lower Manhattan called Tin Pan Alley. The first Tin Pan Alley song to sell one million copies, “After the Ball” (1892) by Charles K. Harris, inspired rapid growth in the music publishing industry. The early pop songs were simple, memorable, and emotionally appealing, attracting large audiences to

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them. At the same time, vaudeville became a popular form of entertainment in American society, for the simple reason that one of its central components was the use of popular songs to which the audience could sing along. Also at the same time, so-called ragtime pieces written by professional composers such as Scott Joplin (1868–1917) also became popular, introducing a new and emotionally powerful creative musical medium that was to influence the development of mainstream music subsequently—namely, African American musical art. As just mentioned, it was a small cadre of composers and lyricists based in New York City who produced the best-known songs of the early twentieth century. In many cases, the two—composer and lyricist—worked in pairs (George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, etc.). Their songs were popularized in Broadway performances, and performed by well-known singers accompanied by dance orchestras throughout society. With the growing popularity of vinyl recordings, such music quickly spread throughout the society. Affordable and better-quality gramophone discs made recordings more desirable than sheet music. Relatively unknown singers such as Bing Crosby and, later, Frank Sinatra gradually became celebrities through the medium of records and radio broadcasts. The African American influence on mainstream popular music became particularly evident during the so-called Jazz Age, which preceded the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1935, white jazz musician Benny Goodman boosted the popularity of the style with his band’s recordings of jazz works. From 1935 to 1945, the dominant type of popular music was, in fact, big band swing, a style modeled on the innovations of African American jazz orchestras. The “big band era” ended after the Second World War (1939–45), although the influence of the swing music it made popular could still be heard in the so-called jump band rhythm and blues and ballroom music of the 1940s. Important shifts in popular music after the Second World War were tied to social and technological changes. The massive migration of Southern musicians and audiences to urban areas and the use of the electric guitar were particularly influential in shifting the paradigm in American pop music. These set the stage for the hard-edged Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, the honkytonk or “hard-country” style of Hank Williams, and, in the mid-1950s, the rise of rock and roll music. Rock grew out of the intermingling of several streams of postwar popular music styles, including rhythm and blues, the recordings of blues “shouters” such as Big Joe Turner, gospel-based vocal styles, boogie-woogie piano music, and honky-tonk music. Promoted by entrepreneurs such as Alan Freed—who spread the term rock and roll broadly through his radio program

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as an exciting new music trend—and recorded by small independent labels, rock was an unexpected success, attracting a newly affluent teenage audience in the mid-1950s. The pioneers of rock came from varied backgrounds. Bill Haley and the Comets, whose “Rock Around the Clock” (1955) was the first rock anthem to gain wide popularity through the medium of records, radio, and concert performances, was a country-and-western bandleader; Fats Domino was a rhythm and blues artist; Chuck Berry was a hairdresser; and Elvis Presley was a truck driver. As will be discussed in more detail below, the “golden era” of rock and roll—defined by the exuberant recordings of Haley, Berry, Domino, Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly—lasted from 1954 to 1959. The most successful artists wrote and performed songs about love, sexuality, identity crises, personal freedom, and other issues that were (and continue to be) of central concern to teenagers. By the early 1960s most of what the music industry promoted as rock and roll was an imitation of the original songs and styles. The period also saw the development of distinctive regional styles, such as the sound of the southern California band the Beach Boys, the Greenwich Village urban folk movement that included the art of Bob Dylan, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul, and Mary; and the rugged sound of Northwest groups such as the Sonics. Rock was becoming the musical voice of larger and larger segments of the entire society. In one short decade, it had made its way to center stage. This became especially noticeable when the so-called British Invasion began in 1964 with the arrival of the Beatles in New York City, and with the emergence of the “rock group” as an artistic force. British bands, raised on the influence of rhythm and blues, and early rock and roll, invigorated mainstream music, in part by reinterpreting the early classics of American rock. Each group developed a distinctive style: the Beatles combined Chuck Berry’s guitar-based rock and roll into a sophisticated new style; the Animals combined various rhythm and blues styles to produce a hard-driving musical idiom; and the Rolling Stones incorporated aspects of Chicago urban blues into their distinctive, thrusting sound. The late 1960s was a period of corporate expansion and stylistic diversification in the record industry. Pop music generally was being defined more and more as music for young people. Styles included not only the influential experiments of the Beatles but also San Francisco psychedelic rock, guitar-based rock by Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, Southern rock, hard rock, jazz rock, folk rock, and other styles. Soul music, the successor to rhythm and blues, covered a wide range of blended styles, including the gospel-based performances of Aretha Franklin, the funk music of James Brown, and the soulful crooning of Marvin Gaye. Country music—firmly centered in Nashville,

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Tennessee—produced a new generation of stars who combined elements of old country-and-western music standards with rock and roll tinges and nuances. Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Dolly Parton helped contribute to the rising popularity of such music. In the 1970s, glamorous superstars playing to massive crowds in sports arenas defined a new trend. A plethora of distinctive new styles—disco, glam rock, punk rock, new wave, reggae, funk, and so on—were pioneered by independent labels and creative musicians. As a consequence, by the end of the decade pop music became highly fragmented and thus much less profitable for record companies to sell to large homogeneous audiences. The music industry became cautious due to a drop in sales of recorded music by almost $1 billion between 1978 and 1982 and a similarly precipitous decline in income from live concerts. A number of factors contributed to an economic revival in pop music during the mid-1980s. The advent of the music video—marked by the debut in 1981 of Music Television (MTV), a twenty-four-hour music video channel—and the introduction of the digitally recorded compact disc in 1983 stimulated demand for new music. The video album Thriller (1982) by Michael Jackson became the biggest-selling album in pop music history up to that time, and it established a pattern by which record companies relied upon a few big hits to generate profits. Popular musicians of this period included Bruce Springsteen, the working-class bar-band hero; the late singer-composer Prince, whose 1984 single “When Doves Cry” was the first song in more than twenty years to top both the mainstream pop charts and the African American music charts; and Madonna, the iconoclastic performer from a working-class background who transformed herself into a controversial “sex-kitten” pop icon with her provocative music videos. Audiences for pop music became even more fragmented in the 1990s. Bands such as Blur, Oasis, Pearl Jam, REM, and Radiohead continued the tradition of rock music. But it was rap and hip-hop, along with a recycling of jazz and other previous musical styles, that dominated the scene. Today, it is becoming increasingly obvious that each new pop music style and craze comes and goes quickly. Unlike the music of classical composers and, of jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong (1901–71), pop music generally has a very brief “musical battery life,” so to speak. This does not imply that many types of pop music are not highly influential and important art forms. However, the commercialization of such forms requires that they have a short life span, so that the economics of music recordings can be tied to bottom-line profits. Simply put, most pop music is not designed to last. For this reason, it is little wonder that jazz and even classical music made an unexpected comeback in the 1990s. The number of newly formed record

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labels devoted to reissuing the classical music repertoire on CD was unprecedented. Their success was fueled in large part by the use of classical music by the movies and advertising. Labels such as Naxos and Chandos, for instance, became profitable. The renewed interest in jazz was highlighted by a brilliant 10-part documentary on American PBS, by director Ken Burns, in early 2001. The main point made by the program was that the jazz phenomenon not only dictated all subsequent pop music trends, but was also a mirror of twentieth-century musical art. The TV program was followed by a coffee-table book, a DVD boxed set, a five-disc CD companion, and a special series of twenty-two essential jazz artist compilations. The traditional media for promoting pop music, from recordings to radio and television have conceded to the digital one, where music stars are now made and often quickly abandoned. An example is Justin Bieber, a Canadian pop singer who symbolizes the power of the Internet to produce superstars of pop music. Considered to be a lightweight musically, pop culture critics point out that in the Internet Age anyone can become a superstar if the “viral conditions” are right. Bieber was discovered on YouTube videos in 2007 by agent Scooter Braun who then introduced him to the pop music star Usher—leading to a major record deal followed by a huge promotional campaign. Today, many musical performers aspire to become popular by being discovered in a similar way, attracting audiences on YouTube or social media. This has had significant consequences on the development and role of pop music today, some of which will be discussed below.

Pop music genres Although music genres, recording stars, and hit songs change constantly, strong continuities can be detected within popular music. Most pop music genres draw upon: (1) the smooth, romantic vocal style of Tin Pan Alley; (2) the strong rhythms and emotional intensity of African American jazz, gospel, and blues music; and (3) the romantic themes and ballad forms of crooning and swing music. These are the elements of a generic pop music code that most musicians have typically incorporated, in one way or other, and to varying degrees, in the making of their musical texts. The promotion of jazz, blues, swing, show tunes, and Tin Pan Alley pop music from the 1920s to the 1950s was bolstered largely through the medium of radio, which broadcast music to large audiences, creating crazes overnight for new songs and performers. Especially influential in this regard was the advent of the “Top 40” program, a radio format that played only top single records—the top 40 on record sales charts. This became the dominant radio format from the 1950s to the 1970s, uniting musical tastes across audiences,

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by promoting mainly rock and roll. As mentioned, by the 1980s audiences became highly fragmented. So, Top 40 radio gave way to niche audiences for specific musical tastes. Today, there are dozens of genres, each with its own audience and each one promoted by record labels or through uploading systems on the web. A few examples will suffice: ll

Adult Contemporary: a mix of oldies and softer rock hits

ll

Contemporary Hit Radio: mostly current hits, usually mixing pop and rock

ll

Country: subdivided into traditional country, urban country, and rock country

ll

Modern Rock: current rock music split into its various branches: for example, hard rock, industrial rock, alternative rock, indie rock, and so on

ll

Rap and Hip-hop: works by rap and hip-hop stars

ll

Oldies: songs of previous eras

ll

Classic Rock: rock songs of the 1960s, 1970s 1980s, and 1990s

ll

Rhythm and Blues: rhythm and blues music by classic and contemporary performers

ll

Experimental: rock and folk promoted mainly by college and university radio stations

ll

Latin: music composed by Hispanic artists but performed by many others

ll

Classical music: music intended for lovers of the great composers

ll

Opera: music for aficionados of classic and contemporary opera

ll

Jazz and Blues: jazz and blues music intended to appeal to lovers of both current and traditional jazz and blues artists

ll

Gospel: gospel music intended to appeal to lovers of both current and traditional gospel performers

ll

Indie: a generic category that now includes virtually any new music produced independently, by the musicians themselves.

In addition to the above largely American-based typology, the music styles of other countries has started gaining widespread appeal through recordings, radio, television, and the Internet. The Argentine tango gained worldwide popularity already during the 1910s, initiating a craze for Latin ballroom dancing in Paris, London, and New York City. Similarly, the Cuban rumba became popular around the world in the 1930s primarily through recordings and radio. In the post-Top 40 era, such styles have made a comeback,

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becoming popular with new audiences across the world. Another emerging pop music genre is Indian film music, which is produced in studios in New Delhi and Mumbai. Although it gets very little attention from the mainstream Anglo-American music media, it nevertheless has a very large audience. African music too is popular in today’s diverse society with many kinds of audiences. It includes a number of distinctive regional styles, such as the juju music of Nigerian bandleader King Sunny Adé ; central African soukous, a blend of indigenous songs and dance rhythms with Afro-Cuban music; and South African isicathamiya, the Zulu choral singing style performed by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The list of new trends for specific audiences could go on and on. Never before has music of all types been so available to whoever wants to listen. From classical music and jazz to the latest music craze, the digital world literally has brought music to the people. The expressions and themes that pop music expounds quickly pass into general discourse, and the clothing fashions that pop musicians wear quickly become general fashion trends. Music has become an intrinsic part of modern-day signifying orders, thanks to the mass media. The William Tell overture gallop movement by the eighteenth-century opera composer Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), for instance, has become so closely linked with The Lone Ranger TV series of the 1950s that the two are hardly ever perceived as separate by those who grew up in that era; similarly, another Rossini overture, the one he composed for the opera The Barber of Seville, has become so closely associated with a famous Bugs Bunny cartoon that the two are now inseparable in many people’s minds. Of special relevance to the history of pop music is the so-called indie movement. This refers (in film and music production) to work financed and prepared outside of major conglomerate media industries. The term referred at first to movie producers who resisted being controlled by the Motion Picture Patents Company, also known as the Edison Trust. The meaning of the term today has changed, however, generally alluding to filmmaking style that is more engaging as opposed to Hollywood’s flashy and expensive moviemaking style; and of course to music that does not fit in with the traditional genres. Starting out as “underground music,” with its cult-like followings, the Internet has projected indie music into the mainstream. Indie musicians are typically unsigned artists who showcase their music themselves to audiences, via sites such as YouTube. The indie music scene has even spawned its own genres, among which Britpop (British indie pop music) and Riot Grrrl, a feminist punk rock movement, are the best-known ones. In the indie universe, trends seem to come and go very rapidly and those indie musicians who become popular online generally tend to migrate toward the mainstream, signing with the traditional labels.

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Digital audio media Several digital technologies have changed how music is produced and consumed. One of these is MP3 technology. This is a coding system for digital audio, consisting of files that can be listened to via streaming. The technology is a compressive one that allows for greater storage of data than has ever been possible with records or CDs. The combination of small size and good fidelity has led to virtually the demise of the record and the CD, since MP3 files can be distributed over the Internet and downloaded easily. With the advent of mobile devices and app technologies, music can be easily and economically stored and played on all kinds of devices. Another significant development is the Internet music store. The most prominent one is iTunes, developed by Apple Inc. in 2003. It is a website that can play, download, and organize digital multimedia files including the musical MP3-produced files. The iTunes store and others like it, such as Google Play, have truly put the final nail in most previous music production and distribution media, consisting of records and CDs. These have now become part of a nostalgia and memorabilia culture, rather than vibrant music production media. Since anyone can upload their files on iTunes, the traditional quality filters are becoming virtually irrelevant. Some social critics describe this as a DIY culture (abbreviation of Do-It-Yourself culture) whereby musicians can present themselves to potential audiences through the Internet, without the traditional filters for quality control (such as agents, producers, talent scouts, and record labels). The Internet has made it possible for musicians to get around these and put out their work by themselves. The works might gain popularity through social media chatter and other forms of “viral distribution.” DIY culture is seen by some critics as true popular culture, since it allows the quality of the works to be determined by everyone and anyone. Needless to say, whether true or not, a subtext in this book is that there is no turning back the clock once a technological innovation arrives that makes mediation cheaper, easier, and quicker. Another thing that the new technologies have introduced is the playlist, or the self-styled album, thus making the traditional album virtually obsolete. A playlist is a list of files (audio or video) that can be downloaded from iTunes or some other such site, including Spotify, that a user selects in order to make a list of songs, like an album, that can be played back as if it were an album. A technological advantage in this case is that the songs can be played in sequence or in shuffled order. Another source of significant change to the audio mediascape is YouTube, which is now where one can go and listen to virtually anything in the musical universe. One can access a video of a Beethoven Symphony (indeed many

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videos of the same symphony) or the latest performances of musical celebrities. However, the very nature of YouTube almost guarantees that any fame that someone can garner will likely be short-lived. Consider the case of Psy (Park Jae-Sang), which is an abbreviation of “psycho” in reference to the Gangnam Style craze that he spawned via YouTube. Psy is a South Korean singer and songwriter who is known for his comedic videos and concerts in Korea. He became a global celebrity when on December 21, 2012, his music video, Gangnam Style, surpassed one billion views on YouTube—the first ever to do so. He was subsequently dubbed as the King of YouTube. The craze catapulted Psy to center stage in the global pop culture arena for 2012 and the first-half of 2013. He appeared on television programs such as the Today Show and Saturday Night Live, in concerts such as the Times Square New Year’s Eve Celebration of 2012, among many others. Pop musicians such as Katy Perry and Britney Spears started following and promoting Psy on Twitter. Psy was also signed by a major label, School Boy records. The Guinness Book of World Records listed Gangnam Style as the most viewed video online, the most “liked” video, and the first video to be viewed more than two billion times. Psy was even named a goodwill ambassador of UNICEF. He has since performed with other celebrities of pop music including Madonna. Reactions to his success varied in South Korea, with some even calling him the “antithesis” of what Korean pop culture is all about. But by early 2014, the rage of Gangnam Style had subsided and Psy receded to the background, becoming another nano-celebrity (short-lived celebrity) of the Internet. So, while digital media allow musicians to gain audiences, in the end they may not be as effective as the traditional ones in making them true celebrities in the style of a Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, or Elvis Presley, all of whom are products of the media age of records, radio, and television.

Music as social code The swing music that became the rage between 1935 and 1945 appealed mainly to the young people of the era, who saw it as a way to survive the stark economic realities of the post-Depression era and the moral ravages of the postwar era. The juvenilization of music became even more pronounced when, in 1942, Frank Sinatra wowed “bobby-soxers” at the Paramount in New York, giving America a foretaste of the teenage hysteria that was just around the corner. The marriage of pop music with teenagers was officially consummated a little more than a decade later when rock and roll, a term clearly

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connoting the hormonal impulses connected with adolescence, emerged as a music designed to appeal exclusively to teenagers. From the beginning of the 1920s, music emerged as a social code, that is, as something that both tapped into social developments and also shaped them concurrently. The first true experiment in pop music was jazz, which thus requires some commentary here. Similarly, rock and roll and hip-hop crystallized as social codes reflecting social emphases that typified the eras in which they came forth.

Jazz The starting point for discussing the spread of jazz as a mass musical art form is Louis Armstrong (1901–71), nicknamed Satchmo, one of the most famous and influential performers in the history of jazz. He began in the 1920s as a trumpet player and as a singer with a distinctive gravelly voice. His first recorded solo appears on “Chimes Blues” (1923). In 1925, Armstrong made recordings that became masterpieces of jazz, including “Cornet Chop Suey” (1926), “Potato Head Blues” (1927), “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” (1927), “Hotter than That” (1927), “Tight Like This” (1928), “West End Blues” (1928), and a duet with pianist Earl Hines called “Weather Bird” (1928). In “Heebie Jeebies” (1926), he introduced scat singing, which has become a highly popular form of jazz singing style. By the mid-1930s, Armstrong became a society-wide popular entertainer. He had several hit recordings just before he died, including “Hello, Dolly!” (1963) and “What a Wonderful World” (1967). Armstrong now has a new generation of fans who have come to realize the power of his music. Indeed, in Armstrong’s raspy and heartfelt renditions one can hear deep sadness and sorrow just below the surface. It constitutes a form of crying that is subtle yet profound. It is also an unconscious musical paean to the sorrowful plight of African Americans—a plight that can be sensed through the voice and the music, making it much more resonant. As mentioned several times, jazz emerged in the 1920s as the first true pop music craze. The specific origins of jazz are not clear. It was a combination of several styles, starting in New Orleans in the early 1900s. Most jazz was played by small marching bands or by solo pianists. In 1917 a group of New Orleans musicians called The Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded a jazz phonograph record, creating a sensation. The term “Dixieland jazz” was immediately attached to it. In 1922 the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and in 1923 the Creole Jazz Band, led by cornetist King Oliver, became popular throughout the United States. The term “cool jazz” surfaced 1948, when

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tenor saxophonist Stan Getz recorded a slow, romantic solo of Ralph Burns’ composition “Early Autumn” with the Woody Herman band. This style was adopted by a group of young musicians that included Miles Davis, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, and arranger Gil Evans. Their recordings emphasized a lagging beat, soft instrumental sounds, and unusual orchestrations that included the French horn and the tuba. The recordings, with Davis as leader, were later released as Birth of the Cool. The role of jazz in the birth and spread of popular culture cannot be overemphasized. This was a major theme of the movie Chicago (2002), which starts off with the signature tune as a kind of aphorism for the times “All That Jazz.” Once background music in the brothels of New Orleans and Kansas City, jazz started to spread and flourish as a mass musical art because young people loved it. It was fun and it bespoke of a new freer lifestyle, in contrast to the stodgy one of the previous Victorian era. By the end of the 1920s, spurred by the cheapness and availability of mass-produced records and the emergence of the radio as a promoter of popular music, jazz and its derivatives came to define early pop culture. To this day, recordings of jazz music sell in the millions, with updated versions played and sung by a new cadre of “retrospective” jazz artists.

Rock and roll As mentioned above, the birth of “commercial rock” is usually traced to the 1955 hit song by Bill Haley and the Comets, “Rock Around the Clock,” although in actual fact the first true rock song (as we now interpret that term) is Elvis Presley’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” which he recorded in 1954—itself a remake of Wynonie Harris’ 1947 rendition of the same song. Haley’s song, incidentally, was the theme music of The Blackboard Jungle, a motion picture about teenagers and the many problems associated with coming of age. The movie made it obvious to one and all that adolescence had emerged as a social force to be reckoned with—it even provoked riots in South London on its original release, as did its signature tune. As an amalgam of a vocal-group style known as doo-wop, of a piano-based rhythmic style of jazz based on boogie-woogie, and a country-music idiom known as honky-tonk, rock quickly developed its own recognizable style that teenagers could call theirs, and theirs alone. In addition to recordings and radio, the rising popularity of television in the mid-1950s helped to turn rock songs and musicians into overnight successes. Through this new and powerful medium, the musicians introduced clothing and hairstyle fashions, and started dance crazes. In 1956, Elvis Presley became the “king” of rock, after appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, symbolizing the new youth rebellious-

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ness with his hip swinging and brash attitude before a national audience of viewers. Semiotically speaking, rock music had a truly distinctive style from, say, crooning music because it formed an opposition with it. The following chart can be used to identify the main oppositional features: Crooning music

Rock music

Soft and tender

Loud and rough

Restrained rhythms

Hard-driving rhythms

Flowing melodies

Hard-edged melodies

Romantic lyrics

Lyrics tinged with allusions to sexuality

The instrument that truly set rock apart from all its pop music predecessors was the electric guitar. It was Chuck Berry who turned the guitar into a symbol for the changing times, establishing a style of performance that continues to exert influence on rock music to this day. Guitar solos and riffs are powerful ones, given the intensity of the sound and its great volume. Beginning in the late 1960s a new generation of rock guitarists, including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Carlos Santana, experimented with amplification and various electronic devices, extending the musical potential of the instrument. Other instruments commonly used in early rock music included the electric bass guitar, keyboard instruments, and the drum set. The recordings of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly exemplified the “golden age” of rock and roll in the mid-1950s. These artists gave the music its emotional (sexual) power. Presley’s “Hound Dog” (1956) and “All Shook Up” (1956), Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” (1955) and “Lucille” (1957), and Berry’s “Maybellene” (1955) and “Johnny B. Goode” (1958) established, in fact, the main features of the rock style—loudness, hard-driving rhythms, and a metaphorical play on prurient themes, which would have been prohibited at the time if stated explicitly. An incident that occurred in the winter of 1959 brought out the emotional sway that rock and roll musicians held over teenagers. Three highly popular singers, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were killed, in that year, in an airplane crash on their way to a rock concert. The media portrayed their death as a tragedy of mythical proportions. Their songs, which would have faded away into the “oldies” category forthwith, became legendary classics. Television news programs projected images of teenagers crying inconsolably as they reacted to the tragedy. Posters and magazine photos of the

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three were transformed into icons of veneration and hung on bedroom walls throughout North America. But all this did not last for very long. By the early 1960s, Elvis, the “king” was dethroned. The Beatles emerged to take his place on the throne. Several hit parades, instead of just one as in the 1950s, reflected a new diversity and growing sophistication in musical tastes. Rock and roll became a medium for expressing revolutionary social and political ideas. It was no longer just music “to dance to” or “to fall in love by.” The radical hippie movement of the mid-1960s was, in fact, propelled by rock and roll. Its artistic voices denounced apathy, warmongering, racism, stereotyping, and other social ills. By the end of the decade, it became obvious to society at large that the “second generation” of rock and roll teens was quite different from the previous one, and intensely committed to social and political issues. In the 1960s rock had, in effect, entered its second critical period, now known as the “classic” era. Motown music emerged in that era, as did distinctive regional styles, such as the California style made popular by the Beach Boys and the Greenwich Village urban folk movement that included the music of Bob Dylan. The British Invasion began in 1964 with the arrival of the Beatles in New York City. The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band established new standards for studio recording and helped perpetrate the image of the long-haired rock musician as a creative artist. This image was further enshrined by the media with the advent of “psychedelic rock,” which promoted the use of hallucinogenic drugs, psychedelic art, light shows, and an emphasis on spontaneity and communitarian values. Musicians such as Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison and the Doors, the Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa developed a unique blend of complex rock genres and styles, catapulting rock into the domain of a new musical art form, alongside classical music and opera. Indeed, some of the musicians were classically trained, such as pianist Gary Brooker of Procol Harum. Jimi Hendrix gained exposure and became an instant legend at the first large-scale rock festivals in the United States—Monterey Pop (1967) and Woodstock (1969). Soul music became part of the multi-branching rock music code as well, with the widespread appeal of such African American artists as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Marvin Gaye. Paradoxically, despite the “antiestablishment orientation” of the music, and its rejection of traditional bourgeois goals, artists signed lucrative contracts with major recording companies. The music of the classic era continued to attract audiences even after its demise. This was confirmed by a VH1 poll released in 2001. Of the one hundred albums chosen by 500 journalists, music executives, and artists as the most influential and important of rock history, most were recorded in the 1960s and 1970s. The top one chosen was the 1966 Revolver album

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with which the Beatles initiated their experiment to transform the simple hard-driving form of early rock into “serious music.” With few exceptions— for example, Nirvana’s Nevermind album (1991), which came in second, Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill album (1998), which came in thirty-seventh, and U2’s Achtung Baby album (1991), which came in sixty-fifth—the majority of the albums selected were recorded during the classic era of rock. No albums from the golden era made it to the list, except for Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions, recorded in 1954–55, although the album was not released until 1976. It was rated twenty-first. Dominating the list were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, and other stars of the classic era. More recent polls have shown a movement away from the classic rock paradigm, with punk, neo-punk, rap, alternative, and even classical music making it to the lists. One such list, based on a survey by Quora, lists (in no particular order) albums such as Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd), Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), Definitely Maybe (Oasis), Appetite for Destruction (Guns N’ Roses), Thriller (Michael Jackson), among many others, including works by Norah Jones, Amy Winehouse, Beyoncé , Black-Eyed Peas, and Alicia Keys. In effect, such lists reveal how eclectic and fragmented the pop music world has become, with music (previous and present) attracting eclectic audiences. The shift away from classic rock came in the mid-1970s with the appearance of disco and punk as contrastive styles in teenage musical tastes. Initially associated with the gay subculture of New York City, disco quickly attracted a large teen following. Although despised by many other teens, disco had a substantial impact on rock music, especially after the release of the motion picture Saturday Night Fever (1977) and its hugely successful disco soundtrack featuring the group called the Bee Gees. Disco lifestyle was based on exhilarating fun dancing and glittering fashion. Punk music culture originated around 1976 in New York City and London as a reaction against the commercialism of disco and the “artistic pretentiousness” of 1960s rock, even though two precursors were 1960s “surf ” rock bands and “garage” bands such as The Standells and The Seeds. Punk rock music was raw, abrasive, and rude. Early punk groups included the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Ramones. A variant, less coarse form of punk culture, called new wave, emerged a little later as represented by Elvis Costello and the Jam. Alienating themselves visibly from mainstream culture, the followers of punk music emerged as a more menacing threat to the social order than the one posed by their hippie predecessors. The stage performances of punk musicians were deliberately violent and confrontational. They spat on their audiences, mutilated themselves with knives, damaged the props on stage and in the hall, shouted, burped, urinated, and bellowed at will to a basic rhythmic pulsating beat, inciting their fans to follow suit. The fashion

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trends they introduced—chains, dog collars, black clothes, army boots, and hairstyles, which ranged from shaved heads to the wild-looking “Mohawk” hairdos of every color imaginable—emphasized degradation, mockery, social caricature, and insubordination at once. Punk teens rejected disco culture with the expression “disco sucks,” seeing it as too superficial and much too acceptable to the adult world. By the late 1970s, both disco and punk were receding from the mainstream music radar, although snippets of the musical forms they introduced have remained influential to this day. Among the new trends, one of the most popular favored makeup, cross-dressing, and an overall blurring of the lines between the sexes. The hard-rock band, Kiss, whose performances on stage were designed to shock adults, symbolized this new trend perfectly. Each musician assumed a mock comic-book role—a glamour boy, an alien from outer space, a kitty cat, and a sex-crazed Kabuki monster. Band members wore makeup and their stage act included fire-eating, smoke-bombs, hydraulic lifts, and the smashing of instruments. Two performers—Michael Jackson and Madonna—challenged prevailing gender attitudes even more than Kiss had done in the 1980s. Madonna’s songs “Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl,” and “Dress You Up” were not-so-subtle feminist statements against the hypocrisy of society with respect to women’s bodies and sexuality. These topped the hit-parade charts to the chagrin and dismay of leading moralist politicians of the day. Madonna openly defied political correctness by adopting a Marilyn Monroe “sex-kitten” peep-show pose as her performance trademark. Michael Jackson assumed both male and female sexual characteristics for his stage persona. He achieved this through extensive cosmetic surgery. In a way both were pioneers in breaking down gender categories, making diverse sexuality, gradually more acceptable in society at large. The advent of MTV and of music videos in the 1980s highlighted the role that television played in the propagation of rock as mainstream music. The whole rock and roll craze was, in effect, first introduced into society at large by The Ed Sullivan Show after it hosted Elvis Presley and early rock stars on Sunday evenings in the mid-1950s. The same program catapulted the Beatles to fame in 1964. An estimated seventy-three million people watched that show. The moments that link TV with the diffusion and promotion of pop music are now part of history. In addition to the Elvis Presley and Beatle TV debuts, here are a few other highlights of the TV-rock music partnership: ll

In 1957, Dick Clark’s American Bandstand was launched, spreading teen trends in music, fashion, and dance through daily exposure on television.

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In 1967, the Who included explosives in their musical act on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, introducing extravagant spectacle into rock performances.

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In 1968, Elvis Presley made a comeback with his special on NBC, entrenching an “Elvis subculture” after his death in 1977.

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In 1975, Saturday Night Live introduced rock musical acts into its programs, projecting rock music more and more into the mainstream.

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In 1981, MTV was launched with the video, Video Killed the Radio Star, by the Buggles, making the music video a staple of rock music production.

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In 1983, the Motown 25 special featured Michael Jackson’s first “moonwalk,” the signature move of his dance style, bringing rock music even more into the domain of entertainment culture.

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In 1984, Madonna shocked everyone by appearing in a wedding gown singing “Like a Virgin” on the MTV Video Awards, emphasizing that rock music and changing cultural mores were intertwined.

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In 1985, the Live Aid concert was aired by ABC and MTV, rekindling interest in rock as a vehicle of political and social commentary.

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In the early 1990s, MTV started its own reality TV program, called Real World. The program depicted the lives, loves, and other personal issues confronting young people of the era.

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In the twenty-first century, special music channels exist, but are less influential given the advent of streaming technologies, as well as YouTube as a major medium for music promotion.



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Today, rock music has become even more eclectic and fragmented. Fan loyalties are split among artists of previous eras and all kinds of musicians. Moreover, pop music faces a new source of competition for the music dollar—a renewed interest in classical music and opera brought about mainly by the use of such music by movies of today and by its adoption by musical performers throughout Asia.

Hip-hop Of all the trends of the 1990s, the one that gained the largest following among teenage audiences was rap music, which traces its roots to the mid-1970s reggae music styles. The superstar of the reggae style was Bob Marley, who by the time of his death in 1981 had become one of the most popular musicians in the world. During the 1980s rap music made its way to the center of the pop music entertainment stage. Rock superstars, such as Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and Paul Simon, whose 1985 album Graceland featured musicians from Africa and Latin America, played an important role in bringing this about by exposing the works of African American musicians to audiences

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across the world. Rap is a genre in which vocalists perform rhythmic speech, usually accompanied by music snippets, called samples, from prerecorded material or from music created by synthesizers. The first rap records were made in 1979 by small, independent record companies. Although artists such as Sugarhill Gang had national hits during the early 1980s, rap music did not enter the pop music mainstream until 1986, when rappers Run-D.M.C. and the hard-rock band Aerosmith collaborated on a version of the song “Walk This Way,” creating a new audience for rap among white rock fans. By the end of the 1980s, MTV had established a program dedicated solely to rap. This made it possible for artists such as M. C. Hammer and the Beastie Boys to achieve success. The term rap is often used interchangeably with hip-hop. But the latter was derived from a phrase used in the rap recording “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) by Sugarhill Gang. The term hop has been around a long time to describe various styles of dance. For example, the Lindy hop style originated in Harlem in the 1920s. It is probably better known in its so-called jitterbug version. It was characterized by energetic body rhythms and the improvisational moves of the dancers. Lindy hop dancers created a heightened energy level and excitement by performing daring aerial movements. The hop dance of early rock and roll, too, was a high-energy acrobatic form of dance. The most famous example of this style was the dance performed to Danny and the Juniors’ 1958 hit “At the Hop.” The rise of rap in many ways parallels the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s. Both originated within the African American community and both were initially recorded by small, independent record labels and marketed almost exclusively to African American audiences. In both cases, the new style gradually attracted white musicians, a few of whom began performing it. For rock and roll it was Elvis Presley; for rap it was the Beastie Boys, whose release of “You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party” (1986) was one of the first two rap records to reach the Billboard top-ten list of popular hits. The other was “Walk This Way” (1986). Soon after 1986, the use of samples and declaimed vocal styles became widespread in the popular music of many performers, significantly altering previous notions of what constitutes a song, a composition, or musical accompaniment. Rap music typically emphasizes lyrics and wordplay, achieving interest through rhythmic complexity and variations in the timing of the lyrics. It is not unlike the popular musical form of the Renaissance era known as the madrigal—an unaccompanied vocal composition for two or three voices in simple harmony, following a strict poetic form, developed in Italy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Hip-hop was, in my view, the madrigal music of the 1990s. Its lyrical themes can be broadly categorized under three headings: (1) those that concern human relationships, (2) those that

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chronicle and often embrace the so-called gangsta lifestyle of youths who live in inner cities, and (3) those that address contemporary political issues or aspects of African American history. Underpinning the rapper’s vocals is the separately recorded musical accompaniment, known as a backing track. In 1982, computer-generated sounds from synthesizers were used along with snippets from preexisting recordings. With the arrival of digital technology, sampling began to replace the turntable style of cutting and mixing. DJs were thus able to access precise digital sound bites and reconstruct them into new sound collages. Sampling eventually facilitated the layering of sound, enabling rap artists such as Public Enemy to place seven or eight samples on top of each other. By the late 1990s any source was considered fair game as rap artists borrowed sounds from such disparate sources as folk music, jazz records, and television news broadcasts. Rap moved from the margins of pop music culture to the mainstream as more and more musicians began to seriously embrace the new style. Particularly worrisome to many conservatives was the rise of gangsta rap, which depicted an outlaw lifestyle of sex, drugs, and violence in inner-city America. In 1988 the first major album of gangsta rap was released, “Straight Outta Compton” by the rap group NWA. Songs from the album generated an extraordinary amount of controversy for their violent attitudes and inspired protests from a number of organizations, including the FBI. However, attempts to censor gangsta rap only served to publicize the music and make it more attractive to youths generally. Hip-hop culture in the late 1990s became a widespread source of identity-construction and self-definition for many teens. It introduced the practice of using nicknames, known as tags, as part of self-definition. These were commonly etched on the urban landscape—on bus shelters, buses, subways, signs, walls, freeway overpasses, mailboxes, and so on—with markers, spray paint, or shoe polish. In this way, hip-hop teens advertised their new identity to everyone. To visually reinforce it, the tag was decorated with crowns, stars, arrows, underlines, halos, and so on. There were two main forms of decoration, known as throw-ups and pieces. The former consisted in spray-painting one’s new name in bubble, block, or some other expansive style; the latter in decorating it with characters from cartoons or with proverbs. In such cities as Los Angeles and New York hip-hop teens made thousands of murals. So interesting had hip-hop tagging art become by the late 1990s that some traditional art galleries even started putting it on display. In December of 2000, the Brooklyn Museum of Art organized an exposition of 400 pieces of urban street art, called Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage, reflecting more than three decades of hip-hop art. In a city where nearly 2,000 arrests for graffiti offenses were carried out in the same year, the art gallery had taken on the role previously confined to the streets.

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The twenty-first century Pop music took on a seemingly harder edge as the 1990s came to an end. That was the era when, for a brief period of time, heavy metal and rap joined forces to produce so-called rap metal music. Along with the music of gangsta rappers such as Ice-T, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Doggy Dogg, rap metal became particularly worrisome to conservative politicians, who fretted especially over the brutal and hardcore sexual lyrics of the music. At the start of the year 2000, female rap metal bands also came into the spotlight, showing as much rage and profanity as their male counterparts, adding to the uneasiness felt by conservatives about the whole hip-hop movement. While this has all subsided as part of a dissipating moral panic, the transgressive political subtext of rap has not. During the final phases of the 2016 presidential election in the United States, rapper Jay-Z allied himself with Hillary Clinton showing how politically significant the rap movement had become in American society. It continues to have resonance for those fighting against racism and other injustices. Change is occurring all over the pop music world, brought about by technological changes such as those mentioned above (iTunes, viral videos, etc.). So-called techno groups, who combine computer-generated, disco-like rhythms with digital sounds, and acid jazz bands, who combine rock, soul, rhythm and blues, and jazz influences into an eclectic style have become somewhat popular. But they are competing with artists representing a plethora of new and recycled music styles. The only “constant” in pop music is that of “constant change.” Perhaps in no other area of pop culture is Barthes’ notion of neomania more applicable than it is to the domain of pop music. As in the hippie 1960s, protest and a general critique of society still can be found in many of the new songs, expressing rage against the “system.” But although such music remains an important vehicle for conveying and debating ideas, like all other things in the global village, it seems either to pass much too quickly from public consciousness, or else to have very little impact other than to get niche fans to download music. Another disconcerting trend is the fact that some former pop music stars are popular more than ever. Every musical style has, of course, a lifecycle. Baroque music survived for a century as the dominant style from about 1650 to 1750; the classical forms of Haydn and Mozart persisted from the 1770s to well into the nineteenth century, when Beethoven and other composers radically altered them to bring about the so-called Romantic movement; and serious composers in the twentieth century, from Shostakovich and Bartok to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Glass, constantly experimented with new ways to make music. But pop music has shown itself to be particularly inclined to change rapidly and to pass from communal memory. Its ephemerality or short

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life is, no doubt, a sign of the culture it mirrors. As emotionally powerful as any given pop music genre is to a particular group of people, it quickly loses its sway over subsequent generations, unless it has something to say that transcends a particular era. This is why jazz, blues, and gospel, along with some rock and rap works, are admired today and inserted into conservatories to be learned by new generations. In a book titled If It Ain’t Got that Swing (2000), Mark Gauvreau Judge argues that Chuck Berry’s 1950s song “Roll Over Beethoven” signaled the end of the more traditional forms of music. As a consequence, it also heralded the demise of adult popular culture. Ironically, the rock/pop music that Judge decries may have itself run its course, becoming increasingly an object of nostalgia, as indicated by various events that took place in the 1990s. In 1995, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland, Ohio—a sure sign that rock may have become “museum music.” Also in the 1990s, several major television documentaries were produced on the history of rock and roll, and historical box-set recordings were reissued featuring rock artists from the past—further signs that rock music had become more a part of history than of current interest.

The radio In 1837, the telegraph became the first electronic medium making long-distance communications possible. However, it was soon found to be inefficient because it depended on a complex system of receiving stations wired to each other along a fixed route. In 1895, the American engineer Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) transmitted an electronic signal successfully to a receiving device that had no wired connection to his transmitter, thus demonstrating that a signal could be sent through space so that devices at random points could receive it. He called his invention a radiotelegraph (later shortened to radio), because of the fact that its signal moved outward in all directions, that is, radially, from the point of transmission. This is how radio was introduced, technologically speaking, into the world. Evidence of a plan for radio broadcasting to the general public can be found in a 1916 memorandum written by David Sarnoff (1891–1971), an employee of Marconi’s US branch, American Marconi, which would eventually become the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). In it, Sarnoff recommended that radio be made into a household “utility.” Sarnoff’s memo was not given any consideration by management at first. After the First World War ended in 1918, however, several manufacturing companies began to explore Sarnoff’s idea for the mass marketing of home radio receivers very seriously.

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In an effort to boost radio sales in peacetime, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation of Pittsburgh established what many culture historians consider to be the first commercially owned radio station to offer a schedule of programming to the general public. It came to be known by the call letters KDKA, after it received its license from the Department of Commerce (which held regulatory power following the end of the war) in October of 1920. KDKA aired various kinds of entertainment programs, including recorded music, which was generated by a phonograph placed within the range of a microphone. The station did not charge user fees to listeners, nor did it carry paid advertisements. Westinghouse used KDKA simply as an enticement for people to purchase home radio receivers and other appliances. Other radio manufacturers soon followed Westinghouse’s example. The General Electric Company, for example, broadcast its own programs on station WGY in Schenectady, New York. RCA eventually gave Sarnoff permission to develop company sales of radios for home entertainment. Sarnoff opened stations in New York City and Washington, DC, and in 1926 he founded the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), an RCA subsidiary created for the specific purpose of broadcasting programs via a cross-country network of stations. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio service was established shortly thereafter in 1928, becoming a dominant force in American broadcasting industry over the subsequent fifty years. In contrast to the Westinghouse Corporation, AT&T began exploring in 1922 the possibilities of toll broadcasting, that is, of charging fees in return for the airing of commercial advertisements on its stations. Fearing legal action, however, the telephone company sold its stations to RCA and left the broadcasting business. In return, AT&T was granted the exclusive right to provide the connections that would link local stations to the NBC network. The sale of radios more than justified the expense to manufacturers of operating broadcasting services. According to estimates by the National Association of Broadcasters, in 1922 there were 60,000 households in the United States with radios; by 1929 the number had topped ten million. But increases in sales of radio receivers could not continue forever. The sale of advertising time loomed, consequently, as the only viable solution for the survival of American radio broadcasting. The merger of advertising with radio programming was the event that, arguably, brought the Electronic Galaxy into existence. In that galaxy, noncommercial broadcasting would play only a minor role and, in fact, there would not be a coast-to-coast noncommercial radio network in the United States until the formation of National Public Radio (NPR) in 1970. In Great Britain, on the other hand, radio owners have always paid yearly license fees, collected by the government, which are turned over directly to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

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Radio broadcasting reached a pinnacle of influence during the Second World War. In that period, American commentator Edward R. Murrow (1908–65) changed the nature of news reporting permanently with his sensational descriptions of street scenes during the German bombing raids of London, which he delivered as an eyewitness from the rooftop of the CBS news bureau there. American president Franklin D. Roosevelt was among the first politicians to understand the power of radio as a propaganda medium. He would frequently use the radio to bypass the press and directly address the American people with his so-called fireside chats during the Great Depression. Roosevelt knew that the emotional power of the voice would be much more persuasive than would any logical argument he might put into print. The chats have given way today to tweeting, as the Trump presidency showed. It too allows the president to bypass the mainstream media and reach the public directly. Radio broadcasting dramatically changed social life wherever it was introduced. It brought news, information, storytelling, drama, comedy, and various arts directly into homes. Historically a privilege of the é lite, the arts could be enjoyed by members of the general public, most of whom would otherwise not have access to venues such as the concert hall and the theater. The parallel growth of network radio and Hollywood cinema, both of which were launched as large commercial enterprises in 1927, created an unprecedented mass culture for people of all social classes and educational backgrounds.

Radio, advertising, and audience research A radio program is integrated with advertising. The soap opera genre was even named for the type of advertiser—soap companies—that sponsored them. In the United States advertising agencies sponsored almost all network radio shows before the development of network television. Stations often sold agencies full sponsorship, which included placing the product name in a program’s title, as with Palmolive Beauty Box Theater (1927–37) and various others. Entire radio programs became associated with products. The ratings system arose, in fact, from the sponsors’ desire to know how many people they were reaching with their advertising. In 1929 Archibald Crossley launched Crossley’s Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, using telephone surveys to project daily estimates of audience size for the national radio networks. The A. C. Nielsen Company, which had been surveying audience size in radio since the mid-1930s, eventually became the dominant ratings service. The resulting projections, or ratings, helped determine the price of advertisements and, ultimately, whether the program would stay on the air or be canceled. Only public radio stations are exempt from the “ratings game,” for the reason

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that they are financed by government subsidies, individual donations, and corporate grants. Needless to say, today the ratings game of the past has given way to the “Like” or “Dislike” buttons on a radio station’s website. Radio introduced the commercial into advertising—a mini-narrative or musical jingle revolving around a product or service and its uses. The commercial became a highly persuasive form of advertising, because it could reach masses of potential customers, print literate or not, instantaneously through the persuasive capacity of the human voice—which could be seductive, friendly, cheery, insistent, or foreboding, as required by the nature of the product pitch. Radio commercials of the day consisted of pseudoscientific sales pitches, satires of movies, and snappy jingles. They became so familiar that perception of the product became inextricably intertwined with the style and content of the commercials created to promote it. The commercial also created the first advertising personalities, such as Mr. Clean (representing a detergent product of the same name); and it became a source of dissemination of recognizable tunes throughout society, through the jingle format. From the outset, it was obvious that radio advertising both reflected and set social trends. A synergy thus quickly developed between advertising campaigns and general lifestyle trends, as advertisers attempted to keep in step with changing trends and shape them at the same time. Radio programs and commercials today are totally integrated. Commercials are interspersed throughout a program, informing listeners of products that they want to hear about. Radio advertising has the advantage that people can listen to programs while doing other things, such as driving a car or working at home. Another advantage is that radio audiences, in general, are more highly selectable by program genres than are television audiences. For example, stations that feature country music attract different kinds of listeners than do those that play rock. By selecting the station, advertisers can reach the people most likely to buy their products. The technical concept of audience, which is a key one in media and popular culture studies traces its roots to the radio. A branch of both psychology and media studies is now devoted to studying how audiences react to media texts. Known generally as audience research (AR), it aims to identify and dissect the various modalities of interpretation that characterize specific types of audiences. Audience is defined as the group of prototypical readers, spectators, listeners, viewers, or web users attracted to a certain media genre. Some audiences (such as those for actual sporting events) are physically present at the media event; other audiences (such as those for novels, television, radio, and webcasts) are not. Audience members do not always undergo the viewing or listening experience at the same time; for example, not everyone reads the same book or sees the same movie in the same time frame.

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The fundamental goal of AR is to measure how many members (statistically speaking) are in an audience for a specific program, classifying them according to geographic, demographic, and psychographic categories (age, class, gender, education, worldview, region, ideology, etc.). This allows broadcasters and advertisers to identify who their audiences are and to plan their programming and advertising strategies accordingly. The main techniques used in determining audience constituency are as follows: ll

Diaries constitute the oldest form of AR, whereby chosen subjects are asked to record their listening or viewing preferences in a diary. A main weakness of this approach is that people are prone to forget to record their habits. Diaries were first used in 1936, when the BBC wanted to gauge audience opinion on radio programming. The BBC asked sample groups to keep diaries of their listening habits.

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Interviews conducted by researchers allow them to ascertain people’s preferences and to map them against their demographic and psychographic characteristics.

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Audience Ethnography is the research method whereby the researcher joins a specific audience group and observes their reactions to media from within the group.

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Electronic Devices, such as the so-called Portable People Meter (installed on television sets, radios, etc.), allow researchers to keep track of listening, viewing, and navigating habits. Appropriate software is now available that has the capacity to track channel use and changing habits. Known as audience flow, it is defined as the particular pattern shown by audiences changing radio stations or television channels within a given period of time.

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New Technologies, such as Nielsen’s “NetRatings” (among others), provide valuable information, such as Internet usage habits, attention span rates, and the like while, at the same time, providing real-time audience data including size. Webcasting also provides opportunities for audiences to discuss programs on the relevant websites, thereby enriching the nature of the AR data that can be collected.

Once relevant data are gathered, the goal of AR shifts to sifting out any relevant statistical patterns present in the data. For example, the concept of ratings point (percentage of an audience viewing or listening to a particular program) is used to quantify relevant information. Closely related is the concept of share point, which indicates the percentage of all audiences that watched (or listened to) a certain program.

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Another aim of AR is to help media experts develop theories of audience behaviors. Among the many theories developed in this domain, the following can be mentioned briefly here: ll

Hypodermic Needle Theory maintains that the program is received uncritically by audiences, producing a conditioning effect on them. For example, the theory would claim that violence on TV raises the level of violence in audiences who view violent programs, or else leads to a higher tolerance of violent behavior in society at large.

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Two-Step Flow Theory posits that audiences tend to accept the interpretations of those who they see as “leaders” in their respective communities. Thus, religious audiences tend uncritically to accept the views of their church leaders on the acceptability or unsuitability of certain movies, radio programs, and the like.

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Uses and Gratifications Theory retains that audiences are not influenced directly by the media but choose their media products in accordance with their needs or to get satisfaction or gratification from them.

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Reception Theory maintains that audiences negotiate the interpretation of a media text according to their backgrounds and life experiences, not passively or robotically (as other theories claim).

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Obstinate Audience Theory suggests that there is a two-way dynamic established between audiences and the media, whereby audience reactions influence how a program is ultimately accepted or received by society at large.

One of the more influential scholars in AR was Elihu Katz. In a 1993 study (coauthored with Tamar Liebes), The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of “Dallas,” Katz linked the patterns shown by audience reception to different cultural expectations, which induces the audience’s “re-negotiation” of a soap opera such as Dallas. The book is also important for having introduced a convergent approach to audience research: one that integrates different methods (qualitative vs. quantitative), disciplines (linguistics, sociology, etc.), and communication features (audience, text, context). In effect, Katz showed that the audiences for Dallas, across the world, were “active viewers,” not passive ones. It has never been easier for audiences from across the globe to access radio programs than today via satellite radio and podcasts. As a consequence, the traditional localized (nationalistic) nature of audiences is giving way, more and more, to global, intercultural audiences. As a result, AR research is changing accordingly, as it is becoming more and more obvious that the forms of media culture to which audiences are exposed today will not be

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determined only by those living in a specific area of the world but increasingly by people in different regions of the globe, as all people search for new ways to interact in the global village and seek to understand who they are. In the Internet Age there is no longer a homogeneous audience. For example, YouTube has obliterated the distinction between target audiences and global ones, as well as the distinction between producers and consumers of media.

Radio genres At first, radio was no more than an audio medium for print and theatrical genres. For example, it adapted the various genres of theatrical performance, transforming them into radio dramas, action serials, situation comedies (or sitcoms), and so-called soap operas. It looked to vaudeville to garner and adapt material for its comedy-variety programming. And it modeled its news coverage on the format of daily newspapers—announcers would, in fact, often simply read articles from the newspaper over the air. Nevertheless, because of its capacity to reach large numbers of people, from the 1920s to the early 1950s, radio broadcasting evolved into society’s primary medium of information, arts appreciation, and, above all else, distraction. Only after the advent of television in the 1950s did radio’s hegemony in this domain begin to erode, as its audiences split into smaller, distinct segments. Today, radio is primarily a medium for niche audiences. People listen to it in their cars as they drive from location to location, or in their offices (or other places of work) as they do something else. Aware of this, radio stations typically present traffic information in a regular interspersed fashion throughout their broadcasts, or else transmit uninterrupted stretches of music during certain periods of the working day. Despite the obvious differences between radio and television, the development of programming for both broadcast media is best understood as a single history comprised of two stages. Early radio broadcasting was dominated, as mentioned, by adaptations of older media. The sitcom, for example, was adapted from theatrical genres that originated in the Commedia dell’Arte— which spread in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries characterized by improvisation from a standard plot outline and the use of stock characters. Sitcoms adapted this genre for new radio audiences by using familiar characters and conditions to explore life in the home, the workplace, and other common locations. It became one of the more popular of the early radio programs. The most highly rated sitcom in the golden (earliest) era of radio history was Amos ’n Andy, in which actors performed the stereotypical roles of African American characters in outrageous caricature. The series premiered on NBC in 1928, and ran for twenty years on radio before moving to televi-

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sion, where it ran from 1951 to 1953. Similarly, The Goldbergs (1929–50), Life with Luigi (1948–53), and other ethnically based family sitcoms successfully exploited the aural character of the radio medium, as actors used thick immigrant accents and malapropisms (misuse of words) to carve out their roles and characters. Lucille Ball’s radio show My Favorite Husband (1948–51) was a notable exception, developing sitcom artistry considerably. It established dramatic elements such as battles between the sexes, arguments among neighbors, and other mundane conflicts that became fundamental to the TV version of this genre. Radio variety shows were adapted from vaudeville. Popular comedy-variety radio stars such as Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Edgar Bergen were, originally, vaudeville actors and comedians. A radio comedy-variety hour typically consisted of short monologues and skits featuring the host. These alternated with various show-business acts, including singers, musicians, comedians, and others. Radio drama also became highly popular. The genre was presented in one of two formats—anthology and serial. The anthology format showcased individual plays, such as one would expect to see on stage or in motion pictures. This was highly popular in the 1930s and 1940s and included Mercury Theater on the Air (1938–41), created by American actor and director Orson Welles (1915–85), and Theatre Guild of the Air (1945–54). Radio series, using recurring characters, situations, and settings, were more popular, however. Genres in this format included urban police dramas, such as Gang Busters (1935–57); private-eye mysteries, such as The Shadow (1930–54); and Westerns, such as The Lone Ranger (1933–55). These were adaptations of adventure novels or pulp fiction narratives. The radio narratives provided reference points (signifieds) to which people could turn in their everyday discourse. Radio drama virtually disappeared by the mid-1950s as its biggest stars and most popular programs were transferred by the networks from radio to television. Soap opera, or daily serial drama, was originally developed as a daytime genre aimed specifically at a female audience. Soap operas explored romance, friendship, and familial relations in emotionally involving narrative formats. The invention of the soap opera is credited to Irna Phillips, who began developing the genre for local radio broadcast in Chicago during the 1920s. Many of her radio shows were adapted for television, with some running first on radio and then on television for more than twenty-five years. In the area of news reporting, radio could offer its audiences live coverage of events—something that newspapers could not do. The immediacy with which radio news reports reached people redefined the role of news reporting in society. Print journalism became a supplemental medium, focusing on in-depth coverage and editorial opinion. Today, radio continues to be a primary source of news reporting. So-called drive time (7–9 a.m. and

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4–7 p.m.)—the time most commuters travel to and from work—has become radio’s “prime time.” Programming consists mainly of traffic bulletins, weather reports, news items, and time checks. Some stations have now even adopted “news-only formats,” reflecting the radio’s need to cultivate specialized audiences for economic survival. National Public Radio’s All Things Considered (1971–) and Morning Edition (1979–), for example, were developed as morning and evening on-air newspapers for sophisticated audiences. Needless to say, radio has always been a promoter of pop music. The jazz, swing, rock, and hip-hop movements would not have become as dominant as they did without radio. Radio hit parades have always showcased new and old tunes, spurring consumers to buy records. Today, a host of radio stations provide specialized music broadcasting, from adult contemporary to classical music and jazz. A genre that started on radio is the talk show. The original talk shows were really no more than dialogues between a host and a guest on politics or current affairs. But subsequently, many gossip and “shock talk” shows emerged, becoming very popular, and remaining so to this day. The first such talk show was the one hosted by Father Charles E. Coughlin, which premiered in 1926. A conservative Catholic priest, Coughlin, attracted forty-five million listeners to his weekly radio talks. In the 1960s, outspoken hosts Alan Berg and Alex Bennett focused on pressing social issues and events such as the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. Today, talk shows hosted by controversial political commentators continue to attract large audiences. There are also now various subgenres, including hot talk, which attracts mainly younger audiences, a show interspersing contemporary music throughout the show and hosted by “shock jocks” who often use vulgarities to express their radical views of current events, and sports talk shows, which attract mainly male audiences. The talk show has, of course, migrated to the Internet, where it continues to attract huge audiences. Perhaps its popularity can be explained as revealing several inclinations and curiosities, including the interest in gossip, celebrities, sports events, and the like.

Online radio In the Digital Galaxy, radio has shown itself to have staying power and to be an adaptive medium. It is estimated that there are billions of radio sets in use worldwide, with more than half concentrated in North America, the European Union countries, and Japan. In developing societies, too, nearly all citizens own or have access to a radio. Radio stations are springing up globally. Programs and commercials are being transferred to digital databases for broadcasting.

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Internet radio (also called web radio, streaming radio, e-radio, online radio, webcasting, or satellite radio) is, simply, radio programming transmitted via the Internet. Internet radio has several distinctive features with respect to traditional radio. Some of these are as follows: ll

Since a program is streamed or put on a website it can be accessed at any time and from any location. The latter function has made the previous portable radios virtually extinct, with mobile devices taking their place.

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Some Internet radio services are hyperlinked to traditional radio stations; that is, traditional radio stations offer Internet sites for their listeners to access content subsequent to a transmission or to provide follow-up possibilities (commentary on programs, Q&As about future or past programming, and the like).

ll

Internet radio programming is accessible from virtually anywhere on the globe, unless censorship or licensing issues are involved.

ll

Surveys show that more people listen to Internet radio than to any other radio platform, including satellite radio, podcasts, or cell-phonebased radio combined. Music is now popular on radio sites such as Spotify and iHeart Radio. Listeners can pick and choose the songs they like and make their own playlists from the offerings of these sites, which number in the tens of millions.

Podcasting (as briefly mentioned) consists of prerecorded audio files available for downloading through the Internet on media players or mobile devices. Users often subscribe to podcasts at the iTunes Store or at similar venues. Once the podcast has been recorded, the show is then distributed through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to the iTunes Music Store Podcast Directory or individual websites. In the early 2000s, the technology for self-made podcasting emerged, and as a result podcasting soared producing an increasingly burgeoning “podcast galaxy,” that promises to expand and thus characterize the future of radio broadcasting.

Celebrities and nostalgia The radio, like cinema, created celebrities by simply exposing singers, announcers, actors, and the like through the “magical voice box,” as it was called. It also injected into the esprit of society a need to look back to trends of the past. In other words, it made nostalgia a common emotion, as can be seen by all kinds of retro and memorabilia trends, from collecting comic

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books to programs on TV dealing with older automobiles, as symbols of one’s past and even of the country’s past. In effect, radio reshaped society by injecting into it a need for celebrities from mediated culture, from cinema to recordings to radio itself. As McLuhan often emphasized, a mass communications technology defines an age—indeed, it brings it about. At the same time, when the age has evanesced, people who lived in it feel a need to revisit it in their imaginations. The proof is compelling—we have become addictively dependent on our modern technologies to carry out everyday communicative, interactive, creative, and intellectual activities. We have, in effect, become enmeshed in our own tools, even if this is often to our detriment. McLuhan claimed that, while new technologies enhance many aspects of human life, they also have hidden negative effects. One of these is a kind of ersatz “living in the past” or an immersion into “retroculture” and previous celebrities.

Celebrity culture Celebrity culture crystallized in the Roaring Twenties, as radio converged with the movie and recording industries to promote actors and musicians via the magic box. Starting in the radio age, some celebrities became icons (as we now call them retrospectively), especially after their deaths, venerated (at least for a time) like religious icons. Celebrities and icons populate all areas of the mediascape—from sports (Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, LeBron James) to science (Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs). The mania for celebrity status was astutely articulated by Andy Warhol in his famous saying that in modern society everyone desired “fifteen minutes of fame.” Warhol also realized that anyone or anything can gain celebrity status. Indeed his most famous celebrity subjects included commercial products, such as Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola soft-drink bottles alongside icons such as Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Mao Tse Tung, and Marilyn Monroe. A distinction between fame and celebrity is often made. Inventors may be famous, but they are not necessarily perceived as celebrities, unless the interest of the general public and the mass media are piqued in tandem. An example is Albert Einstein, who was famous as a scientist, but who was also a celebrity through the attention that the media paid him. As a consequence Einstein has been represented in comic strips, on T-shirts, greeting cards, and other memorabilia. The first celebrities were silent movie actors in the 1910s and 1920s, influencing lifestyle and appearance. In the 1920s, young men wore their hair slicked down with oil in the manner of the movie star Rudolph Valentino. In the 1950s, many sported a ducktail (with the hair long on the sides and swept

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back), in imitation of celebrities such as James Dean and Elvis Presley. The exploits of “dark celebrities,” such as serial killers and ruthless businessmen, are also part of celebrity culture. Even academics can gain celebrity status if their ideas are showcased by the media. Many celebrities are not famous for their accomplishments, but merely for having gained a place in the spotlight. For example, Paris Hilton or the Kardashians would not be celebrities without that place. Like some celebrities of the past, they are famous simply because fame is now intrinsic to media culture. A video that goes viral on YouTube enhances the chance for someone to gain celebrity status. A recent example is that of Justin Bieber, as already pointed out. The Internet, which has killed many things from the past, may have also killed the possibility for gaining true celebrity status. This is why the fame gained online is often labeled “nano-celebrity.” The celebrity of anyone or anything gained on the Internet quickly dissipates. Rather than “fifteen minutes of fame,” a more appropriate descriptor might be “fifteen seconds of fame.” If something goes viral, then nano-celebrity status is virtually guaranteed. In the pre-Internet era, this was perceived as lasting for a long time. The nano-celebrity environment created by the Internet may be bringing about the demise of a lasting celebrity culture.

Retroculture Nostalgia is defined as the sentimental or wistful longing for the past. Its most symptomatic manifestations are evidenced by the plethora of memorabilia that media culture produces. Elvis movies, Barbie dolls, original adventure comics, disco dancing, and so on, constitute a system of nostalgia that is part of how the mediascape perpetrates itself. Included in this is the penchant for celebrities of the past, often outdoing present celebrities in gaining media and fan attention. Simon Reynolds (2010) calls this retromania, referring to a vague nostalgia felt by people about the celebrities and the fads of the past. The subtext is that today’s trends are unoriginal and unexciting, and even if this is not true in any real way, it is perceived as true. The global Internet stage has fragmented the unity of the pop culture spectacle, leading to the acceptance of the past as the only future. Current artists like Lady Gaga are often accused of being clones of previous ones (in this case Madonna). But, then, repetition, imitation, and ritualistic performance have always been part of media culture. So the critique does not really hold. The content of an online fad is now called an Internet meme, since it spreads throughout cyberspace quickly and massively. A meme may be an image, a video, a hyperlink, a hashtag, a website, or even just a word or phrase. It spreads virally via social networks, blogs, and e-mail. A well-known example

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of someone born as a nano-celebrity within the memetic sphere but becoming a veritable celebrity across the mediascape in all spheres is Grumpy Cat. Grumpy Cat got her fifteen minutes (seconds) of fame when she came to prominence after a photograph (of her) was posted on Reddit. Parodies based on the photograph went viral. Grumpy Cat became the subject of a popular meme in which lolcats (images of any kind) are made from the photograph. Clearly, in the Internet Age anyone or anything can become a celebrity if the “viral conditions” are right. But the fame is a transient and quickly forgettable one.

Further reading Gravells, Jane. 2017. Semiotics and Verbal Texts: How the News Media Construct a Crisis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gravells examines news reporting semiotically showing how the news media construct ideological texts that impart a sense of crisis by tapping into common fears. Nö th, Winfried. 1997. Semiotics of the Media: State of the Art, Projects, and Perspectives. Berlin: de Gruyter. Although much work has been conducted on media semiotics after this text, it constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of media culture through the lens of semiotic method. Especially useful are Nö th’s many references to the relevant literature on the topic.

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Chapter 5 Film and video Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms. —Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)

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he first successful “moving photographs” were made in 1877 by Eadweard Muybridge, a British photographer working in California. Muybridge took a series of photographs of a running horse, setting up a row of cameras with strings attached to their shutters. When the horse ran by, it broke each string in succession, tripping the shutters. Muybridge’s procedure influenced inventors in several countries to work toward developing devices for recording moving images. Among them was Thomas Edison who invented the first functional motion-picture camera in 1888 when he filmed fifteen seconds of one of his assistants sneezing. Shortly thereafter, in 1895, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiè re (1862–1954) and his brother Louis Jean Lumiè re (1864–1948) gave the first public showing of a cinematic film in a Paris café . Thus was born the technology and art of the motion picture, perhaps the most influential art form of the last one hundred or so years. If we live today in a “visually mediated” world—a world where visual images shape lifestyle and inculcate values—we owe it first and foremost to the movies. Visionbased and vision-enhancing media are so common that we hardly realize how intrinsic they have become to the modern-day mediascape. Photography, for instance, is the medium through which, by and large, we remember people, events, and things. Photographs capture a fleeting and irretrievable moment in time, extracting it from the flux of change that characterizes human life. Such “captured” moments have strong appeal because they allow us literally to reflect upon them by “re-seeing” them. The photographs that adorn the tables and walls in our homes are visual mementos and testimonials of who we are; so too are the Instagram photos that are posted online, proclaiming who we are and what we are involved in to the whole world. This reifying power of the photograph was brought out by Michelangelo Antonioni in his 1966 movie masterpiece, Blow-Up. The search for “clues” to a crime in a blow-up of a photograph in that movie constituted a metaphor for the search for clues to our own existence.

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At the level of the signifier, the film is a text consisting of a chain of images that create the illusion of real-life motion and action. At the level of the signified, movies are metaphorical mirrors of life. The topic of cinema is, clearly, a central one for media semiotics because movie genres constitute signification systems to which most people today respond and to which they look for recreation, inspiration, and insight at the level of the interpretant.

Motion pictures The three main categories of motion pictures are feature films, documentaries, and animated films, commonly called cartoons. The feature film is normally a work of fiction, almost always narrative in structure, which is produced in three stages. The pre-production stage is the period of time when the script is procured. The script may be an adaptation from a novel, short story, a play, or some other print work; it may also be something written specifically for the screen. The production stage is the period of time when the filming of the script occurs. Finally, the post-production (editing) stage is the phase when all the parts of the film, which have been shot out of sequence, are put together to make one cohesive story. The documentary is a nonfiction film depicting real-life situations with individuals often describing their feelings and experiences in an unrehearsed manner to a camera or an interviewer. Documentaries are frequently shot without a script and are rarely shown in theaters that exhibit feature films. They are seen regularly on television, however. Documentaries can be shot on location or simply assembled from archival material. Animation was originally the technique of using film to create the illusion of movement from a series of two-dimensional drawings or three-dimensional objects. The creation of an animated motion picture nearly always begins with the preparation of a storyboard, a series of sketches that portray the important parts of the story. Additional sketches are then prepared to illustrate backgrounds, dé cor, and the appearance and temperaments of the characters. Today, animated films are produced digitally on computers. Whereas in print fiction the author (or authors) can be easily identified as the writer-creator of the text, usually via a signature, in feature films the question of authorship is a much more complex one. In this case, there is both a screenwriter and a director who are responsible for creating the text and its artistic delivery. The function of screenwriters varies greatly with the type of film being produced. The screenwriter may be called upon to develop an idea or to adapt a novel, stage play, or musical to the special requirements of the screen. But the writer is not the key individual in the production of the film—

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that person is the director, the one who visualizes the script and guides the production crew and actors in carrying out that vision. In theory, the director has artistic control over everything from the script itself to the final cut of the film, although in reality various circumstances compromise the director’s absolute artistic authority. Nonetheless, it is the director’s sense of the creative visualization of the script that transforms it into a motion picture. The movie Amadeus is a case-in-point. This 1984 movie masterpiece was directed by Milos Forman (1932–2018). It is based on the 1979 play by British playwright Peter Shaffer (1926–2016) about the purported legendary eighteenth-century rivalry between Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Italian composer Antonio Salieri. The play plumbs the meaning of art, genius, and the important role of music in the spiritual life of human beings. The film captures these themes visually and acoustically by juxtaposing the emotionally powerful music of Mozart against the backdrop of dramatized events in his life and the truly splendid commentaries of Salieri, who guides the audience through the musical repertoire with remarkable insight and perspicacity as a narrator. Now, Forman’s close-ups, angle shots, tracking shots (which capture horizontal movement), and zooming actions allow us to literally see Mozart’s moods (his passions, his tragedies, etc.) on his face as he conducts or plays his music, as well as those of his commentator Salieri (his envy, his deep understanding of Mozart’s art, etc.) as he speaks to his confessor, having been imprisoned in an insane asylum for causing the death of Mozart. Forman thus blends music, plot, and commentary through brilliant camera artistry to create a truly effective mise-en-scè ne that is perceived as narrative, drama, musical performance, and historical docudrama at once. Forman’s cinematic touch is what delivers Shaffer’s message effectively, offering possibilities that the theatrical play could not do on its own. Interestingly, Shaffer comments in a postscript to the published version of the play (Shaffer 1993: 108) that the “cinema is a worrying medium for the stage playwright to work in. Its unverbal essence offers difficulties to anyone living largely by the spoken word. Increasingly, as American films grow ever more popular around the world, it is apparent that the most successful are being spoken in Screenspeak, a kind of cinematic Esperanto equally comprehensible in Bogotà and Bulaway.” Shaffer perceptively indicates, with this statement, that cinema has, in fact, introduced a new language into social discourse, which is based on a general mode of cinematic discourse across the world. Alongside the screenwriter and director is the musical composer. For many feature films, composers are assigned the task of creating a musical score to accompany scenes in the story. The composer works with the director to enhance the dramatic content of the individual scenes, since music can establish a mood as well as conjure up any number of emotions. For example,

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music can identify a person as being suspicious when there is nothing visible on the screen to suggest such a thing. Music can also function as a bridge from one scene to another in order to prepare the audience for an impending change of mood. One or two characters may also be associated with their own musical themes, either related to, or separate from, the main theme. Film music has, in effect, become a genre of its own and, in some cases, even eclipses the film itself. Combining images, narrative, and music, cinema creates representations that are among the most semiotically powerful ever devised by human ingenuity. Today, the images and sounds that movies project in a theater are overwhelming, thanks to digitization and new 3-D technologies. Digital effects have now become an intrinsic component in the production and editing of all movies. The first completely computer-generated film, Toy Story, was released in 1995. Now, such animated films are often more popular than films with human actors in them.

Early cinema Most cinema historians trace the origin of cinema as an artistic medium to the year 1896 when the French magician Georges Mé liè s made a series of films that explored the narrative potential of the new medium. In 1899, in a studio on the outskirts of Paris, Mé liè s reconstructed a ten-part version of the trial of French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, and in 1900 he filmed Cinderella in twenty scenes. He is chiefly remembered, however, for his clever fantasy A Trip to the Moon (1902), in which he exploited the new possibilities of the movie camera for portraying narrative visually. His short film was an instant hit with the public and was shown internationally. Although considered little more than a curiosity today, it remains a significant precursor of an art form that was barely in its infancy at the time. One year later, in 1903, American inventor Edwin S. Porter produced the first American silent movie, The Great Train Robbery, a twelve-minute film that greatly influenced the development of motion pictures, establishing many of cinema’s basic techniques—movement of the camera close to the action, the use of separate shots, and editing of the shots to cut back and forth among different actions to form a unified narrative. He used these techniques to shape a story, rather than present a simple visual narrative. With the release of D. W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), small theaters sprang up throughout the United States, and cinema emerged as a de facto mass medium of entertainment and engagement. Griffith introduced the close-up, with the camera emphasizing the actor’s emotions. His movie, a three-hour dazzling spectacle, stunned audiences and established cinema

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as a major medium. Yet the film’s racist ideology—especially its defense of white supremacy to protect racial purity—was controversial in its own time and remains repugnant to this day. Simply put, the movie is racist, but is still considered an essential part of movie history. Between 1915 and 1920, grandiose movie palaces were built throughout the United States and Europe. Hollywood started producing hundreds of films a year to satisfy an ever-increasing demand from a fanatical movie-going public. The vast majority of the films were Westerns, slapstick comedies, and romantic melodramas such as Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female (1919). By the mid-1920s, movie studios had become distraction factories themselves, taking people’s minds off daily problems. Movies were also perfect antidotes against boredom. The film medium had, in effect, emerged as a major component in the development of mass-mediated culture—a culture whose defining characteristic is an eclectic blending and mixing of the artistic and the diversionary. Despite the stylistic innovations introduced by Griffith and others, which made historical feature films highly popular, comedy emerged as the main staple of silent cinema. After the risqué  comedies of the early years, a new comic style called slapstick became popular. This boisterous, physical comedy was named for the stick wielded by clowns in Punch and Judy puppet shows. American Mack Sennett formed a new company, Keystone, in 1912 that played an important role in developing the genre. Sennett employed a host of talented comedians, the most notable of whom was English actor Charlie Chaplin. At Keystone, Chaplin developed his signature zany character. He then went on to direct, produce, write, and star in his own movie productions. By the First World War era, such classic short comedies as Easy Street (1917) and The Immigrant (1917) brought him international acclaim greater than that of any other movie performer. In the 1920s, he began making feature-length comedies, such as The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925). Chaplin’s comedy was firmly rooted in common life, and thus appealed to most audiences. Two other cinema comedians during the same era, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, diversified and enlarged the slapstick genre, portraying young men coping ludicrously with the conundrums of modern life. Actually, throughout the early era it was not Hollywood, but Germany, who had the strongest film industry, even as American films made inroads there. Filmmaking in Germany emphasized cinema as an art form, not a “distraction spectacle,” with particular attention paid to visual representation in itself, conveyed through lighting and set design. Director Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), with its disfigured sets and twisted narrative of a sleepwalking murderer who is controlled by a mysterious doctor, is an exemplar of early German cinematic art that is psychoanalytic and horrific at once. Other leading German filmmakers during the 1920s included Fritz

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Lang, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst. Lang’s films projected extraordinarily macabre visions of urban life and portentous ones of the future. His most famous silent film was Metropolis (1927), a stunning depiction of a futuristic city with railway bridges running between upper stories of skyscrapers, while workers toiled at huge machines underground. Murnau made works of deep psychological complexity, including the classic films Nosferatu (1922) and The Last Laugh (1924), the latter portraying the morbid thoughts of an aging doorman demoted to a washroom attendant. Pabst, who introduced films based on everyday reality, directed the macabre sexual tragedy Pandora’s Box (1928). In Russia, the works of filmmakers such as Sergey Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were far ahead of their time, posing challenging questions about the relationship between politics and art. Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) and October (1928) are still powerful testaments to human perseverance. Vertov produced persuasive documentaries, rather than feature films, developing montage as part of an evolving cinematic technology. Montage refers to the composition of images by juxtaposing or superimposing them in some way to create a rapid succession of different shots in a scene. In France, filmmakers introduced surrealism into moviemaking art—a form of representation that incorporates bizarre dream-like images in order to portray the grotesque nature of everyday reality. For example, Entr’acte (1924), directed by René  Clair, used early trick camera photography to produce surrealist images on the screen with animated designs and objects. In similar fashion, Fernand Lé ger made Le ballet mé canique (1924) and Marcel Duchamp Anemic Cinema (1926), both of which are penetrating representations of nightmares rather than surrealist dreams. A filmmaker who brought even more creative ambitions to the screen was Abel Gance, whose five-hour film Napolé on (1927) showed images in different combinations on three sideby-side screens. Filmmakers from other countries also produced important movies. Carl-Theodor Dreyer of Denmark directed The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), considered a classic for its unprecedented psychological realism. The Spaniards Luis Buñ uel and Salvador Dalí  produced a surrealist film, An Andalusian Dog (1929), which became famous for its unusual and disturbing imagery. The power of the new film medium caught everyone’s attention. Many nations sought to establish their own film production as a matter of importance to national culture, sometimes also placing quotas on film imports. Meanwhile, filmmakers were creating works outside their homeland or emigrating to take up their careers elsewhere. The incipient global village culled into existence by paper print technology in the Gutenberg Galaxy was given some of its contemporary finishing touches by the film medium in the Electronic Galaxy. The consequences for society of this proliferating new

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medium were much debated. Movie stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino were seen, admired, and imitated by millions. Censorship bodies tried to control the influence of films by editing them before exhibition, or by proposing rules and standards for producers to follow. Movies adopted genres from print and from previous spectacles, such as vaudeville. These included comedy, the Western, mystery, horror, romance, melodrama, and the war story—all stapes of pulp fiction and dime novels. Cinema came up with many of its own variations and combinations as, for example, the comedy-drama. The hallmark of the early cinematic genres was their familiarity—spectators could easily identify a genre since its story, character, setting, and costume conventions were highly predictable. The transition from silent to sound films was so rapid that many movies released in 1928 and 1929 had begun production as silent films but were hastily turned into “talkies,” as they were called, to meet the growing demand. The first talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in 1927, starring the legendary actor Al Jolson. However, it was with the release of Applause (1929), by American director Rouben Mamoulian, that the power of the talkie manifested itself to one and all. Mamoulian overlapped sound from different sources. The impressionistic effects he created contrasted with efforts to develop a natural or realistic standard for film sound. Gangster films and musicals dominated the new “talking screen” of the early 1930s. These created a great stir among politicians and self-appointed moral guardians, who believed that they had too much of an impact on audiences. As a consequence, the American politician and motion-picture executive William Harrison Hays established a Production Code (1930), as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (1922–45), which prescribed or proscribed the content of American films from 1930 to 1966. The vogue of filming novels reached a peak in the late 1930s with expensively mounted productions of classic novels, including one of the most popular films in motion-picture history, Gone with the Wind (1939).

The golden age Escaping from the dreariness of everyday life through motion pictures became a veritable pattern in the 1930s and 1940s—the period of time now called cinema’s “golden age.” Moreover, going to the movies was developing into much more than just a “night out,” but rather something that seemed strangely to unify people in a ritualistic way. People started naming their children after movie actors. The musical sound tracks of certain movies became popular on their own and were played on radio and sold through recordings. In the age of the Great Depression, a dime or a quarter would get you entry

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into a movie theater and a means to escape from reality and immerse yourself imaginatively into fantasy worlds. The golden age started with a cycle of classic horror films, including Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and The Mummy (1932), which spawned a series of sequels and spin-offs that lasted throughout the 1930s. One of the most enduring films of the decade was the musical fantasy The Wizard of Oz (1939), based on a book by L. Frank Baum (1856–1919), a children’s movie with a frightful theme that reflected the emerging cynicism of society at large—namely, that all human aspirations are ultimately make-believe, that the “Wizard” at the end of the “road of life” is really a fraud, a charlatan. The fun of living is getting to Oz, not finding out the truth about Oz. One American filmmaker who came to Hollywood from radio in 1940 was the writer-director-actor Orson Welles, who experimented with new camera angles and sound effects that greatly extended the representational power of film. His Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) influenced the subsequent work of virtually every major filmmaker in the world. Welles’ originality resulted from unusual techniques, such as maintaining deep focus (in which all objects in the sets, both near to and far from the camera, are in focus), employing low and high camera angles and long takes (periods of uninterrupted filming), as well as deploying sound and lighting as integral devices. The growing artistic value of cinema came to the forefront in the late 1940s, when Italian cineastes, such as Roberto Rossellini with Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica with The Bicycle Thief (1949), achieved an intimacy and depth of emotion that radically transformed motion pictures. Known as neorealism, the style was continued well into the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s which saw the release of such classic films as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1966), Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1963), and Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1959) and Red Desert (1964), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and 1900 (1977), and Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away (1975) and Seven Beauties (1976). Two genres that flourished with the coming of sound were gangster films and musicals. The gangster movie capitalized on public concern over increasing crime as well as the notoriety of famous criminal gang leaders. Little Caesar (1930) made actor Edward G. Robinson a star in the role of Italian-American Rico Bandello, and actor James Cagney won acclaim portraying Irish-American Tom Powers in The Public Enemy (1931). Musical films were a logical outcome of the advent of sound movies. They gained wide appeal after Warner Brothers released a series of musical movies that broke with stage conventions, filming large groups of dancers from multiple

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viewpoints to create unique cinematic spectacles. These included 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade (1933), choreographed by American Busby Berkeley. Perhaps the most popular cinematic musicals of all time were those that featured individual performers, in particular the dance team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in such films as Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1937). A pulp fiction genre that gained new vitality with the coming of sound was the horror film. The heavy voice of Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi gave new thrills to audiences in the vampire film Dracula (1931), directed by American Tod Browning. In Frankenstein (1931), by British-born filmmaker James Whale, actor Boris Karloff created a remarkably compassionate portrayal of the blundering monster brought to life by an ambitious scientist. In Britain, producer-director Alexander Korda made a worldwide impact with his film The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), starring Charles Laughton. Alfred Hitchcock directed thrillers and espionage films such as The 39 Steps (1935). Britain also developed a significant government-sponsored documentary film industry under the leadership of John Grierson. In France, there emerged a distinctive style of filmmaking called poetic realism, which focused on ordinary people struggling with the banality of their existence. Leading directors of the movement included Jean Vigo with L’atalante (1934) and Marcel Carné  with Daybreak (1939). However, the most versatile and prolific director was Jean Renoir, whose best-known works from the period include The Grand Illusion (1937) and Rules of the Game (1939). In Germany, Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst, leading directors of the silent period, made innovative early sound films—Lang with M (1931) and Pabst with Comradeship (1931). During the Second World War Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, and other Hollywood directors joined the armed forces and made war-related documentaries. Capra supervised the Why We Fight series (1942–45), seven films which sought to explain the reason for war, and Huston directed The Battle of San Pietro (1945), which depicted the grim consequences of warfare on the human spirit. Film animation gained enormous popularity during the golden age. Walt Disney made the first animated cartoon with synchronized sound, Steamboat Willie, in 1928. It was the third film to feature the popular Mickey Mouse character. Disney also pioneered the use of color animation, producing Flowers and Trees (1932), the first film released in the three-strip Technicolor process. He began making feature-length animated films in color with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Color was used in only a handful of films until the 1950s, when Hollywood turned more frequently to color in an effort to differentiate cinema from the increasingly popular medium of television, then available only in black and white. Further simplification and

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improvements in color technology meant that color movies had become the standard and black and white the exception by the 1960s.

Moviemaking after the Second World War The advent of television as a mass medium after the Second World War caused the greatest threat to the hegemony of the cinema. Although motion-picture attendance had begun to decline before television became widely available, the rapid spread of home television sets in the 1950s was accompanied by a steady decrease in movie-going that continued right into the 1960s. In an effort to offset television’s appeal, movie studios adopted new technologies—such as wide-screen and three-dimensional ones—that offered a more enticing screen image. These briefly stemmed attendance loss following their introduction in 1953, but they could not halt the longer-term transformation of the TV-mediated pop culture. Three-dimensionality, or 3-D, is achieved by recording multiple images through filters that direct light and require viewers to wear specially designed spectacles to observe the three-dimensional effects. The technology for 3-D actually goes back to the early period of cinema. But it did not catch on until the early 1950s. In 1954, dozens of 3-D films were released by Hollywood, featuring effects that were purported by movie trailers to “come off the screen right at you.” But the popularity of 3-D soon waned, and it quickly dropped from sight. It has been revived by blockbuster productions, such as Avatar, the new set of Star Wars films, and others. In the 1970s, cinema made a veritable comeback. No doubt, the “pop culture savvy” of such Hollywood directors as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg had a lot to do with this. Coppola directed a huge hit of the early 1970s, The Godfather (1972), a film that showed the first concrete signs of cinema’s revival. Lucas made American Graffiti (1973), a highly popular film about teenagers that looked back nostalgically to a previous era. Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), set in the ethnic milieu of New York City’s Little Italy neighborhood, garnered much interest and stimulated debate. After directing several small films, Spielberg, the youngest of the group, directed the film whose enormous success was to change the American movie landscape, Jaws (1975), virtually turning the blockbuster into a mainstream form of moviemaking. As a movie about a killer shark that terrorizes a small beach community, it became the model for a number of films in which fear-inspiring creatures threatened helpless victims. Many of these directors continued as important filmmakers following the 1970s revival. For example, Spielberg made a host of other multimillion-dollar blockbusters. With Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T.

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(1982), he capitalized on a widespread fascination with aliens, UFOs, and extraterrestrial life, fascination that was already evident in many pulp fiction magazines. His Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and the projected film Indiana Jones 5, are clever remakes of the serial cliff-hangers that were highly popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Most of Spielberg’s films rely on hightech special effects. His Jurassic Park (1993), for instance, featured frighteningly realistic computer-generated dinosaurs. Within the first four weeks of its release, it became the highest-grossing film up to that time, only to be surpassed by Titanic (1998) five years later. Other directors also helped to bring the film medium back to center stage in the postwar era. Woody Allen made wry urban comedies, such as the Academy Award–winning Annie Hall (1977); Michael Cimino won an Academy Award for The Deer Hunter (1978), a critically acclaimed cinematic exploration of the Vietnam War; and British director Ridley Scott made two highly significant films, Blade Runner (1982), a futuristic film praised for its visual effects and cyberpunk realism, and Thelma and Louise (1991), about two women on the run from a male-dominated society. He also directed the thriller Hannibal (2001), emphasizing the “humanity” that harbors even within heinous, twisted psychopaths. Blue Velvet (1986), directed by David Lynch, a surreal film set in a small American town, was ranked by critics as one of the top American films of the 1980s. Similarly ranked was Do the Right Thing (1989) by filmmaker Spike Lee, who also directed a biographical film about a militant and controversial African American leader of the 1960s, Malcolm X (1992). A highly polemical film examining American politics, JFK (1991), directed by Oliver Stone, claimed that a conspiracy among government officials lay behind the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Actor-director Clint Eastwood gained recognition as a major filmmaker with Unforgiven (1992), a Western that won Academy Awards for best picture and director. By the mid-1990s, movie-going had once again become the “thing to do” for vast audiences. Cinema had regained its status as a trendsetter. For instance, the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001), a martial arts fantasy set in nineteenth-century China, focused on three generations of warrior women, the youngest of whom could wipe out an army of male thugs without even sweating. The idea of a “feral woman,” however, is an ancient one, as can be seen, for example, in mythic characters such as Helen of Troy and Diana the huntress. At the same time that Hollywood regained its bearings, the cinematic traditions of other countries continued to flourish. One of the most distinctive and original directors to emerge in the post–Second World War international

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cinema stage was Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, who brought an intense philosophical and intellectual depth to cinema, treating the themes of personal isolation, sexual conflict, and religious obsession with stark cinematic imagery. In The Seventh Seal (1956) he probed the mystery of life and spirituality through the trials of a medieval knight playing a game of chess with death. In Wild Strawberries (1957) he highlighted the role of memory in the creation of Selfhood, using a series of poetic flashbacks through which an elderly professor reviewed and examined his life. He dissected the human condition starkly in a series of subsequent films—Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), and Autumn Sonata (1978)—which mocked the penchant in the human species to search for meaning to existence, like the absurdists in the theater and the nihilists and existentialists in philosophy. Italian cinema introduced the “on location” film—that is, the film that captured events in city streets and other authentic settings, rather than on studio lots—with post-synchronized sound (the dubbing of dialogue in the studio after filming) that made it possible to utilize a more fluid camera movement amid realistic surroundings. Director Luchino Visconti made what is often considered to be the first such film, Obsession (1942), during the war years. He was followed by Federico Fellini, who got his start in the neorealist movement as a scriptwriter, becoming a director in the 1950s. Fellini’s movies became influential worldwide, especially among filmmakers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, who saw his mold of cinema-making as an alternative to Hollywood’s dream and distraction factory and a means of making inexpensive films about their own histories and peoples. In late 1950s France, a similar type of movement, known as new wave, was spearheaded by Franç ois Truffaut, whose first feature The 400 Blows (1959) remains a classic of stark realism. Jean-Luc Godard challenged narrative conventions by utilizing “jump cuts,” gaps used for breaking the temporal continuity of a scene. His innovation signaled a desire among filmmakers to reconceptualize cinema, while at the same time paying homage to Hollywood. The most prolific and controversial among the postwar German directors was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who made nearly forty films over a thirteen-year career before his death in 1982. Fassbinder’s films dealt primarily with power and desire in sexual relationships. A significant aspect of the postwar German scene was the prominence of women filmmakers such as Helke Sander and Helma Sanders-Brahms, who approached history and modern life from a refreshing feminist viewpoint. In Britain, veteran directors such as Michael Powell, David Lean, and Carol Reed, as well as such newcomers as Laurence Olivier, contributed to an extraordinary period of creativity in British cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Lean won Hollywood awards for best picture and best director with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Karel

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Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963) and Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), emphasized social realism. Feminist directors such as Sally Potter, and filmmakers representing racially diverse and gay cultures, such as Isaac Julien and Derek Jarman, set British filmmaking apart from that of other countries in the 1980s and 1990s. In the same decades, Irish cinema started gaining attention, culminating in The Crying Game (1992) by Neil Jordan, which became an international hit. The period of glasnost in the 1980s led to the release in Russia of older films that the Soviet government had suppressed, as well as new films that dealt with the previously off-limits topics of politics and private life. With the end of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, some Russian filmmakers began to examine the burdens of their recent social experiment. Eastern European countries too started gaining international prestige with their cinematic art, and continue to receive international attention to this day. Poland was perhaps the first to make its mark internationally with the films of Andrzej Wajda. The Czech Republic produced its own new wave cinema with such directors as Milos Forman and Jirí  Menzel. In the former Yugoslavia, filmmaker Dusan Makavejev gained prominence with Man Is Not a Bird (1966). In Hungary, Mikló s Jancsó , gained worldwide attention with his meticulously choreographed Red Psalm (1972), a work in the form of a folk ballet depicting historical events. In Romania, Lucien Pintilie made The Oak (1992) and other films about the region’s recent history that captured wide audiences across the globe. International recognition for the film culture of Japan came after 1945, beginning with acclaim for Japanese directors Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro, and Kurosawa Akira, who are acknowledged as leading filmmakers of the 1950s. Ozu made intricate, intimate films representing the pitiable aspects of domestic life. In the 1960s, Japan had its own new wave movement with the films of Oshima Nagisa, Imamura Shohei, and Shinoda Masahiro. Starting in the 1930s, filmmaking in India was perceived primarily as a musical art. In a country with dozens of major languages, film music reached across linguistic barriers. Cinema performers gained celebrity from follow-up recordings and radio broadcasts of their music. The first Indian filmmaker to break from this and be appreciated internationally as a cinema stylist was Satyajit Ray. The Indian film industry is the largest in the world, called Bollywood. It is one of the most versatile, artistically. In China, filmmaking became an important art form in the 1980s. A new generation of directors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tian Zhuangzhuang, led the way toward the establishment of an indigenous Chinese cinematic art form. They did this by breaking with the tradition of studio filmmaking—going to rural China to make films of daily life there.

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The English-speaking nations of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand had difficulty establishing their own film cultures after the war, because American and British films filled their theaters. But things changed gradually. In Canada, filmmakers Chantal Akerman, David Cronenberg, and Atom Egoyan won international acclaim for their cinematic art. In Australia, Peter Weir earned acclaim for Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1977), Fred Schepisi for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Gillian Armstrong for My Brilliant Career (1979), and Bruce Beresford for Breaker Morant (1980). Although Egypt and a few other Arab and African countries had produced films for decades previously, filmmaking began to develop broadly after the 1960s, following the withdrawal of European colonial powers. Egyptian cinema experienced a surge as political changes made it possible for filmmakers such as Youssef Chahine to produce social commentaries in a neorealist style. In some parts of Africa, the importance and role of indigenous cinema grew steadily from the mid-1960s onward. For example, African filmmaker Ousmane Sembé ne of Senegal, a novelist turned film director, became a leading director with movies such as La noire (1966), the first African feature film gaining wide acclaim. Other important African filmmakers to emerge included Souleymane Cisse of Mali and Idrissa Ouedraogo of Burkina Faso. A prominent film movement, known as cinema novo (“new cinema”), took a foothold in Brazil with works that dramatized the nation’s social issues. Directors Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos made powerful films set in remote regions of the country depicting the dire dehumanizing effects of systemic poverty. In Cuba, filmmakers Tomá s Gutié r rez Alea and Humberto Solas made films that challenged the status quo with regard to human rights and the role of women in society. In Mexico, Paul LeDuc’s Frida (1983), which dramatized the life of painter Frida Kahlo, and Alfonso Arau’s Como agua para chocolate (1991) became highly popular both within and outside Mexico, as works blending realistic detail with elements of fantasy and magic.

Cinema in the twenty-first century By the end of the 1990s, the influx of movies from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and elsewhere attracted increasingly larger American audiences. Independent movie production also started to gain widespread popularity. Independent directors included Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, 1994), the Coen brothers (Fargo, 1996), and John Sayles (Lone Star, 1996). New channels of distribution (cable television, video, early mobile devices)

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resulted in an increased variety of films from across the globe. Although Hollywood maintained its dominance, filmmaking had evolved into a truly global art in the ever-expanding Digital Galaxy. The indie films started out very modestly, but are now common. The term referred at first to movie producers who resisted being controlled by the Motion Picture Patents Company. Its meaning has changed, however, generally alluding to filmmaking style that is more engaging as opposed to Hollywood’s flashy and expensive moviemaking style. Indie producers use low-budget sets, cast, and crew to create films with a more artistic focus, rather than with pure entertainment value. Indie productions, ironically, have become profitable, with their own festivals, the Sundance Film Festival being the most notable one, which introduced famous and crossover directors to the world of cinema, including Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Digital technologies started making an impact on moviemaking, as did techniques simulating reality television (using a roving camera). The first popular movie to do so was The Blair Witch Project (1999). Three film students set out into the Black Hills Forest to make a documentary on the legendary Blair Witch with a 16-millimeter camera, a video camera, and a DAT recorder. With these they capture every word and sound. After wandering around the forest, the three become lost and mysteriously hunted. They were never to be seen again. A year later, a bag full of film cans, DAT tapes, and videotapes were found. The video footage makes the movie seem truly real and very scary. As for the adoption of themes and social realities, movies continue to play a significant role in the Digital Galaxy. They continue to be the source for the recycling of myth. An example is the set of Harry Potter films, which were very popular with children and parents throughout the new millennium. There were seven movies (based on the novels by J. K. Rowling), cast in chronological order, with the characters aging in tandem with their audiences. In this case, audience members and movie (book) characters experienced the coming-of-age period dynamically together. With sorcery, magic, heroism, and various other elements the Harry Potter movies and books garnered a huge cult following of children and adults. To this day, there are fan clubs for the series throughout the world, with blogs, fan sites, podcasts, and even symposia and conferences where the fans can meet and exchange ideas and memorabilia. The podcasts called MuggleCast and PotterCast are still popular. Explanations for the popularity of the series have been varied, but most converge on the idea that they are consistent with the ancient fables and legends such as the Arthurian ones, all of which tap into the childhood imagination and sense of fantasy. The Harry Potter films, among many others, constitute what cineastes label blockbusters, movies that earn a large amount of revenue or are sensationalis-

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tic, with famous movie actors and elaborate movie sets. Two directors associated historically with the blockbuster are Cecil B. De Mille (1881–1959) and Steven Spielberg (b. 1947). De Mille introduced the blockbuster with his spectacular historical and biblical epics, including Joan the Woman (1916), The Ten Commandments (1923), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Cleopatra (1934), and Samson and Delilah (1949). As mentioned, Spielberg’s movie Jaws (1975), a thriller based on Peter Benchley’s novel of the same name showed Hollywood that an important segment of movie audiences was made up of young people. Blockbusters are now common. Blockbuster style has become an unconscious pattern in major movie production. As a final word on the history of cinema, it should be pointed out that cinema is at a crossroads, with no one being really sure where it will be going. As for audio (musical) media, today YouTube allows anyone to upload a selfmade movie and gain an audience for it. However, as in the case of indie music this does not guarantee popularity. The online medium is becoming basically an audition locus for aspiring artists, directors, actors, scriptwriters, and the like to gain access to viewers. With free Internet distribution the DIY age of filmmaking, like that of music production, may be changing the way in which movies are made and received radically.

Video The late 1980s saw a revolution in the way people viewed movies, with major releases being made available for home video viewing almost immediately after they left the movie theater. This development, combined with the advent of cable television featuring relatively current films on special channels, seemed to threaten the long-term survival of movie theaters and created a climate of uneasiness in movie studios throughout the world similar to that of the early 1950s, when television began to challenge the hegemony of motion pictures. As a result, film companies started increasingly favoring large spectacle movies with fantastic special effects in the hope of luring the public away from home videos and back to the big screen. But their fears turned out to be unfounded. As in the early days of cinema, going to the movies is still perceived as a communal event, something that is to be shared with others, albeit in a strangely silent and uncommunicative way. Being at a movie theater is a social act. So, despite the challenge from video technologies, from DVDs to streaming sites, HBO, and Netflix, the traditional movie theater has remained stable as a site for movie viewing. The first home videotape player to be sold was the Beta machine invented by the Sony Corporation in the late 1970s. The popularity of that device was quickly eclipsed by the VHS videotape format, introduced into the market

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through clever advertising by the Radio Corporation of America, becoming the industry standard. The videocassette recorder (VCR), with its capacity to play prerecorded videotapes that were rented or purchased at video shops, and to record programs shown on television for later playback, made an inevitable dint at first in movie-going. So too, as mentioned, did the cable television systems that spread broadly at about the same time, vastly expanding the number of channels available to the home viewer and providing access to recent movies via a pay-TV format. As these new technologies came into widespread use, movie studios were understandably worried. But, as mentioned above, it was all for naught. The studios had forgotten a major lesson of cinematic history—being in a movie theater with a real audience is part of the whole communal effect that cinema is intended to create. As it has turned out, the advent of video actually fostered a much wider audience for movies. All kinds of films, past and present, are now available to the home viewer with a click on a screen. With cable networks and other media for movie viewing (e.g., Netflix) a substantial increase in independent-film production has ensued. The digital video discs (DVDs), invented in the 1990s, and then streaming and other viewing modalities in the 2010s, all have stimulated even more interest in movies. Because they make it possible to enjoy movies in the home or elsewhere on a computer or mobile device, with all the technological splendor offered by movie theaters (given the right equipment), they are entrenching movies even more so into the mediascape. Another source of competition for the viewer’s attention has come from the role-playing video game. Video games are contemporary descendants of pinball machines, in which small metal balls are shot across a sloping board, with the object being to score points by striking various targets. Pinball machines played significant roles in various aspects of pop culture. Their importance was emphasized by The Who’s 1969 rock opera Tommy in which skill at pinball shakes the main character, Tommy, who had become catatonic, out of his state, transforming him into a hero, gaining him fame and fortune. One of the first well-known role-playing video games, set in an imaginary world based loosely on medieval myth, was Dungeons and Dragons, invented by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. It started the role-playing video game craze and subculture of subsequent decades. The movie Mazes and Monsters (1982), starring Tom Hanks, is when this game genre first made its filmic appearance. In the mid-1980s, Japanese companies, such as the Nintendo Corporation, improved the technology, introducing popular games such as Donkey Kong and the Super Mario Brothers. Since then a veritable “video game culture” has mushroomed into a very profitable media industry, as can be seen by the Poké mon phenomenon—a franchise founded by Satoshi Tajiri in 1995, based on fictional creatures called “Poké mon” which human

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beings try to capture and train to fight each other for sport. The franchise started in the form of two video games—“Game Boy” and “Game Freak,” catching on broadly throughout the world. Today, the franchise includes not only video games, but TV shows, comic books, card games, toys, and other artifacts. Role-playing video games are fantasy-manufacturing devices, with players pretending to be part of an adventure. Each game develops its own rules and each participant plays a specific role or character, called an avatar, in the scenario. Occult and horror themes are basic components of the adventure. The increase in the popularity of online games has produced many subgenres, such as multiplayer online role-playing games. Video gaming provides, in effect, a new format for the adventure story, in which the make-believe element is in the hands of the players, who are the scriptwriters, actors, and directors at once. The narrative that develops is, clearly, an open one, as Umberto Eco called texts whose interpretations or outcomes are not predictable, adding to its appeal. The division between the imaginary and the real is thus blurred, producing a simulacrum effect.

Cinema and postmodernism Most feature films are, essentially, visual narratives. This is why, according to some cinema semioticians (e.g., Metz 1974), they can be viewed as having the same structural features of language. In my opinion, this is true only in part. It is more accurate to say that the cinematic text expands the categories of language by blending dialogue, music, scenery, and action in a cohesive way. For this reason, it can be characterized as a composite textual form made up of verbal and nonverbal signifiers. Its composite nature is what makes cinematic representation powerful. A detective movie, for instance, is made up of dialogue between the actors. The narration of the action unfolds through camera shots, montage, and other types of cinematic techniques. Music may be added to emphasize dramatic and emotional aspects of the text. Together, the experience of the text is synesthetic, blending different sensory modalities. Because of its emotional effectiveness it has become perhaps the most important visual-artistic medium of the last one hundred or so years, constituting both a channel for escapism and a maker and promoter of philosophical and intellectual trends. This facet of cinema was dramatized in 1988 by a movie about movies and their crucial role in shaping the modern world. It was called Cinema Paradiso (in Italy Nuovo Cinema Paradiso), directed by the then-emerging Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, a movie that ends with one of the most

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heart-wrenching scenes in cinema history. The protagonist, Totò , who as a boy in the 1950s used to love going to his small-town movie theater, called Cinema Paradiso, and helping out the projectionist Alfredo is left a package by Alfredo, after his death. He goes back to the small village of his youth as a famous director, and is welcomed by those who still are alive to remember him. Totò  opens the package back home in Rome and finds in it all the forbidden kissing scenes that were censored by the kindly and well-meaning parish priest of his childhood. The scene is accompanied by the wistful music of Ennio Morricone, recalling the kindness of Alfredo and his love for Totò . The forbidden kiss is thus transformed into a nostalgic symbol of a simpler and more naï ve time, now almost forgotten, as is the Cinema Paradiso of his childhood. One of the most significant philosophical-artistic trends that cinema helped promote is postmodernism, which spread throughout society as a mind-set after several key movies, including Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, and Koyaanisqatsi, which will be discussed below.

Postmodernism Postmodernism did not originate in cinema. Its beginnings can be traced to the theater of Irish-born playwright and novelist, Samuel Beckett (1906–89)—a leading figure of the movement known as the theater of the absurd. In his novels and plays, Beckett focused on the wretchedness of existence, exposing the essential frightfulness of human consciousness, which he ultimately reduced to an inner and solitary sense of Self. His late 1940s play, Waiting for Godot, is a remarkable work of “proto-postmodern” drama. People reacted strongly to the play, becoming an instant classic of the theater soon after its debut on television in 1961. Waiting for Godot appeals to the modern imagination because, like the two tramps in it, many people have become skeptical about the presence of any “purpose” to human existence. The play challenges the age-old belief that there is a “meaning to life,” insinuating instead that all our meaning structures and systems (language, religious concepts, etc.) are no more than illusory screens we have set up to avoid the “truth”—that life is an absurd moment of consciousness on its way to extinction. But despite its nihilism, people seem paradoxically to discover “meaning” in Beckett’s play. The tramps in this masterpiece are perpetually waiting for a character named Godot—a name coined in obvious satirical reference to God. Godot never comes in the play. But deep inside us, as audience members, we yearningly hope that Beckett is wrong, and that on some other stage, in some other play, the design of things will become known to us—that Godot will indeed come. That is the ambiguity and paradox of the human

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condition that postmodern art explores. It is a highly absurdist, nihilistic, and ironic form of representation that attacks traditions and value systems as concoctions of human fancy, rather than as systems reflecting a mysterious purpose. But in so doing, it forces us nonetheless to think about the very systems it decries. The term postmodernism is rarely applied to Beckett’s play for the simple reason that it was coined by architects after the play in the 1960s to designate an architectural movement that rejected the earlier modernist style (characterized by the building of monolithic corporation skyscrapers and tall apartment buildings) that had degenerated into sterile and monotonous formulas, reintroducing traditional and classical elements. Postmodern architects called for greater individuality, complexity, and eccentricity in design, while also demanding acknowledgment of historical precedent and continuity. Shortly after its adoption in architecture, the notion of postmodernism started to catch on more broadly, becoming a catchphrase for a more general movement in philosophy and the arts. But Beckett’s play clearly anticipates the whole postmodern movement in the arts. To understand the roots of this movement it is instructive to step back in time to the origins of modernism—the belief that science was the means for answering life’s great questions. Modernism can be traced to the Renaissance. It received its greatest impetus after the Enlightenment, known also as the “age of reason.” In the nineteenth century, the dizzying growth of technology and the constantly increasing certainty that science could eventually solve all human problems further entrenched modernism into cultural groupthink. At mid-century, Charles Darwin (1809–82) introduced the scientific notion of natural selection, which posed a serious challenge to traditional religious worldviews. By the end of the century, the now famous assertion that “God is dead,” by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), expressed in a nutshell the radical change in worldview that modernism had brought about in society. Postmodernism in philosophy and the arts is a reaction to the modernist perspective. In postmodernism, nothing is for certain, and even science and mathematics are seen as constructs of the fertile human imagination, as subject to its vagaries as are the arts. The essence of postmodern technique in all the arts was, and continues to be, irony and parody of the modernist belief in scientific certainty on the one side, and the blind faith of religious people on the other. The technique has been expanded to encompass destructive critiques of modernist society itself. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1992: vii–viii) has perceptively remarked, postmodernism constitutes “a state of mind marked above all by its all-deriding, all-eroding, all-dissolving destructiveness.”

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Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner In no other art form did postmodern technique find such a welcoming home as the cinema. One of the first movies designed in a postmodern way was Stanley Kubrick’s (1928–1999) cinematic masterpiece of 1971, A Clockwork Orange. The setting for the movie is Britain in the future. A teenage thug, Alex De Large, lives a life of crime and sex in a wanton and reckless fashion. Caught and imprisoned for murder, he volunteers to undergo an experimental shock treatment therapy designed to brainwash him to become nauseated by his previous lifestyle. However, Mr. Alexander, one of Alex’s victims, traps him with the aim of avenging himself. He hopes to drive Alex to commit suicide ironically to the strains of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. But Alex is supported by the media and soon after he is released and restored to health through therapy. The movie ends in typical postmodern fashion with no true resolution. But the scenario of senseless, aimless violence that a teenager is capable of perpetrating is a horrifying portrait of contemporary life. Alex is a goalless and ruthless person trapped in a weary, decaying environment. His only way out is through intimidation and physicality. He is a “ticking timebomb” ready to explode at any instant. Alex feels an acute and urgent need to change—indeed to “save”—the world. But he does not know what to save it from. The film’s fragmented images of life on the streets reinforce Alex’s overall view that reality is illusory, thus bolstering the movie’s subtext that life is absurd, without a purpose, and that human actions are a montage of illusory ready-made stories with no real substance behind them, concocted simply to help us wait for our inevitable extinction and return to nothingness. Some of the movie’s scenic techniques were emulated by Ridley Scott in his 1982 masterpiece, Blade Runner, based on a science-fiction story titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1928–82). The movie still attracts considerable interest from movie aficionados. Before discussing the movie, it is necessary to discuss briefly the science-fiction genre itself. The genre deals typically with the effects of science or future events on human beings. Although it has ancient roots—for example, in his True History (160 BCE) Lucian of Samosata described a trip to the moon; the seventeenth-century British prelate and historian Francis Godwin also wrote of travel to the moon; and the English statesman Sir Thomas More wrote about a futuristic world in Utopia (1516)—science fiction as we now know it traces its origins to the period after the Industrial Revolution when, in her novel Frankenstein (1818), the British novelist Mary Shelley explored the potential of science and technology for doing good or evil. Right after the

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publication of her novel, the science-fiction genre emerged as a new form of popular reading, becoming entrenched in pulp fiction generally right after. The first writer to specialize in the new genre was French author Jules Verne (1828–1905). His highly popular novels included Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). The first major English writer of science fiction was H. G. Wells (1866–1946), whose Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1898) became classics the instant they were published. In the twentieth century the popularity of science fiction grew with the publication of Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley (1894–63) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) by George Orwell (1903–50), with the advent of movies such as Mé liè s’ A Trip to the Moon (1902), and with the rise of TV science-fiction programs such as The Twilight Zone (1959–64, revived 1985– 87), Lost in Space (1965–68), Star Trek (1966–69), Dr. Who (1961–91), and The X-Files (1993–2002). The movie Blade Runner was scripted in a 1980s style of science-fiction writing known as cyberpunk. The target of cyberpunk writers was dehumanized societies dominated by technology and science. Blade Runner deals with the following typical cyberpunk theme: What if we could bring machines to life? What would they be like? Would they be more “human” than humans? Against the depressing backdrop of a contemporary decaying urban landscape, Rick Deckard is one of a select few futuristic law-enforcement officers, nicknamed “blade runners,” who have been trained to detect and track down “replicants,” powerful humanoid robots who have been engineered to do the work of people in space. But the replicants have gone amok. They have somehow developed the mental characteristics of humans, such as self-awareness and abstract consciousness, and have started to ask fundamental philosophical questions about their own existence, made all the more urgent by the limited lifespan programmed into them. A desperate band of these killer replicants has made its way back to earth seeking to have their programs changed. They are looking desperately for the sinister corporate tycoon responsible for their creation so that he can reprogram them to extend their life eternally. Deckard’s assignment is to track down these runaway humanoid creatures and terminate them. His search takes place in an urban wasteland where punk mutants control the streets while the pathetic inhabitants of endless blocks of gloomy highrises remain glued to their TV sets. Deckard relies on a videocassette recorder (VCR), complete with stop action and precision image-enhancers, to find the replicants through dark alleys abandoned to the forces of anarchy. The method used by Deckard to identify a suspect as being either “human” or “replicant” is reminiscent of the classic Turing test used by artificial intelligence (AI) theorists. The brilliant British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–54)

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suggested, shortly before his untimely death in the early 1950s, that one could program a computer in such a way that it would be virtually impossible to discriminate between its answers and those contrived by a human being. His notion has become immortalized as the Turing test. It goes somewhat like this. Suppose a human observer is placed in a room that hides a programmed computer on one side and, on the other, another human being. The computer and hidden human being can only respond to questions in writing on pieces of paper which are passed back and forth from the observer to the computer and human being through slits in the wall. If the observer cannot identify, on the basis of the written responses, who is the computer and who the human being, then the observer must conclude that the machine is “intelligent.” It has passed the Turing test. Deckard’s detection technique is similar, but ultimately rejects the validity of the Turing test, because he focuses on the reactions of his interviewee’s eyes, which convey humanness or lack thereof. The replicants and the various mannequins seen in the movie are icons of human anatomy. One of the replicants is even killed ironically by a mannequin. Human-like toys are also seen from time to time. But there is one feature that differentiates human anatomy from artificially made anatomies—the eye. Replicants use their “eyes” exclusively to see; humans use them as well to show feeling. Aware of the mysterious power of the human eye, the replicants kill their maker by poking out his eyes. Interestingly, we are never sure throughout the movie if Deckard is a human or a replicant himself, since the camera never provides a close-up of his eyes. In this postmodern scenario the replicants, paradoxically, are more “human” than the human characters. Deckard even falls in love with one of them, Rachel, whose name has obvious intertextual connections with the biblical character of the same name. She helps him track down his prey, falling in love with him. The film makes many other references to the Bible. For example, near the end, a naked replicant Roy, with only a white cloth around his waist, in obvious allusion to the Crucifixion scene, saves Deckard’s life at the cost of his own. The white dove that appears when Roy “expires” is reminiscent of the dove that was sent to Noah’s Ark in the midst of torrential rain to help the ark find a safe place away from the deluge—a symbolic quest for a safer future. That is, in fact, what happens right after Roy’s demise, as Deckard and Rachel escape the gruesome city scene into the countryside. The dark, gloomy postmodern atmosphere suddenly clears up, the sun comes out, and a “new dawn” rises. These are images that call to mind the Garden of Eden scene. For the sake of historical accuracy, however, it should be mentioned that this was not the original ending of the movie, but one that the producers insisted upon. Nevertheless, it resonates as much as the director’s cut version. Blade Runner asks the fundamental questions of philosophy in a new way: What is a human being? What is real? Is there any meaning to existence? By

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making the replicants the iconic simulacra of human beings, and by transforming their struggle to survive and to know who they are into a reflection of our own struggle, the movie is about the nature and meaning of human life. A sequel directed by Denis Villeneuve was released in 2017, titled Blade Runner 2049, in which a blade runner, named K, discovers a secret that has the potential of plunging humankind into total chaos, from where it presumably emerged. This leads him on a quest to find the original blade runner, Rick Deckard, who has been missing for thirty years. The movie is interesting on two counts. First, it resurrects the future, so to speak, by bringing it to the present. In a way, it provides a final chapter to the Blade Runner saga. More importantly is the date in the title, 2049, which is highly suggestive of computer engineer Ray Kurzweil’s (2005) prediction that a technological “singularity” will occur around that date, when the replicants will have won after all. The singularity is Kurzweil’s term for the moment when AI will pass the Turing test, achieving levels of intelligence that might even surpass human levels. Kurzweil has set the date for the singularity as 2045. So the movie takes place four years after, when replicants will have had their revenge at last. We will return to the concept of the singularity subsequently. Suffice it to say here that Villeneuve’s movie is an imaginative revisitation of the original Blade Runner. The replicants in the movie are again seeking to become respected on the same level as humans. K finds Deckard’s daughter, presumably half replicant (Rachel), half human (Deckard), or more than likely completely replicant (since Deckard might be a replicant himself). The future looks uncertain, begging the question: What will become of a cybernetic world in which humans and machines share the same life space? The Blade Runner movies are actually experiments in post-humanism, rather than strictly postmodernism. This is a term used broadly to refer to an era in which humans no longer dominate the world but instead have merged with their machines and with animals to create a new world order that pits humans not at the center but as equal partners with other intelligences (artificial and animal). The term actually has five general meanings (Haraway 1991): ll

It refers to an opposition to traditional humanism, or the view that humans are makers of their own world, not subject to external metaphysical forces, and thus are at the center of the universe. In post-humanism, humans are just small organic particles in the overall scheme of things.

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It refers not only to a need to move beyond archaic concepts of human nature, but also to a need to evolve a society that includes nonhumans, including other species and machines.

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It refers to the world of virtual communications in cyberspace, where relations between humans can unfold totally in such a space and thus through simulation. Thus, a new definition of reality is required.

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It refers to a philosophical movement aiming to obliterate all traditional distinctions through technology.

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It refers to a critical strain of philosophy aiming to attack all traditional notions of religiosity and spirituality.



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Koyaanisqatsi American director Godfrey Reggio’s brilliant 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi is both an exemplar of postmodern technique in cinema and a scathing critique of contemporary urban society. It is a film without words that unfolds through a series of discontinuous images. On the one hand, this emphasizes how disjointed the contemporary world has become. On the other hand, it is an example of what postmodern art is like—a parody of documentary-style films and TV programs. The film has no characters, plot, dialogue, or commentary—in a word, nothing recognizable as a narrative. The camera juxtaposes contrasting images of cars on freeways, atomic blasts, litter on urban streets, people shopping in malls, housing complexes, buildings being demolished, and so on. We see the world as the camera sees it. And it is a turgid, gloomy world with no purpose or apparent meaning whatsoever. People walk in crowds or perform routine tasks, like mindless creatures. To emphasize the insanity and absurdity of this world, Reggio incorporates the mesmerizing music of Philip Glass (1937–) into his cinematic text. The music acts as a guide to understanding the images, interpreting them melodically and rhythmically. We can “feel” the senselessness of human actions in such a world in the contrasting melodies and rhythms of Glass’ music. His slow rhythms tire us with their heaviness, and his prestissimi—which accompany a demented chorus of singers chanting in the background—assault our senses. When this musical-imagistic frenzy finally ends, we feel an enormous sense of relief. In a certain sense, the whole film can be conceived as a musical sonata with an opening part, or exposition, a middle developmental section, and a final recapitulation with coda. The film starts off with a glimpse into a vastly different world—the world of the Hopi peoples of Arizona and other areas of the American Southwest. This is a world firmly implanted in a holistic mythical view of existence—a view that does not separate human achievement from nature. Glass’ choral music in this exposition is spiritual, sacred, and profound. It inspires reverence for human spirituality. This stands in dark contrast to the development of the filmic sonata, which consists of a cornuco-

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pia of dissonant images of a decaying, senseless, industrialized world. Then, we are taken back, at the end, to the Hopi world. As in any recapitulation, the opening profound strains of the choir come back, hauntingly, awesomely, and with a warning this time (the coda) which is projected onto the screen: koyaanisqatsi (from the Hopi language) 1. crazy life, 2. life in turmoil, 3. life out of balance, 4. life disintegrating, 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

We are left, in this way, with no resolution and no blockbuster ending. The movie presents a bleak portrait of the contemporary world in cinematic language without words. Like Waiting for Godot, we leave the theater without any catharsis, as Aristotle called the “purging effects” of a great play. As social critic Jean-Franç ois Lyotard (1984: xxiv) states, postmodernism impugns the status quo because it shows that the “narrative function is losing its functors, its great heroes, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.” However, in making modern-day humanity more aware of its illusory past, it has concomitantly engendered a kind of ahistoricity and nihilism that is of little value to the progress of the human species. Postmodern cinema is powerful because it is critical and reflective. But ultimately, the human spirit cries out for something more emotionally satisfying, something more poetic. Indeed, today movies such as Koyaanisqatsi are rarely being produced. Nevertheless, postmodernism has left its mark in cinema. Thrillers and mystery stories now dominate the movie-going scene, and most of these use cinematic techniques that are reminiscent of Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner. So, while postmodernism may have run its course as a widespread artistic movement, it has left many residues. One example of its legacy is The Matrix (1999), a truly brilliant science-fiction narrative that struck a resounding chord with young audiences brought up in a rapidly expanding Digital Galaxy. The movie exposes the artificial world of the computer screen, with intertextual allusions to the Bible. It critiques those “technophiles” who are totally engrossed in their “e-lives.” The “computer nerds” rule—implies the movie—but what kind of world have they generated? The search for a higher state of consciousness, free of objects, is ultimately what satisfies humanity.

Cinema genres Early filmmakers drew upon novels, vaudeville, the circus, and pulp fiction for their film scripts. But they also created their own genres that still greatly influence film production. Current films, television series, made-for-TV

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movies, miniseries, and even new forms of video and multimedia productions often follow the genre formulas of traditional cinema. The signification system that undergirds how we extract meaning from movies is the aim of cinema semiotics. Movies allow us to interconnect crime stories, mysterious happenings, romance and sex, and many more things that make up social reality through the camera’s ever-probing eye. Overall, cinema is an overarching syntext, as it has been called here. Its many genres provide snapshots of the human mind and human reality, giving it a coherent structure through exposure to the diversity of the genres themselves. Like all fiction, however, each single genre has its own narremes and outcomes that are ensconced in the cinema medium.

The main genres The most popular film genres of today derive their ancestry from the early and golden age eras of filmmaking. Some of the popular early films include the following: ll

Crime Drama: such as Little Caesar (1930)

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Sci-fi: such as A Trip to the Moon (1902)

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Animation: such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

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Comedy: such as It Happened One Night (1934)

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Character Drama: such as Citizen Kane (1941)

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Historical Drama: such as Intolerance (1916)

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Documentaries: such as Nanook of the North (1922)

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Detective Movies: such as The Maltese Falcon (1941)

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Suspense Movies: such as M (1931)

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Monster Movies: such as King Kong (1933)

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Horror Films: such as Nosferatu (1922) and Dracula (1931)

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Musicals: such as Flying Down to Rio (1933) and The Wizard of Oz (1939)

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War Films: such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and Wings (1931)

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Action-Adventure: such as Thief of Baghdad (1921)

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Film Noir: such as Double Indemnity (1944)

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Westerns: such as The Great Train Robbery (1903)

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Romances: such as The Sheik (1921)

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Melodrama: such as The Perils of Pauline (1914)

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Starting in the 1950s, Hollywood updated its repertoire of genres by appropriating social themes that were becoming relevant at the time, some of which have remained intrinsic to moviemaking. From the adolescent-oriented beach party movies to current slasher, jackass, and chick flicks, the movies have shown an uncanny ability to create new genres to suit current tastes based on social trends and patterns. Slasher movies, like the Friday the Thirteenth series of movies, reveal a modern-day fascination with serial killers and with crime in general; jackass movies (comedies that portray individuals, especially young males, as idiotic) show a current fascination with moronic humor; and chick flicks (such as the Bridget Jones Diary and Sex and the City movies), which deal with the plight of modern women, tap into a general social trend that highlights the consequences of women having achieved liberation. The latter genre constitutes a new filmic locus for women to come to grips with their new sense of freedom. In contrast to the fantasy world of the feminine-directed romance films, the chick flick assails the traditional view of women as passive beings. Among the cinema genres that gained popularity after the golden era, the following can be mentioned: ll

Youth Rebellion: The Wild One (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

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Adventure/spy: the James Bond movies

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Intrigue: the Mission Impossible movies, The Da Vinci Code (2006)

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Romantic Comedies: Pillow Talk (1959), You’ve Got Mail (1998)

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New Science Fiction: The Matrix (1999)

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Slasher: Friday the Thirteenth (1980), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), the Saw movies

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Pop Music: Jailhouse Rock (1957), A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Spice World (1998)

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Martial Arts: the Bruce Lee movies

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Rap Movies: 8 Mile Road (2002), Barbershop (2004)

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African American: Superfly (1972), Boyz in the Hood (1991), Black Panther (2018)

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Hispanic: El Mariachi (1992)

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Coming-of-age: The Breakfast Club (1985)

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Antiwar: Apocalypse Now (1979)

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Sword and Sorcery: Conan the Barbarian (1982), Lord of the Rings movies (2001–03), the Harry Potter movies (2000–07)

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Disaster: The Towering Inferno (1974), The Perfect Storm (2000)

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Apocalyptic: Lost Souls (2000), Left Behind (2001)

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Fear: Jaws (1975), Jurassic Park (1993)

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Dumb-jackass: Dumb and Dumber (1994) and Jackass II (2006)

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Chick Flicks: the Bridget Jones’ Diary movies

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Feral Women Movies: Lara Croft (2001), Wonder Woman (2017)

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Superhero Movies: Superman movies, Batman movies

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UFO and Alien: the Alien set of movies

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AI Movies: Blade Runner 2049



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Some of these genres recycle previous ones, but some are new. Added to the above are children’s movies (such as the Disney movies), many of which are animated, and, more recently, movies based on graphic novels (such as V for Vendetta, 2006) and simulated reality style movies, such as The Blair Witch Project (1999), as discussed. The serial genre has always been popular. In the 1930s and 1940s, Republic Pictures made many so-called cliff-hanger movies, which were seen on consecutive weeks in movie theaters, thus enticing audiences to come back regularly to see the outcome of the episodes. In recent times, the same concept has taken on different forms, either as sequels or as series of movies (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond, etc.).

The thriller From the outset, movies were able to enter the world of mass culture easily because they made fiction available to large audiences. The central objective of all such early genres was, in fact, to provide the same kind of narrative distraction that pulp fiction had traditionally supplied. On top of the list of genres in terms of popularity is the thriller, a genre developed by Alfred Hitchcock (1899–80), the British-born American motion-picture director, noted for his technically innovative and psychologically complex thrillers. Hitchcock entered the moviemaking business in 1920 as a designer of silent-film title cards and worked as an art director, scriptwriter, and assistant director before directing his first picture, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925. However, it was not until his third picture, The Lodger (1926), about a man suspected of being Jack the Ripper, that he became identified with thrillers. In 1929, Hitchcock made his first talking film, Blackmail, which was acclaimed for its imaginative use of sound. In that movie, Hitchcock used a continually clanging shop bell to convey the heroine’s feelings of guilt. During the 1930s he gained international fame with a series of immensely popular suspense dramas, including The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938).

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Hitchcock went to Hollywood in 1939. His first American film, Rebecca (1940), was adapted from a novel by British writer Daphne du Maurier and won an Academy Award for best picture. Afterward, he returned to the thriller genre, becoming inextricably associated with it, creating expectations in his audiences of experiencing suspense. These included Suspicion (1941), about a woman who imagines that her husband is a murderer, and two widely praised suspense movies, Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Notorious (1946). Hitchcock embarked upon the most creative period of his career in the 1950s. In rapid succession, he produced and directed a series of inventive films, beginning with Strangers on a Train (1951) and continuing with Rear Window (1954), a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). The plots of these pictures have been likened to nightmares that take place in daylight—a small town appears calm on the surface but reveals dark tensions underneath; an innocent man finds himself suddenly the object of suspicion; a wholesome-looking motel clerk is actually a psychotic killer who impersonates his dead mother; and so on. Hitchcock’s movies are also notable for their techniques, which were clearly influenced by the montage experiments of Russian director Sergey Eisenstein—arranging a series of quick shots to evoke strong emotions in the viewer. In addition to montage, Hitchcock manipulates his audience with his unusual camera angles and carefully placed sound effects. He meticulously planned each shot in his films and treated the actor as just another element on the set, leaving the impression that nothing on the screen had been put there by chance. So powerful was Hitchcock’s art that all subsequent thriller movies are now cast in his shadow. Every new thriller movie is either implicitly or explicitly compared to his work; and the adjective “Hitchcockian” has entered the movie lexicon permanently. The Hitchcock = thriller formula is now part of cinema lore and a permanent page in its historical evolution. Such is the power of the director. Incidentally, the American Film Institute’s 2001 listing of the 100 most popular thrillers of all time, voted on by 1800 cinemagoers, showed that Hitchcock’s Psycho was number one. Two other Hitchcock films made to the top ten: North by Northwest at number four and The Birds at number seven. A thriller that is clearly inspired by Hitchcock is the 2001 film Memento, written and directed by Christopher Nolan and based on a short story written by his brother Jonathan Nolan (Memento Mori). The main character, Leonard, is forced to live entirely in the present, unable to create new memories after a head injury. The movie revolves around his attempts to get revenge for the killing and raping of his wife. Leonard writes notes on his body, he takes Polaroid photos, and keeps pieces of paper so that he can remember what he

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has discovered—hence the name Memento to indicate that his memory is a series of external mementos, which he is unable to connect to any life story and therefore to any sense of reality. The time sequence of the narrative is presented in reverse manner, so that the audience is denied the key clues of which the protagonist is also deprived, due to his amnesia. The viewer is thus projected directly into the horror of having lost one’s memory. Fragmentation and dislocation in the narrative and in memory lead to doubt about the reality of consciousness and existence. We get the idea that Leonard’s wife was killed at the very start. Leonard was hit on the head in the act, and is left without short-term memory. He carries a picture of a man he suspects of the murder. The death of this man, and the inference that Leonard killed him, ends the tale. Leonard goes on to write a letter, in the style of previous mementos, perhaps to himself, knowing that he would otherwise forget that he was the one who wrote them. The movie is replete with symbols of time—alarm clocks ringing, a wristwatch, notepads, and so on. The movie however destroys the sense of time created by such artifacts by showing the plot in both forward and reverse time, distinguishing the two sequences by black-and-white and color cinematography. Color sequences show what actually happened; black-and-white ones what Leonard believes happened. The first color scene, in which Leonard shoots and kills the suspected man Teddy, is in actual fact the last scene of the narrative. In that scene we see a Polaroid undevelop, a bullet fly back into the barrel of a gun, and Teddy come back to life after the sound of a shot is heard. This is followed immediately by a black-and-white scene of Leonard in a motel room talking to an anonymous person on the phone explaining his circumstances. To make the movie even more horrifying, Nolan intersplices the parallel story of a man named Sam Jenkins. As an insurance investigator, Leonard came across a medical claim from Sam Jenkins, who eerily had the same memory problem that he has now. Leonard investigated the case and had the insurance company deny giving Sam the money he sought, believing that Sam was faking his condition. Sam’s wife also wasn’t sure if her husband was faking. So, she came up with a memory test. She had diabetes and it was Sam’s job to administer the shots of insulin. If she repeatedly had to ask for the shots, she would be able to prove that his condition was real. To her dismay, Sam administered the shots automatonically, forgetting he had just given her one. Eventually, she slipped into a coma from the overdoses and died, leaving Sam a patient in a mental institution. The Sam Jenkins subplot clearly creates a sense that Leonard may, himself, be a patient in the same mental institution, and that he also killed his wife. Ultimately, the movie raises an ancient philosophical question in a Hitchcockian-surrealist style: What is truth? It is, what we make of it in our

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minds, seems to be the answer. The horror comes when we “lose the mind” that creates the truth.

Viewing movies As Cinema Paradiso brought out so powerfully, viewing movies is a social experience that brings people together as a communal viewing body. This aspect might be changing, of course, as new media for cinema are emerging to make viewing a more individualistic affair. The early cineastes certainly understood the power of communal viewing. Cecil B. DeMille, the early American motion-picture director and producer, whose spectacular historical epics and biblical film extravaganzas have inspired contemporary blockbuster moviemaking, realized that audiences reacted to a movie in a uniform way through the power of the screen. In the 1910s, DeMille made a number of distinctive silent films, including The Warrens of Virginia (1915), Joan the Woman (1916), and The Whispering Chorus (1918). In a short time, he carved out, through his own persona, the image of the dashing Hollywood director that prevailed for many decades. He also helped to establish the idea that movies are spectacles, not unlike the mythical spectacles of ancient drama. With The Ten Commandments (1923), which contained the germ of the blockbuster formula, DeMille understood the importance of communal rituals at times such as Easter-Passover, pointing to cinema as the medium through which the traditional rituals could be experienced. The movie was enormously successful at the box office. He followed this success in the subsequent decade with many others, including The Sign of the Cross (1932), Cleopatra (1934), and The Crusades (1935). Subsequently, DeMille’s largerthan-life, big-budget films became legendary with a string of pictures that included The Plainsman (1936), The Buccaneer (1938), Union Pacific (1939), Northwest Mounted Police (1940), Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Samson and Delilah (1949), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), and a sensationalistic remake of The Ten Commandments (1958). Movies will continue to attract large audiences, for the simple reason that they are social rituals in themselves, bringing people together communally. We feel that the movie “tells us” the story, in much the same way that village storytellers once did. The impact is immediate and to the point. Movie viewing in public locales, such as cineplexes, will thus likely remain an intrinsic component of the Digital Galaxy for time to come. Since the advent of cinema, movies have been experienced as social events, inside a movie theater, with intermissions, food fare, and other social rituals. The movie theater was the center of attraction of cities and towns from the 1930s to the 1970s. The

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corner movie house has been swallowed up by the mega-theater complexes, where many movies screens are involved. The movie theater has become a self-contained entertainment locale. And moviemakers are also ensuring the continuity of the movie theater by adopting and adapting technologies. For example, ever since the success of Avatar (2009), the advent of new 3-D technology is starting to change how audiences may wish to view movies, paving the way for a revolution in viewing, even though 3-D movies go back in time, as discussed, when the technology was used primarily as a crude special effects gimmick in horror and sci-fi movies. Cinemagoing has survived as a social event because of the need for people to experience a film in a communal locus. An analogy to eating can be made. One can of course eat meals alone. But the same meals eaten at a restaurant in the company of others have social significance that transforms the meals into a form of social bonding. Similarly, movies can be viewed alone or in the company of others. The latter somehow resonates within us in a similar way as a form of social alliance.

Further reading In the field of cinema semiotics, the following merit some mention. Metz, Christian. 1974. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Metz’s book argues that a film is the specific manifestation of an intrinsic “filmic language” that is structured just like a verbal language, with meaning-bearing units, a syntax, and so on. Ehrat, P. Johannes. 2005. Cinema and Semiotic: Peirce and Film Aesthetics, Narration, and Representation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. This book delves into the fine details of the narrative semiotics of cinema. It is a bit technical but still readable as a general assessment of film as a semiotic code.

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Chapter 6 Television Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing. —E. B. White (1899–1985)

T

he medium of television has been pivotal in shaping the modern-day mediascape, ever since it became a dominant mass medium in the 1950s. TV has engendered a form of visual literacy that informs and engages more people than any other medium had been capable of doing at any other time in human history before the Internet. Because of its reach and ubiquity, it has been accused of entrenching materialistic and shallow culture into groupthink. Scientific research papers on the effects television has purportedly had on society were once common, giving way to Internet studies only in the last decade or so. Are the social critics right? Has television spawned a “psychologically toxic” world? Are the victims of TV programs, as Key (1989: 13) suggests, people who “scream and shout hysterically at rock concerts and later in life at religious revival meetings?” There is no doubt that TV has had an impact on people’s behaviors, but so has every other form of mediated representation—from the texts inscribed on clay tablets to the paperback novel. In actual fact, the TV medium is an extension of previous media, literally taking radio content into the visual domain. TV genres and the codes that underlie them constitute the subject matter of this chapter. Semiotically, TV can be characterized, as will be discussed below, as a social text. This can be defined as an overarching representamen that guides and informs the wider society on issues of current concern, as well as shaping them. Consider, as an example, the sitcom Seinfeld that was popular in the 1990s. It both reflected the state of uncertain morality and questioned the American Dream based on living within a family structure and seeking to make “something” of oneself—shaping the sitcoms that came after and tapping into an unconscious mind-set in society at large that is still resonating in general groupthink: Is there really anything worth striving for other than daily survival? The characters in the sitcom did not subscribe to the narrative of family and career as indexes of success of previous sitcoms; they were the antithesis of

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traditional characters. They lived day by day with no goals other than surviving and exchanging repartees among themselves. Because the sitcom came on week-after-week it was able to paint and shape a deconstructed narrative of life in America that would have been impossible to do in any other medium. It was brilliant as a comedy and scary as a portrait of contemporary life. Returning once again to the insights of McLuhan, TV can be seen as a major step in bringing about the global village, even before the advent of the Internet—a step that followed previous ones going back to antiquity and the rise of writing as a mass medium. In its own way, however, it “re-tribalized” us. To quote McLuhan: “The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums” (McLuhan 1962: 35). His term captures perfectly the kind of consciousness we have all developed by living in an electronically mediated mind-space, whereby we all feel connected to each other anywhere on earth—at least potentially—through our electronic tools. As discussed throughout this book, McLuhan claimed that the media in which information is recorded and transmitted are decisive in shaping trends and in charting future progress, since they extend human faculties (biological, mental, institutional) significantly, re-calibrating our consciousness, thus, leading to a rewiring of the brain. So, by simply switching on our television sets to satellite-transmitted programs, visiting websites, using social media, and the like, we tend to feel connected to others in an abstract, rather than real, fashion. The environment in which we interact, create, and express ourselves is no longer just real space, but also an electronic space where sensory modalities are also becoming more and more virtual. Without any doubt, that space became dominant in the TV age.

The advent of TV Television owes its technological origins to the 1884 scanning disk invented by engineer Paul Nipkow. Nipkow’s device was used from 1923 to 1925 in experimental television systems. In 1926 the Scottish scientist, John Logie Baird, perfected the scanning method, and in 1931 the Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin built the electronic scanning system that became the prototype of the modern TV camera. American inventor Ernst F. W. Alexanderson actually exhibited the first home television receiver in Schenectady, New York, in 1928. The images his device transmitted were small, poor, and unsteady, but astute business people present at the exhibition saw it nonetheless as having great commercial potential. By the late 1930s, television service was in place in several countries. The British BBC, for example, started a regular service in 1936. By the

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1940s there were twenty-three television stations operating in the United States. But it was not until the early 1950s that technology had advanced to the point that made it possible for virtually every North American household to afford a television set. Immediately thereafter, television personages became household names, and people began more and more to plan their daily lives around television programs. Since the 1960s television programming has developed into much more than an assortment of disconnected fact and fiction shows. Like the newspaper, it has become a syntext (Chapter 3) for the larger society. The TV syntext can be characterized more specifically as a social text (as will be discussed below), functioning as a kind of overarching code through which people have gleaned a large portion of their information, intellectual stimulation, and distraction before the Internet Age and even within this latter age. TV’s total integration into society can be seen by the fact that TV sets are ubiquitous—in hotel rooms, airports, schools, elevators, office waiting rooms, cafeterias, washrooms, and even outer space. The successful US landing on the moon in July 1969 was documented with live broadcasts made from the surface of the moon. Technology has constantly improved TV viewing. Today, digital television receivers, which convert electronic signals into a digital code (a series of ones and zeros), are doing to television what the compact disc did to sound recording in the 1980s and MP3 technology in the millennium. Known as high-definition television (HDTV), the technology was developed originally in the mid-1980s. HDTV offers sharper pictures on wider screens, with cinema-quality images. A fully digital system was put on display in the United States in the early 1990s. Remarkably, engineers have devised ways of making HDTV compatible with computers and telecommunications equipment so that it can be applied to other systems besides home television, such as medical devices, security systems, and computer-aided manufacturing. Also, television content can be streamed, and thus viewed without the time constraints of traditional TV, and some services, like HBO, fall outside of the traditional TV-advertising partnership, since they charge viewers fees directly. All this has changed TV viewing, but not its significance as a powerful visual medium that still guides and influences opinions and shapes trends. TV has, like all other mass media, been a two-edged sword. On the positive side, it has been instrumental in bringing about significant and important changes in society. For instance, the TV images of the Vietnam War broadcast daily in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought about protest and ultimately an end to the war. The constant exposure and treatment of sexual themes on sitcoms has also, through the years, greatly reduced the puritanical hypocrisy that previously existed with regard to sexual matters in society at large. The protests and changes in sexual mores were successful because they did not involve just “intellectuals,” but large segments of the populace who simply viewed the rel-

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evant issues on television. On the other hand, whereas reading books requires some degree of critical reflection, processing TV images does not. This has led, as Baudrillard (1988, 1998) has emphasized, to a generalized passiveness and unreflectiveness in how people receive and understand messages. TV has thus surreptitiously induced a kind of intellectual lethargy in society at large—a lethargy that might have been further exacerbated by cyberspace media. The term image can be defined simply as an iconic sign that stands for some referential domain in some simulative-interpretive way. It is something prototypical (a fashion style, a certain look, a system such as gender, etc.) based on evolving social trends. The image of womanhood portrayed by Lucille Ball in her sitcom I Love Lucy was vastly different than the one portrayed by, say, the mother in Father Knows Best; the former image showed the female as a highly intelligent and independent-minded persona; the latter as a passive and subservient one.

TV broadcasting As mentioned in Chapter 4, after the First World War the Westinghouse Electric Corporation established the first commercially owned radio station, KDKA, to offer programming to the general public. As we saw, early radio broadcasting was dominated by adaptations of novels, pulp fiction narratives, newspaper reports, stage dramas, and vaudeville, which were redesigned for radio in the form of weekly action serials, situation comedies, soap operas, and the like. In like fashion, many of the early TV programs came directly from radio. These included Westerns such as Gunsmoke, soap operas such as The Guiding Light, and sitcoms such as The Jack Benny Show. The TV variety show also evolved in large part from its radio counterpart. So, it is reasonable to say that TV at first was little more than “visual radio.” In the same way that radio extended print and theatrical genres into the audio medium, television extended radio genres into the visual medium. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) showed the American public how effective and appealing TV was with its live coverage of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Immediately thereafter, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and the DuMont Television Network (which went out of business in 1955) became the first TV networks in the United States. Networks are groups of stations that centralize the production and distribution of programming. By the mid-1950s NBC, CBS, and ABC— collectively known as the Big Three in television history—had successfully secured American television audiences as their exclusive domain. In the mid-

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1980s the Fox television network went on the air, capturing a segment of that domain. So, before cable television ended channel scarcity in the late 1980s, viewing choices were largely limited to the programming that the major networks provided. As is the case in all the other media discussed so far, advertising is the fuel that propels TV. Only in the area of public broadcasting is this not the case. Public TV services are generally supported by government funding, contributions from viewers, corporate gifts, and foundation grants. Today, cable and satellite services have greatly widened the scope, offerings, and reach of TV. If we add streaming possibilities to the new TV technological alchemy, it is obvious that TV has hardly lost its hegemony in the digital mediascape, but converged with other media within it. In effect, politics and social issues are influenced by cable news networks alongside social media sites. The two have merged perfectly into a huge mediascape that is based on the visual image of which Baudrillard spoke. Indeed, criminal trials are now played out on television as much as they are in courtrooms; so too are issues of political concern.

TV genres As we saw in previous chapters, the parallel growth of network radio and Hollywood cinema in the late 1920s created an unprecedented mass media culture for people belonging to a wide range of social classes and educational backgrounds. This culture was entrenched further with the rise of television in the 1950s. Despite the obvious differences between radio and television, the development of programming genres for both broadcast media constitutes a single history. I Love Lucy (1951–57), which starred Lucille Ball, for example, was adapted from her radio show My Favorite Husband (1948–51). It became the first veritable “hit program” in American television history, finishing first in the national ratings for three seasons in a row (1952–54) and establishing themes that have been developed by subsequent sitcoms—such as the battle between spouses, quarrels among neighbors or work colleagues, and other everyday conflicts. Some television sitcoms, such as Father Knows Best (1954–60), leaned instead toward a strictly traditional-conservative view of the family, often focusing on child rearing. Others raised the “critical coefficient” of their contents considerably by providing controversial social commentary. Prime examples of such sitcoms were All in the Family (1971–79) and M*A*S*H (1972–83). Some sitcoms have also occasionally used fantasy characters as vehicles for comedy—for example, Bewitched (1964–72) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965–69). A few sitcoms have been deconstructive of the

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traditional sitcom code—based on issues within the family. These include Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, the Simpson’s, and South Park. Irony and a deconstructive subtext characterize these sitcoms. Sitcom

Underlying code

I Love Lucy

Battle between the sexes, arguments among ­people, mundane conflicts

Father Knows Best

Moralistic narrative, family problems

All in the Family/M*A*S*H

Social commentary and critique

Bewitched/I Dream of Jeannie

Fantasy characters who solve human problems

Big Bang Theory

Parody of human relations focusing on the importance of friendship

Seinfeld

Deconstructive of the search for a meaningful life within the traditional family

Simpson’s

Satirical deconstruction of family and social life

South Park

Ribald carnivalesque deconstruction of social mores and political correctness

An interesting sitcom was a short-lived American program of the early 1960s called It’s a Man’s World, which foreshadowed sitcoms such as Seinfeld and even The Big Bang Theory. It premiered on NBC in 1962. It followed the daily lives of four young men: a refugee from a rich Chicago family, a folk singer, and two orphaned brothers. The themes of the sitcom were truly iconoclastic for the era. They dealt with premarital sex, feminism, and the generation gap intelligently and artistically. Mass audiences were not ready for this type of program, however, and after only nineteen episodes, NBC canceled it. They were ready when Seinfeld (1990–98) came onto the scene. It was notable for being about “nothing,” unlike other sitcoms of the same era that focused on family issues (Roseanne, 1988–97), gender issues (Home Improvement, 1991–99), or social issues (Third Rock from the Sun, 1996–2001). Still, Seinfeld became the highest-rated and most profitable show on American television during its last years. It was TV’s answer to cinematic postmodernism (Chapter 5). Seinfeld reflected, in fact, the many identity-less young adults of that era who felt they had nowhere to go and nothing to conquer. Living in a society without goals, and facing the constant threat of AIDS, child abuse, rape, cancer, divorce, unemployment, as well as being dissatisfied with the traditional workplace, viewers of the era saw Seinfeld as a mirror of their lives.

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The TV comedy-variety genre is a hybrid of vaudeville and nightclub entertainment. In the early years of television, many of the medium’s first true stars were, as a matter of fact, comedy-variety performers, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Martha Raye, and Red Skelton. A comedy-variety hour typically consisted of short monologues and skits featuring the host, which alternated with various acts, including singers, bands, stand-up comedians, trained animal acts, and other circus-type performers. The variety show—a related genre in which the host served only as master of ceremonies—emerged in the early period of TV. The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–71), for example, hosted by newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan on CBS, featured entertainers as diverse as the Beatles and the Bolshoi Ballet. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968–73) was a satirical comedy skit hour that made fun of virtually any social or political issue. Anthology and serial dramas are also staple TV genres. The former included Goodyear-Philco Playhouse (1951–60) and Studio One (1948–58). The serials included police dramas, such as Dragnet (1952–59, 1967–70), The Mod Squad (1968–73), and Hawaii Five-O (1968–80); private-eye series, such as 77 Sunset Strip (1958–64), The Rockford Files (1974–80), and Magnum, P.I. (1980–88), in which the character of the detective was as important as the criminal investigation; and Westerns, such as Wagon Train (1957–65) and Bonanza (1959–73). Other distinct types of television series included war programs, such as Rat Patrol (1966–67); spy series, such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68); and science-fiction series, such as Star Trek (1966–69). Many dramatic series were based on the exploits of lawyers, doctors, or rich business entrepreneurs. These included Perry Mason (1957–66), L.A. Law (1986–94), Ben Casey (1961–66), and Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–76). Dramatic series continue in programs such as the CSI ones, and special series on HBO and Netflix dealing with all kinds of narratives, but with more realism than is permitted on network TV. TV soap operas, like their radio counterparts, have always explored romance, friendship, and familial relations in narrative form. Among the most popular of the early TV era were The Guiding Light and The Edge of Night. The history of the TV soap opera is also the history of gender relations in society. At first, the soaps were no more than afternoon “romance interludes” for stay-at-home wives; eventually they developed into episodes dealing with many other aspects of relations. Clearly, as a social text, TV functions both as society’s mirror, reflecting its trends and also, in a form of synergy, shaping them. From the outset, news broadcasting has held wide appeal for television audiences. The immediacy with which TV broadcasting can reach large audiences has, in fact, redefined the role of news reporting in society, being eclipsed only by the online form of journalism, including blogs. Print jour-

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nalism has, as a consequence, become a supplemental medium to radio, TV, and the Internet, focusing on in-depth coverage and editorial opinion. Actually, the earliest years of television offered little in the way of innovative news coverage. But this changed in the mid-1950s. In 1956, NBC introduced The Huntley-Brinkley Report, a half-hour national telecast presented in the early evening and featuring filmed reports of the day’s events. The other networks followed suit shortly thereafter. With the invention of videotape, the cost of such coverage dropped significantly, allowing individual stations to initiate and expand local news coverage. Network and local news programming had become an integral part of the TV syntext. In addition to daily news coverage, the networks capitalized on the popularity of news reporting by developing weekly prime-time newsmagazine series, such as 60 Minutes (1968–) and 20/20 (1978–). Such shows consist of a mixture of cultural reporting, investigative reporting, and human-interest stories. They have proliferated in prime-time broadcasting. And, of course, all-news cable channels have become popular since the mid-1980s. The first of these, CNN (Cable News Network), was founded in 1980 by American businessman Ted Turner. CNN was the first twenty-four-hour television network devoted entirely to news broadcasts. In 1991, the network received wide publicity when its reporter Peter Arnett remained in Iraq during the Gulf War to broadcast his reports. In effect, Arnett gave a “play-by-play” account of the conflict, not unlike what a TV sportscaster does in describing a sports match. The war was real; the broadcasts, however, transformed the events of the war into a narrative. The addictive need for information broadcasting among a steadily growing segment of the population was rendered obvious by CNN’s establishment of its Headline News, a channel running television news programs consecutively throughout the day. CNN and Fox News have become rivals and opponents in the political arena, as became evident after the election of Donald Trump. The latter referred to CNN as “fake news,” initiating a society-wide debate on the power of the TV news media to affect public opinion. CNN and news channels like it started being perceived as fighters against an oligarchic conservative government under Trump, showing how important the TV medium had become in sustaining freedom of speech in a democracy. In a way, a channel such as CNN became a champion for truth and facts, in view of the accusations leveled at the media by Trump. In effect, news television has had a noticeable effect on electoral politics and public opinion. An example before the Trump era, was the 1960 presidential campaign involving Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy who agreed to a series of debates, which were broadcast simultaneously on television and radio. According to surveys, most radio listeners felt that Nixon had won the debates, while television viewers picked Kennedy. Kennedy won the general election that fall. This brought out the power of the visual image over

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any other type of signifier—as Baudrillard consistently remarked (e.g., 1973, 1998). Television coverage of the Vietnam War (1959–75) helped change the rules of American politics. By the mid-1960s the Big Three networks were broadcasting daily images of the war into virtually every home in the United States. For many viewers, the horrors they saw on television were emotionally disconcerting, overshadowing the optimistic reports of impending victory issued by government officials to radio and print media. Other TV genres that have proven to be durable include talk shows (providing a daily dose of gossip, scandal, and information, all mixed into one) sports coverage, children’s programming, game shows, music programs, animation programs, and religious programs. One recent genre that requires special comment is the so-called reality program which started in the early 2000s, projecting real-life people, not actors, into situations involving all the dramatic elements of the soaps—intrigue, danger, betrayal, and sex. The appeal of the unscripted program, which blurs the difference between reality and fiction, lies in its “text-in-the making” nature. As with Luigi Pirandello’s (1867–36) great 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the audience is presented with real-life characters in search of a script and a narrative. The fun is in figuring out how this will come about. One of the first reality TV programs to gain popularity was, in 2001, Temptation Island (on the Fox network). Set on an idyllic island, a group of people in bathing suits were put there so that their emotional and romantic lives could be wrecked on purpose through “temptation” schemes. The reason the couples in the show agreed to be in it was, purportedly, so that they could test their devotion to each other. But, in my view, the people in the show, along with the audiences that viewed them, were enticed by the power of the TV simulacrum. As mentioned previously, Andy Warhol’s prediction that everyone would have their “15 minutes of fame” in the media age has been superseded considerably by unscripted television. People now perceive little difference between what happens on TV and in real life. Unscripted programs simply reify this. But what strikes one in watching such programs critically is the absolute unbelievability of the whole idea. Author-less scripts are indeed interesting. But the result is hardly breathtaking drama. It is “people-watching” gone amok. Unscripted TV is not new. It has been a staple of cable networks and some public broadcasting outlets for years. Britain’s Channel 4’s fine series 1900 House, for instance, was much more intriguing than any Survivor or Temptation Island format, since it followed the misadventures of a family that agreed to live as the Victorians did for three months. The series combined elements of narrative with those of documentary and drama producing a TV sociology of family life that was truly powerful. Similarly, the American 1971 documentary of the Loud family—involving seven months of uninterrupted

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shooting and 300 hours of nonstop broadcasting—created a text-in-the-making that reflected the banality of the family life of the protagonists. The Loud family fell apart, begging the question: Did the TV cameras cause this? Reality TV is voyeurism for the denizens of the mediascape. With the use of webcams and other digital recording devices, millions of people throughout the world are now even letting strangers into their daily lives. It would seem that a growing number of people simply find “living in public” more exciting than living privately. Clearly, the boundaries between private and public have been eroded through the influence of TV. Everyone, from celebrities to housemakers, is airing personal laundry in public for everyone to see. Aware of the spreading culture of intrusion TV programmers have jumped on the “reality bandwagon,” coming up with an array of their own “web-cammish” type shows which portray people in their daily habitats. Millions of TV watchers have access to the spectacle of human “reality” at its most banal, venal, and doltish. Maybe at some deep unconscious level we are all trying to understand what human life is all about through such people-watching. But it certainly seems to be a bizarre way of doing so.

TV today Today, specialty channels dealing with music (e.g., MTV), food (such as the Food Network), crime (such as Identification Discovery), science (Discovery Channel), sports (ESPN, TSN), and virtually any other topic are now part of the TV multichannel universe. Quiz, talent-scout, and dating shows have always been popular. Reality programs showcasing human frailty are also popular on TV with titles such as My 600 lb. Life, Hoarders, and the like. Also highly popular are TV blockbuster series such as Game of Thrones and House of Cards. Services such as Replay TV and America Online TV (AOLTV), among others, offer interactive formats that permit viewers to control what they watch and when they can watch it. Interactivity actually started in 1953, with a children’s show called Winky Dink. Viewers bought a kit that included a piece of plastic to cover the TV screen and a Magic Crayon. Children could then help the hapless Winky character out of jams. Prompted by the show’s announcer, they could draw a bridge for him, to cross over a ravine and then erase the bridge, as instructed to do, so that the bad guys would plunge into the ravine below. The show ran for four years, and was revived in 1970. The next step in interactive TV occurred in Columbus, Ohio, on December 1, 1977, when a cable company provided a “relay box” to customers so that they could order movies whenever they wished. By the early 1990s, specialty

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channels on cable TV allowed viewers to watch shows whenever they chose to do so. Today, channels and programs have websites, which viewers can visit during, before, or after broadcasts. And they can pause live TV and record shows with the click of a button. Cable and satellite providers now even allow users to pull up detailed information while they are watching a broadcast. For example, any episode of Bill Maher’s Real Time political-comedic talk show on HBO is followed up by more of the episodes on YouTube. Webcasts are now also common. They have allowed events, such as local sports events, to gain a broad international audience. In the past, amateur sports or sports from other countries would hardly ever be showcased on the broadcast media. Webcasting has allowed these events to garner a relatively large audience. With all kinds of video devices people throughout the globe can become producers of their own programs. Actors can be taken from real life and webcast with or without their knowledge. Video recorders and video rental stores have become obsolete in large part because of the advent of new TV systems such as HBO and Netflix. HBO is a satellite TV network that features its own programs and motion pictures along with series. HBO actually started in 1972 and is now one of the most acclaimed TV channels of all time, producing high-quality programming and top-of-the-line movies, available in real time or through streaming. HBO has become a major competitor to the Hollywood formula of moviemaking to be seen first in movie theaters. Another competitor to this hegemony is Netflix, an entertainment company founded in 1997 and specializing in streaming media and video-on-demand. It is also now a major film and television production studio. Its first highly acclaimed series, House of Cards, which debuted in 2013, established its popularity as a medium for both television and movie viewing. The company offers new content, called “Netflix Original,” through its ever-expanding online library of films and television programs. Indeed, both HBO and Netflix have completely amalgamated the two media (TV and cinema), releasing hundreds of new movies and programs regularly. TV programming has traditionally been based on the presupposition that the audience was fairly homogeneous in its tastes and expectations. But this has changed in the age of HBO, multichannels, and interactive technologies. Before cable and satellites, it was syndicated programming that made inroads into the hegemony that the main networks enjoyed. Syndicated programs are programs rented or licensed by their producers to other companies for broadcast, distribution, or exhibition. Programs such as The Wheel of Fortune came forward in the mid-1980s to challenge the dominion over audiences that the networks had. It continues to be a popular prime-time quiz program. Cable television was first developed in the late 1940s to serve shadow areas—that is, areas that are blocked from receiving signals from a station’s

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transmitting antenna. Today, cable and satellite TV have become the norm. Digital data-compression techniques, which convert television signals to digital code in an efficient way, have made numerous channels available. Currently, genre channels such as the following are available in the United States.

Genre

Examples

Educational

Discovery Channel, Arts & Entertainment Channel, The Learning Channel

Movie

Home Box Office, Showtime, The Movie Network, Cinemax

Music

Music Television, Country Music Television, VH1

News

CNN, The Weather Channel, Fox News

Religious

The Inspirational Network, The Christian Network

Government

C-SPAN

Sports

ESPN, Fox Sports Channel

Shopping

Home Shopping Network

Animation

The Cartoon Network

Science Fiction

The Sci-Fi Channel

Comedy and Sitcom

The Comedy Channel

Courtroom Coverage

Court-TV

Women

The Women’s Channel

Children

Nickelodeon, The Disney Channel

Families

The Family Channel

African Americans

Black Entertainment Television

Hispanics

Galavision

Country

The Nashville Network

In addition to basic service channels, pay-per-view options allow subscribers access to many kinds of specialized programs, from adult erotic movies to wrestling and boxing tournaments, video game channels, music channels for highly specialized tastes, and print-based services specializing in news headlines, program listings, weather updates, and the like. Cable companies now also offer computer and Internet services. As Swann (2000: 22) observes, it is

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apparent that TV has become: “a home networking center, enabling consumers to control all their electronic products and household appliances with the remote control.” Perhaps the most interactive format of all is that of VR, which is now competing with TV. This consists of a system of devices that enables users to move and react in a computer-simulated environment, sensing and manipulating virtual objects (objects in computer or cyberspace) much as they would real objects. This style of interaction gives participants the feeling of being immersed in the simulated world. Virtual worlds are created by computer programs. But VR simulations differ from other computer simulations in that they require special interface devices that transmit the sights, sounds, and sensations of the simulated world to the user. These devices also record and send the speech and movements of the participant to the simulation program. In effect, the human subject is interacting with a world totally made-up, a kind of representational space where the user is interacting with the representation. To see in the virtual world, the user wears a head-mounted display (HMD) with screens directed at each eye. The HMD contains a position tracker to monitor the location of the user’s head and the direction in which the user is looking. Using this information, a computer recalculates images of the virtual world to match the direction in which the user is looking and displays these images on the HMD. Users hear sounds in the virtual world through earphones in the HMD. Regardless of the meaning that the TV syntext may acquire in the future, the years in which it dominated mass communications will be remembered as a period when vast national populations shared political and cultural events, such as the address of a leader, a singer’s performance, a comedian’s monologue, a tear-jerking drama, or a sports event. Although still possible, assembling so large an audience for any single event is becoming increasingly rare as the number of viewing alternatives available to society continues to increase.

The impact of TV McLuhan was among the first to emphasize that TV had an impact far greater than that of the material it communicated. And indeed, just as he predicted, TV now allows viewers to see themselves as “participants” in wars and conflicts going on in some other part of the world “as they happen.” TV’s impact on world culture, politics, and community life has been widespread. TV sets the social agenda. That is, it has the potential of deeply influ-

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encing people’s opinions because TV chooses which ideas and events are worthy of public exposure. The choices then get transferred to public and political agendas—an unconscious process called salience transfer. The concept of TV’s agenda-setting power was introduced by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in a 1972 study of the impact of media coverage on the 1968 American presidential election. They found a correlation between the degree of media coverage and the rankings of the interviewees. In other words, voter opinions were influenced by quantity of media information. Overall, the conclusion was that televised events tend to be perceived as more relevant than those that are not showcased on TV. A classic example is traced to a 1954 segment of Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now documentary program on CBS. Murrow challenged fanatical senator Joseph McCarthy’s trumped-up campaign against the purported communist subversion of the American media and especially Hollywood. Murrow used footage of McCarthy’s own press conferences to expose the falsehoods of McCarthy’s campaign. This led to the Senate reprimanding McCarthy and divesting him of the authority to take further action. Today, agenda-setting theory has been reconsidered because of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are becoming increasingly prominent in producing the salience transfer effect. The presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump were influenced by social media campaigns, which eclipsed the traditional TV ones. There are four main psychosocial impacts that living in the TV mediascape have, arguably, had on people. These have been called various things by different social scientists. I will refer to them here as the mean world syndrome, the mythologizing effect, the history fabrication effect, and the cognitive compression effect. Needless to say, other media produce similar effects. However, they have done so to a much lesser degree than television, which has only been eclipsed by the Internet in this regard, as will be discussed in the next chapter.

Mean world syndrome George Gerbner and Larry Gross found in a 1976 study that (1) certain media, such as television, cultivate people’s perceptions of reality and (2) that the content of TV programs has a conservative social function—to cultivate existing norms. The researchers realized that those who spent more time watching television (“heavy television viewers”) tended to develop beliefs and attitudes about society that mirrored the messages on television programs. Heavy television viewers typically perceived the world as being a more dangerous and frightening place than it actually is, which causes them to develop a greater

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sense of anxiety and mistrust of others. This phenomenon is called the “mean world syndrome.” The researchers also found that television had a hidden code that reinforced existing norms. Violence on TV does not lead to more crime in society, because in the shows violence does not pay. TV violence ends up cautioning people about the dangers of such violence and, consequently, bringing about its condemnation. Typically, heavy viewers tend to support drastic police measures to bring order about. The syndrome thus concomitantly creates a fascination with violence itself. This explains why sensationalistic news programs dealing with real-life violence are so popular. They are seen symbolically as examples of “what the world is coming to.”

Mythologizing effect The mythologizing effect refers to the phenomenon that television creates personages that are perceived as mythic figures, larger than life. Like any type of privileged space—a platform, a pulpit, etc. that is designed to impart focus and significance to someone—television creates mythic personages by simply “containing” them in electronic space, where they are seen as suspended, in a mythic world of their own. TV personages are infused with a deified quality by virtue of the fact that they are seen inside the mythical space created by television. This is why meeting TV actors, sitcom stars, and so on causes great enthusiasm and excitement in many people. Such celebrities are the contemporary equivalents of the graven images of religious figures. The same effect applies, of course, to the personages in other media. An author of bestselling books, a radio personality, a recording artist, a movie actor, and so on are all perceived mythologically. But since TV reaches more people, the mythologizing effect is more widespread. This effect brings out the power of any medium to affect people’s mind states. Recalling McLuhan, TV mediates reality for viewers by amplifying the way they literally “see” the world unfold before them. In the same way that comic books created superhero mythologies, so too the TV screen has created mythological images of those on the other side of the screen. The ancients likely believed their myths to be true. With the evolution of the scientific mind, the myths were typically relegated to the realm of superstition. But the mythic impulse within us has not subsided. In the case of the media we make, there is always a propensity to see the figures, images, and characters that they enfold as having some mythical quality. As McLuhan observed, the danger lies in the perception that we are subservient to the machines we have built: “Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new

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forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth” (McLuhan 1964: 56).

History fabrication effect The term history fabrication effect refers to the fact that TV literally fabricates history by inducing the impression in viewers that some event—an election campaign, an actor’s love affair, a fashion trend, and so on—is a momentous happening. People make up their minds about the guilt or innocence of others by watching news and interview programs; they see certain behaviors as laudable or damnable by tuning into talk shows or docudramas; and the list could go on and on. In a phrase, the events that are showcased on TV are felt as being more significant and historically meaningful to society than those that are not. A riot that gets airtime becomes a consequential event; one that does not is ignored. This is why political activists are interested in getting on the air. TV imbues their cause with significance. Sports are transformed by television coverage into battles of Herculean proportion. Events such as the John Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Watergate hearings, the Rodney King beating, the O. J. Simpson trial, the death of Lady Diana, the Bill Clinton sex scandal, and the election of Donald Trump are perceived as portentous and prophetic historical events through the filter of TV coverage. In a phrase, TV has become the maker of history and its documenter at the same time. People now experience history through TV, not just read about it in a book or study it at school. And, as a result, television is shaping history. As mentioned briefly above, TV news reporter Edward R. Murrow became a cultural hero when he stood up to Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s on his See It Now documentary program. The horrific images of the Vietnam War that were transmitted into people’s homes daily in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought about an end to the war, mobilizing social protest. Significantly, an MTV flag was hoisted by East German youths over the Berlin Wall as they tore it down in 1989. More people watched the wedding of England’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and later Diana’s funeral, than had ever before in human history observed such events at the same time. The history-making power of TV has led many to actually stage an historical event for the cameras. The social critic W. T. Anderson (1992: 125–30) calls these appropriately “pseudoevents,” because they are never spontaneous, but planned for the sole purpose of “playing” to TV’s huge audiences. Most pseudoevents are intended to be self-fulfilling prophecies. The American invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983 and the Gulf War during January and February 1991 were concomitantly real events and pseudoevents. The

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actual military operations and conflicts were real events. But the reporting of those wars simulated fictional stories of adventure and war. The same kind of simulacrum has been repeated over the years, including the fight against militant-terrorist organizations. Pseudoevents constitute unscripted reality TV at its best, because they mesh reality (the real killing and terrorizing of people) with dramatized social commentary. As Anderson (1992: 126–27) aptly puts it, the “media take the raw material of experience and fashion it into stories; they retell the stories to us, and we call them reality.” Of course, other media create (or have created) history as well. Books written about wars, historical eras, and so on have always shaped how we perceive certain events of the past. Before TV, newspapers and radio were primary fabricators of pseudoevents. But with the rise of TV in the 1950s, there is little doubt that most people started perceiving the making of history “through the tube,” so to speak, rather than through print or some other medium.

Cognitive compression effect The cognitive compression effect refers to the fact that the TV medium presents its stories, information, and features in compacted form for time-constrained transmission. Consequently, viewers have little time to reflect on the topics, implications, and meanings contained in its messages. This leads, generally speaking, to a passive and cognitively effortless way of “reading” the TV text. TV has thus made people habituated to large doses of “meaning-suspended” information, cut up, packaged, and digested beforehand. TV viewing, in a phrase, is very easy to do, cognitively speaking. Take TV news programs as a case-in-point. The amount of information presented in a short period of time on a news program is torrential. We are able to take it all in because the various stories have been edited and stylized beforehand for effortless mass consumption. The camera moves in to select aspects of a situation, to show a face that cares, that is suffering, that is happy, that is angry and then shifts to the face of an anchor who, like the storytellers of villages, tells us what it’s all about. The news items, the film footage, and the commentaries are all fast-paced and brief. They are designed to present snippets of easily digestible information. “Within such a stylistic environment,” remarks Stuart Ewen (1988: 265), “the news is beyond comprehension.” The facts of the news are subjected to the stylized signature of the specific news program; and, indeed, the same story will be presented differently according to whoever the television journalist is. Consequently, “nations and people are daily sorted out into boxes marked ‘good guys,’ ‘vil-

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lains,’ ‘victims,’ and ‘lucky ones,’ style becomes the essence, reality becomes the appearance” (Ewen 1988: 265–66). Some psychologists claim that this effect has led to short attention spans generally. Whether or not this is verifiable, the fact remains that all media tend to compress information through the process of mediation itself, which is a selective one. The device that may have significantly affected attention spans may actually be the remote control. It was developed in 1956 by a man named Robert Adler. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that it became a standard prop of every television set. The remote control has had an enormous impact on how we view television. When we are bored with a program on a specific channel, all we have to do from the comfort of our seats is to flick through the panoply of viewing options at our disposal rapidly and with very little deliberation or reflection. But all this may reflect an intrinsic propensity in human information processing, suggesting that we seek efficiency and a minimization of effort in how to do things and how to take in information, whereby we tend to refine the information, throwing out from it that which is irrelevant to us.

TV and social change The above discussion is not meant to imply that TV has not been powerful as an artistic medium or as an agent for social change. Indeed, because TV has showcased racial protests and other significant social events, it has forced the hand of change several times. TV programs have been pivotal in bringing about shifts in social mind-set vis-à -vis certain issues or else they have emblazoned into communal (and largely unconscious) memory events that have become part of modern history. Here’s just a sampling: ll

In 1963, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November was covered with continuous reporting over several days; including the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s alleged assassin, captured live on TV as it occurred.

ll

In 1977, the miniseries Roots was among the first to deal forcefully with the enduring problem of racism.

ll

In 1968, Star Trek featured the first interracial kiss in an episode titled Plato’s Stepchildren.

ll

In 1970, the first divorced couple appeared on the Odd Couple.

ll

In 1971, All in the Family cast the first homosexual characters in prime time.

ll

In 1973, the same program dealt with the topic of rape.

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In 1991, the first scene of a woman kissing another woman was aired on an episode of L.A. Law.

ll

In 1992, an episode of Seinfeld dealt with one of the more taboo subjects at the time—masturbation.

ll

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were captured and ensconced into communal memory by the TV cameras as the terrorism unfolded; all-day coverage on most channels followed, descrying the event and assessing its apocalyptic significance.

ll

Late night programming, throughout the millennium, became a source of satire and of awareness-raising in the political arena. After Trump was elected in 2016, programs like Saturday Night Live and Real Time with Bill Maher became vehicles of political opposition and resistance to the ideology espoused by Trump. At the same time, some media outlets, such as Fox News presented an opposite view. TV was the main medium of political debate.



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With the advent of satellite transmission, television has also become a powerful medium for inducing radical social, moral, and political changes in cultures across the world. When asked about the stunning defeat of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, the Polish leader Lech Walesa was reported by the newspapers as having said that it “all came from the television set,” implying that television had undermined the stability of the communist world’s relatively poor and largely sheltered lifestyle with images of consumer delights seen on TV programs and commercials. The basic theme of the fascinating studies collected by Irwin, Conard, and Skoble (2001) on The Simpsons and Philosophy is that the Simpsons uses irony in order to probe the meaning of politics and social issues. In effect, TV has been a major source of representing contrasting views on social values and their ideological underpinnings. Democracies require comedic irony to thrive since it allows people to laugh at the foibles of those in power, thus taming their ability to exert mind control over society.

TV as a social text TV is a social text. This can be defined as an overarching text from which a culture extracts meaning for its daily life routines. To see what this means, it is useful to step back in time with one’s imagination to a village in medieval Europe. What would daily life have been like in that era? How would one have organized it? What social text, in effect, would one have been likely to live by?

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As history records, daily life schemes in the era were informed and guided by a religious social text. Residual elements of this text are still around today. Religious dates such as Christmas and Easter, for instance, are still regularly planned yearly events around which many people in our society organize social activities. In medieval Europe, the religious social text regulated life on a daily basis. In that era, people went to church regularly, lived by strict moral codes derived from the religious text, and listened conscientiously to the admonitions and dictates of clergymen. The underlying subtext was that each day brought one closer and closer to one’s true destiny—salvation and an afterlife with God. Living according to the text no doubt imparted a feeling of security, emotional shelter, and spiritual meaning to people’s lives. After the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, the religious social text came gradually to be replaced by a more secular form of textuality. Today, unless someone has joined a religious community or has chosen to live by the dictates of a religious text, the social text by which people in general live is hardly a religious one. We organize our day around work commitments, social appointments, and so on that have hardly anything to do with salvation; and only at those traditional “points” in the calendar (Christmas, Easter, etc.) do we synchronize our secular text with the more traditional religious one. The secular social text necessitates partitioning the day into “time slots.” This is why we depend so heavily upon such devices as clocks, watches, agendas, appointment books, calendars, and so on. We would be desperately lost without such things. In this regard, it is relevant to note that in his great 1726 novel, Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1667– 1745) satirized the tendency of people to rely on the watch to organize their daily routines—the Lilliputians were baffled to note that Gulliver did virtually nothing without consulting his watch! Like Gulliver, we need to know continually “what time it is” in order to carry on with the normal conduct of our daily life. The textual organization of the day is hardly ever conscious. If we started to reflect upon the value of our daily routines, it is likely that we would soon start to question them and eventually to abandon them. This does indeed happen in the case of those individuals who have decided to “drop out” of society, that is, to live their lives outside of the dictates of social textuality. Now, since the 1950s, when it entered the social scene, TV became almost instantly the medium through which a secular social text was delivered, and through which people gleaned information about life. If one peruses the daily TV listings and starts classifying the programs into morning, noon, and evening slots, one will get an idea of what this means. With cable television and satellite dishes, the range of programming offered would, at first, appear to be a broad and random one. But a closer critical look at the listings will reveal a different story.

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Consider morning programming. Virtually all the networks start off their daily fare of offerings with several stock types of shows. These are, invariably, information programs (news, weather, sports), children’s shows, exercise programs, and (later in the morning) talk and quiz shows. There is very little digression from this menu. One may, of course, subscribe to a cable movie channel or to some special-interest channel to suit one’s fancy. But, as ratings research has shown, most people are inclined to watch the regular fare of morning programs. The news and fitness programs cater to working people; children’s shows to young children; and the talk, quiz, and information programs to stay-at-home people in need of stimulation, recreation, or relaxation. The morning part of the TV text changes somewhat on weekends, reflecting the different kinds of social requirements associated with Saturdays and Sundays. But on weekday mornings “Wake up people” is the underlying subtext. “Here’s what you need to know,” blurt out the newscasters. “You need to get into shape,” exclaim the fitness instructors. “You’re bored and need to gossip, so tune in to meet people with their weird or heart-wrenching stories,” bellow the talk show hosts. In the same way that the morning prayers reassured medieval people that their life was meaningful, so too does morning TV assure us that our busy lives have sense and purpose. In the afternoon the primary viewing audience is made up of stay-at-home people. Rather than go out and chitchat or gossip, as did medieval people, we do virtually the same thing by peering daily into the complicated lives of people on afternoon talk shows. They are a fixed part of daily life, putting us on intimate terms with the private lives of common folk. Talk shows and interview programs allow modern-day people to reveal and confess their “sins” in public. A large viewing audience can thus participate cathartically in other people’s acts of self-revelation and repentance. As Stern and Stern (1992: 123) write, talk shows “are a relief in the sense that it is always nice to see people whose problems are worse than yours.” The afternoon is thus a time slot for moral issues, acted out upon a media stage that has replaced the pulpit as the platform from which they are discussed and where “sin” is condemned publicly. TV hosts, like medieval priests, comment morally upon virtually every medical and psychological condition known to humanity. The third part of the TV text has traditionally been called “prime time,” the period in the evenings, from about 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., when most people are home to watch TV. It is significant that the prelude to evening programming is, as it was for the morning time slot, the “news hour.” After this, eclectic programming commences for a couple of hours, with sitcoms, adventure programs, documentaries, movies, and the like. The 1980s also introduced soap operas into this time frame, but with only limited success. Prime-time programming meshes fictional narrative with moral and social messages for the

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entire family. Documentary programs in particular showcase real-life events, often bolstered by dramatic portrayals of these events, so that appropriate moral lessons can be learned. Prime time is followed by “late night” programming—a kind of coda to the daily text. There was very little for medieval people to do past the early evening hours. If they did not go to bed early, then they would talk in village gatherings or else pray. But in contemporary consumerist societies, when the kids are safely in bed, TV programs allow viewers to indulge all sorts of interests. One can fantasize about virtually anything on TV with social impunity. Needless to say, there is now much choice, given the huge number of specialty channels that are available. But, as it turns out, these channels offer more specialized ways to become engaged in the TV social text. For example, if one is a lover of cuisine, one will of course have the opportunity to satisfy this love by watching a food channel. However, this does not change the overall structure and cohesiveness of TV textuality. Specialty channels provide the same kinds of options that specialized books do. One can immerse oneself in any hobby or subject area by taking out the appropriate books from a library. But this in no way impugns the general reading preferences in the culture. So too, the presence of specialty channels on TV in no way alters the basic structure of how TV delivers its social textuality.

TV tropes Given the increasing diversity of consumerist societies, it is little wonder that the TV social text has become similarly diverse. There are now specialty channels for sports, movies, and music enthusiasts, for instance. But one thing has remained constant, TV is the locus where tropes are forged, developed, and eventually discarded. Consider, as a case-in-point, the trope of fatherhood that TV constructed and changed over the years. Sitcoms of the 1950s like Father Knows Best, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet sculpted the father figure to fit the requirements of the traditional patriarchal family structure. Therefore, most of these early sitcoms painted the family in a rosy-colored fashion. The father was in charge, with his wife working behind the scenes to maintain harmony through subservience. This mythology of fatherhood reflected the social mind-set of the 1950s. TV reinforced it and gave it a narrative form for people to take in on a weekly basis, allowing them to evaluate their own family situations in terms of the trope it enfolded. There were two notable exceptions to this as mentioned several times: The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, both of which revolved around strong-willed wives who were, in effect, precursors of later TV feminist char-

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acters. But, in general, the subtext or trope to the 1950s TV sitcom was the conceptual metaphor: father = know-all and be-all. This was the signification system that was created for weekly consumption and against which people monitored their own family lives. In the 1960s and early 1970s the signification system was changed drastically, and the trope was changed to reflect new times. The TV father was becoming more and more a ludicrous character. The sitcom that reflected this new subtext effectively was All in the Family. The North American continent was divided, ideologically and emotionally, into two camps—those who supported the views and attitudes of the TV father, Archie Bunker, a staunch defender of the Vietnam War, and those who despised the war and thus the persona of Archie Bunker. What was happening inside the TV Bunker family was apparently happening in families across the continent. North American society had entered into a period of emotional turmoil and bitter debate over such controversial issues as war, racism, the role of women in society, and the hegemony of the patriarchal family. The new conceptual metaphorical subtext that was informing the sitcoms of the late 1960s and early 1970s was: father = opinionated, ludicrous character. Its symbolic characterization was Archie Bunker. The total deconstruction of the 1950s mythology of fatherhood took place in sitcoms from the 1980s and 1990s. A typical example was Married with Children—a morbid parody of fatherhood and of the nuclear family. The father on this program, Al Bundy, was little more than a physical brute, a reprehensible character who was hardly deserving of the title of father. Indeed, as the name of the sitcom suggested, he was merely “married” and who just happened to have “children,” just as shallow as he was—Bud, his boorish, sex-crazed son, and Kelly, his empty-headed and over-sexed daughter. There was no sugarcoating in that sitcom. Married with Children was implanted on a new parodic subtext: the father = moron. The deconstruction of patriarchy and the alpha male trope of previous eras culminated with the arrival of Seinfeld in the 1990s (as already mentioned) and then of sitcoms such as The Big Bang Theory. The television programs of the 1950s and 1960s had built up a specific mythology of fatherhood. That mythology was challenged not only by All in the Family, but by programs such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Maude, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Cagney and Lacey, and others that portrayed strong, independent women who were attempting to survive, socially and professionally, in a world that was disassembling patriarchal structures. By the late 1980s the deconstruction of the previous sitcom code based on these structures continued, extending into the millennium. The lesson to be learned from studying the TV medium is that it is both a means for sustaining open-minded discussion in an indirect way but also

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a means for sustaining passivity and acceptance of what occurs through the screen. McLuhan always foresaw danger in such media. The mass media may make us mere “spectators,” inclined to abrogate our responsibility to think and act independently, thus debilitating true democracy and meaningful discourse. As Noam Chomsky (2002: 16) put it, paraphrasing the American social critic and journalist Walter Lippmann (1922): Now there are two “functions” in a democracy: The specialized class, the responsible men, carry out the executive function, which means they do the thinking and planning and understand the common interests. Then, there is the bewildered herd, and they have a function in democracy too. Their function in a democracy, Lippmann said, is to be “spectators,” not participants in action. But they have more of a function than that, because it’s a democracy. Occasionally they are allowed to lend their weight to one or another member of the specialized class. In other words, they’re allowed to say, “We want you to be our leader.” That’s because it’s a democracy and not a totalitarian state. That’s called an election. But once they’ve lent their weight to one or another member of the specialized class they’re supposed to sink back and become spectators of action, but not participants.

McLuhan always saw the evolution of humanity optimistically, maintaining that people can always become active and express themselves freely and, in fact, challenge the leadership. So, while Chomsky may have a valid point, in the end we use the media to suit our own preferences and viewpoints, as the history of TV has saliently showed.

Further reading Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang. This is the classic semiotic text examining the effects of the mass media on the human mind and modern societies. Barthes argues that modern mass cultures and media such as TV recycle ancient mythic themes that bear on how they will be unconsciously processed. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotexte. Baudrillard argues that an unconscious “simulacrum” has emerged in the modern world, whereby contemporary people can no longer distinguish, or want to make a distinction, between reality and fantasy. This has been engendered by screens such as the TV one.

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Chapter 7 The computer, the internet, and artificial intelligence The greatest difference between the cross-references in the Bible and the links on the World Wide Web is the difference between words written on parchment or paper in books that were meant to last forever and words written on the transient phosphorescence of a computer screen, where they will soon be effaced by others. This may or may not be the same contrast, written down 1,900 years ago, between the wise man who built his house upon rock and the foolish man who built his house upon sand. —Edward Mendelson (b. 1946)

A

s we saw in the opening chapter, by the middle part of the twentieth century, the great advances made in the field of computer technology had started to radically transform systems and modes of mass communications and thus to shape cultural signifying orders throughout most of the world. By the century’s end, the computer had become interconnected with all aspects of daily life, giving rise to the Digital Galaxy, as it has been called in this book—although it could easily have been called “Babbage’s Galaxy” after the person who invented the first true computer, Charles Babbage (1791– 1871). Today’s personal computers, mobile devices, digital tablets, and the like can store the equivalent of myriad books. Within seconds, anyone can gain access to an enormous store of human information through Google or other search engines. Almost every text we consider meaningful or functional has been transferred to computer storage systems. Print technology opened up the possibility of founding a world civilization, computer technology has put the finishing touches on that possibility. However, nothing is new, so to speak, under the new digital sun. Today, the same signification systems are employed in the delivery of messages by the mass digital media. Moreover, the written word continues to be a cornerstone of contemporary culture—a primary medium through which knowledge is encoded and transmitted, albeit in new multimodal and hypertextual ways.

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From this perspective, it is more accurate to say that the Digital Galaxy is an extension, or outgrowth, of the Gutenberg Galaxy. Indeed, it could never have been brought into existence without the printed book, for the science behind the computer was made possible by scientific knowledge recorded and preserved in books. Mass communication systems have converged in the Digital Galaxy, as mentioned throughout this book. In this galaxy the reception and decipherment of mediated messages are coming more and more under the direct control of receivers, who have before them an infinite array of options. But all this comes with a caveat. The senders of messages have never had so many media tools at their disposal to persuade receivers. As we shall see in the next chapter, advertisers, for instance, have at their fingertips a host of new technological gadgets that they can use to strengthen their goal of “getting the message out.” On this leg of our journey through the mediascape, we stop to look at computer mediation. The goal of media semiotics in this domain is not so much to look at the signification systems that have been transferred to digital form. Rather, the goal is to focus on the new “digital signifiers,” that is, on the new modes of encoding, storing, and retrieving texts of all kinds. A second topic of concern is the emerging metaphorical concept of the mind = the machine which has surreptitiously started to gain unconscious acceptance by society at large, as advances in AI have made ways of doing things more easily with the help of AI devices. AI is not only capable of imitating, but actually performing, human mental activities (problem-solving, inferencing, speaking, etc.). Some AI researchers believe that soon AI will be equal to natural intelligence and even surpass it. The computer chips, called silicon neurons, will eventually allow computers to mimic with a high degree of fidelity the complex functions of brain cells. Using analog technology, the transistors in these chips emulate nerve-cell membranes in order to operate at the speed of neurons. AI is perhaps the most powerful mediating device ever invented. It constitutes a central theme in any study of new media.

Computer mediation The first general-purpose all-electronic computer was built in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania by the American engineer John Presper Eckert, Jr. (1919–95) and the American physicist John William Mauchly (1908– 80). Called ENIAC, for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the

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machine could perform several hundred multiplications per minute. Its overall design constituted the blueprint for modern-day computers. The development of transistor technology and its use in computers in the late 1950s made it possible to manufacture smaller, faster, and more versatile computing machines. Late in the 1960s the integrated circuit was introduced which, by the mid-1980s, made the ownership of a computer affordable for virtually everyone. At first, the personal computer was essentially a sophisticated typewriter. Computers amplified the functions of print writing considerably—namely storage, preservation, and text-making versatility. The spread of computers and the AI field has extended and amplified human mediation infinitely. In so doing, however, AI media have spawned a new form of magic that induces us to believe that our machines are able not only to replace us but also to become more intelligent than us, as will be discussed in this chapter. McLuhan warned against this deceptive belief, since the computer, like the book, or any other medium, is a human artifact, and thus cannot replace the mind that made it, as various AI researchers claim. As he put it: “Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly” (McLuhan 1972: 109).

Historical sketch The history of the computer began, actually, in 1623 when a relatively unknown German scientist named Wilhelm Schikard invented a machine that could add, multiply, and divide. In 1642, the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62) invented a machine that was capable of carrying out many more arithmetical operations. Pascal built fifty copies of his machine, most of which were intended to serve as curiosities in parlors of the wealthy and, thus, gain Pascal fame and perhaps a little wealth. Shortly thereafter, the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) refined Pascal’s machine, thus establishing the basic operational principles of “computing” machines, as these raw forerunners of modern-day electronic computers were named. In the early nineteenth century French inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard established the basic principles of computer programming with his invention of the loom, a device that was designed to run automatically by means of punched cards which programmed patterns into it that were then converted into woven fabrics by the machine. Incidentally, Jacquard’s technological invention nearly cost him his life. He was forced to flee from the city of Lyon, pursued by hostile and belligerent weavers who feared their jobs were

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in jeopardy because of his despised invention. Jacquard’s loom nevertheless survived the assault, and is still used today, especially in the manufacturing of furniture fabrics. It had all the basic features of the modern-day computer: ll

a program (or set of instructions) that could be inputted into the machine;

ll

punched cards which functioned as a primitive memory system;

ll

the operations that the cards activated to bring about a required output.

Another early computer was the Difference Engine, designed in the 1820s by British mathematician and scientist Charles Babbage. The machine had the potential to solve mathematical problems involving numbers with up to twenty-decimal places. Babbage also made plans for another machine, the Analytical Engine, which he claimed would perform many complex arithmetical operations automatically. However, Babbage’s lack of political skills kept him from obtaining the funds that he required to build it. It was Augusta Ada Byron (1815–52), daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron and a personal friend and student of Babbage, who developed the appropriate programs to run Babbage’s Analytical Engine. This led to the naming of its programming language as Ada, in her honor. Although the Analytical Engine was never finished, its key concepts, such as the capacity to store instructions, the use of punched cards, and the ability to print output, provided the blueprint for building modern-day computers. American inventor Herman Hollerith (1860–1929) took the first concrete step toward the modern-day computer when he combined the use of Jacquard’s punched cards with devices that electronically read them. Hollerith’s “electronic computer” was used for the 1890 US census, making the computational time needed to process data much shorter than the time previously needed for hand counts. Hollerith’s Company eventually merged with other companies in 1924 to become International Business Machines, or IBM. The next major step came in 1936, when British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–54) built a machine that could process equations without human direction. The machine (now known as a Turing machine) resembled an automatic typewriter that used symbols instead of letters. Turing intended the device to be used as a “universal machine” that could be programmed to duplicate the function of any other existing machine. In the same decade, American mathematician Howard Aiken (1900–73) developed the Mark I calculating machine, which was built by IBM. Aiken’s computer used relays and electromagnetic components to replace mechanical components, and later vacuum tubes and solid-state transistors (tiny electrical switches) to manipulate the binary numbers in its program. Aiken

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subsequently introduced his computer device to the university community, establishing the first computer science program at Harvard University. And it was in a university setting that the last touches on the blueprint for the construction of a true multipurpose electronic computer were put. At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, it was the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann (1903–57) who finally built a computer with the capacity to solve problems in mathematics, meteorology, economics, and hydrodynamics. Von Neumann’s 1945 Electronic Discrete Variable Computer (EDVAC) was the first computer to use a program stored entirely within its memory. In the same year, Mauchly and Eckert (mentioned above) built ENIAC at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. ENIAC was used initially for military purposes, such as calculating ballistic firing tables and designing atomic weapons. Eckert and Mauchly eventually formed their own company, which was subsequently bought by the Rand Corporation. Rand produced the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), which was used for a broad array of commercial computing tasks. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s refinements in integrated circuitry technology and in the manufacturing of tiny transistors led to the development of the modern microprocessor, a smaller and cheaper computer that could be built even for personal use. The invention was revolutionary and led to a true paradigm shift in society. The first of the so-called personal computers (PCs) was sold by Instrumentation Telemetry Systems. Their Altair 8800 appeared in 1975. It had 256 bytes of RAM. Refinements in the PC continued throughout the early 1980s. Graphical user interfaces were first developed by the Xerox Corporation, then later used successfully by the Apple Computer Corporation for its Macintosh computer. The first operating systems were not unlike the sophisticated operating systems in use today, such as Windows. They enabled computer users, unskilled in technology, to run programs and manipulate data in easy ways. The term “user-friendly” emerged to characterize the new computers. With the continued development of nano-technologies for the miniaturization of computer components, the new millennium has made powerful computational devices available to anyone and portable in one’s hand or wearable on a wrist or as eyeglasses. A smartphone today has the computational power of some of the biggest computers of the past. In 2016, the first quantum computer for common use was created. And in 2017 a program that uses algorithms imitating molecular structure was introduced in a limited way. The computer has clearly become a technologically sophisticated device that has become a part of everyday life. The automobile led to a redesign of the physical landscape; the computer has led to a redesign of the virtual mediascape.

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And computer mediation has changed worldview, mind-set, and behavior, leading all of us to anticipate constant change and newness. In the Digital Galaxy, the rapidity of technological change is the norm, not the exception. In 1965, semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors contained on a computer chip would double every year. This is now known as “Moore’s Law” and it has proven to be realistic. The number of transistors and the computational speed of microprocessors seems to increase constantly. Components continue to shrink in size and are becoming faster, cheaper, and more versatile. Nonetheless, there are physical limits to technology; and we may be approaching them. Computers have made the dream of easy and efficient long-distance communication and information storage concrete realities. Unfortunately, as computer use becomes more widespread, so do the opportunities for misuse. Computer hackers—people who illegally gain access to computer systems—often violate privacy and can tamper with or destroy records, and even influence politics and social events. Programs called viruses or worms can replicate and spread from computer to computer, erasing information or causing computer malfunctions. New ethical issues also have arisen, such as how to regulate material on the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The personal computer American computer designers Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, working out of their garage, created the Apple II in 1977. This was one of the first PCs to incorporate a color video display and a keyboard that made the computer easy to use. Jobs and Wozniak later founded Apple Computer Corporation. In 1984 the first Apple Macintosh was manufactured. That machine featured a graphical user interface (GUI), a visual-based system for representing computer commands and data on the screen. The Macintosh GUI combined icons (pictures that represent files or programs) with windows (boxes that contain an open file or program). A pointing device known as a mouse controlled information on the screen. The Macintosh user interface made computers easy and fun to use, eliminating the need to type in complex commands. PCs have since become as intrinsic to the system of everyday life as automobiles and TV sets. PCs now enable artists to create images. Musicians use them for composing and recording music. Businesses keep track of their finances and forecast performance using PCs. Journalists, students, instructors, and many more “print-based” professionals can now compose their verbal texts on portable PCs and electronically communicate them to others from remote locations. Many people work at home and communicate with fellow workers with their PCs—a practice known as telecommuting. PCs can

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also be used to interface with worldwide communication networks in order to find information on any subject.

Hypertextuality As discussed briefly in Chapter 3, the computer has introduced a new form of textuality known as hypertextuality. Reading a printed page is, at the level of the signifier (i.e., of deciphering the actual signs on the page), a one-dimensional process, since it consists in decoding the individual words and their combinations in sentences in the framework of a specific signification system or code (a novel, a dictionary, etc.). Information of any specific sign in the text must be sought out physically: for example, if one wants to follow up on a reference in the text, one has to do it physically by consulting other printed texts. As opposed to the linear textuality of paper books, hypertextuality permits the user to browse through related topics, regardless of the presented order of the topics. The links are often established both by the author of a hypertext document and by the user, depending on the intent of the document. But hypertextuality has not changed the basic “print code” for making written texts. It has simply amplified it by introducing various powerful elements into it, including instant linkage and multimodal features of composition. Hypertextuality does not impugn the basic structure of written texts. In writing a computer hypertext, the author must still lay out ideas in a linear fashion, according to the writing practices of the relevant language, and then choose which ones can be highlighted for clicking. Interpreting any text involves three types of processes. First, it entails the ability to access the actual contents of the text at the level of the signifier, that is, the ability to decode its words, images, and so on. Only someone possessing knowledge of the codes (verbal and nonverbal) with which the text has been assembled can accomplish this. The second referential capacity entails knowledge of how the X = Y relation unfolds in the specific text, that is, how the text (X) generates its meanings (Y) through a series of internal and external signification processes. Finally, various contextual factors constrain the interpretant, such as what the individual decoder will get from it, what the intent of the author was, and so on. The integration of these referential dimensions makes possible the extraction of a meaning from the text.

Technological tribalism Technologically, the new media based on the computer and the Internet have led to the amalgamation or blending of mass communications and informa-

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tion systems into an overarching digital modality that now undergirds the entire mediascape. This has led to paradigm shifts in social and individual consciousness. Indeed, if our interconnected computer-mediated world were to break down then most of our daily routines would also break down. For instance, if computers or Internet services are down at, say, an airport, then flights and operations will be suspended. Only a few decades ago this would not have been the case, as airports functioned without computers. All this shows that, once a technology is introduced, the world changes. Interconnected mass communication systems based on computer mediation produce a form of cognition that has been called the “communal brain” (as will be discussed below) that is leading to a form of technological tribalism, whereby if any message within the network of possibilities emerges, we are instantly drawn to it, even if it does not concern us. Like living in a tribal context, privacy is no longer a value; we desire more and more to know what everyone else is doing. Moreover, we are constantly involved in carrying out tasks that would have been inconceivable in the past, projecting ourselves into contact with anyone, anywhere, as if we were truly living in a tribal context where the polyphony of voices, as Bakhtin (1981) called them, draws all of us in. Through the convergence of all forms of communication, whereby social media, mobile media, traditional media (telephone), and other relevant media are part of the polyphonic structure of daily interaction, the computer has brought about a sense of connectivity which is hardly optional, but immediate. Our perception of what communication entails is much different than how it was perceived in previous eras. This has brought about several mental states that, although present in the past, are now habitual. One of these is a kind of addiction to instant communication itself. When someone today hears the buzz or ring of a text message, the tendency is to react much like Pavlov’s dogs and respond to it instantly, no matter what else is going on at the time. But there is also a reaction against digital tribalism. As mobile devices, satellite systems, and other sophisticated digital technologies allow people to break down barriers of communication and interaction of the past, there is a renewed strong desire in people to live in the “real” world, as can be seen by phenomena such as mass tourism—indicating arguably that people now want to meet each other in the flesh rather than on screens. This may be an over-simplification, but it is certainly a plausible hypothesis. The desire to connect with others is, perhaps, a stronger motivation for rampant tourism than higher levels of affluence among people. Indeed, the more computer mediation is used to conduct everyday affairs, the more people seem to resort to, or at least desire, more basic real-world forms of interaction. The paradox of everyday life in the global village is, as McLuhan often pointed out, that it engenders both “individualism” and “tribalism” at once. As he so aptly put it, in his own inimitable way: “The tribaliz-

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ing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community” (McLuhan 1985: 60).

The Internet As discussed briefly in the opening chapter, in the late 1960s the US Department of Defense created ARPANET to keep its computers secure in the event of war or natural disaster. Soon after, universities and other knowledge-based institutions created their own networks. These eventually merged with ARPANET to form the Internet in 1969. ARPANET made it possible to transfer data over specially equipped phone lines and satellite links. When the National Science Foundation connected universities and various research sites to ARPANET, the first functional electronic mail network was born. By 1981, a few hundred computers joined ARPANET, which gradually developed into an advanced network that came to be known as the Internet. The Internet was very complicated to use at first; to access it, one had to learn a complicated series of commands. The breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955) invented the World Wide Web, which facilitated Internet access and use. The arrival of browsers in 1993 made Internet use even easier. No other technology in the history of human communications has made it possible for so many people to interact with each other as routinely, cheaply, and easily as has the Internet. Advances in WWW technologies have also led to a convergence of communications systems, which have led, in turn, to the crystallization of new Internet-based lifestyles, careers, and institutions. Today, the Web contains all types of documents, databases, and publications in all media forms (print, audio/oral, visual). The agglomeration of information it encompasses, and the speed and facility at which it can be accessed, have turned the Internet into the primary source of knowledge engineering, information storage, and information retrieval, replacing traditional institutions such as reference libraries and print encyclopedias. Through sites such as Facebook and YouTube the Web has also reshaped human social interaction. It has made “indie culture” and “meme culture” realities, since anyone can post music, writing, videos, movies, or photography on websites, blogs, and so on with the possibility that they will go viral. Ultimately, Berners-Lee’s invention has united the world in ways that could only have been achieved through political, philosophical, or military means in previous eras.

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The transfer of virtually all print databases onto the Internet has created a new way of viewing and organizing the classification of information. In the Gutenberg Galaxy, the basic system of classification—based on the physical nature of books—is alphabetic, for the simple reason that books can be organized on shelves in libraries (or referred to in, say, bibliographies) according to the first letter of the name of the author or title of the book. Subdivision systems were also developed for further organizing “book-contained” knowledge: for example, classification according to subject area, according to the nature of the information, and so on. One such system of cataloging books is the so-called Dewey Decimal Classification system, according to which all knowledge is divided into ten main classes, each of which is designated by a 100-number span. The first class, 000–99, includes general works, such as encyclopedias, newspapers, and periodicals; 100–99 is used for philosophy and psychology; 200–99 for religion and mythology; 300–99 for the social sciences; 400–99 for language; 500–99 for pure science; 600–99 for technology; 700–99 for the arts (including sports and recreations); 800–99 for literature; and 900–99 for history, geography, biography, and travel. Each main class is then subdivided into ten subclasses; for example, in the 800s, 810 is used for American literature, 820 for English literature, 830 for German literature, and so on. Each of these in turn is subdivided further: for example, in the 810s, 811 indicates American poetry and 813 fiction. Even more specific breakdowns, to indicate geographic location, chronological period, or the form of the material, are designated by numbers after a decimal point following the third digit. For example, 813.4 is used for American fiction from 1861 to 1900, and 813.46 indicates a work by, or about, the novelist Henry James. On the Internet, such an organizational framework has been expanded and modified in significant ways, given the kinds of information that are posted on websites. For instance, people can post their own messages, opinions, commentaries, and ideas on any subject imaginable, making any overarching framework for organizing information à la Dewey impracticable. Participants can share information quickly, despite geographical separation. In addition to changes in systems of classification, the Internet has also led to a rethinking of the notion of authorship or ownership of texts. Documents and programs can be downloaded so easily that with some manipulation any text can easily be appropriated and used as if it were one’s own. The Internet is leading, therefore, to a fundamental reevaluation of the notions of authorship and plagiarism. The introduction of the WWW has made it possible to include graphics, animation, video, and sound as part of textuality. The WWW contains countless documents, databases, bulletin boards, and electronic publications, such as newspapers, books, and magazines in all media forms (print, visual, etc.). The miasma of information and texts it contains made it immediately obvi-

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ous to Internet users, shortly after its introduction, that appropriate technology was needed for them to be able to locate specific types of information. This led to the development of uniform resource locator (URL) technology. Using software that connects to the Internet—called navigation or browser software—a computer operator can select a URL that contains information that anyone wants to access. The computer then contacts that address, making the information available to the operator. With millions of separate URLs, classification and indexing have clearly become critical Internet functions. Indexing services—located on the Internet itself—enable users to search for specific information by entering the topic that interests them on a search engine such as Google. In less than a second, the user has access to the required information.

The digital world The current world of digital communication, called Web 2.0, impels all of us to become more involved with one another. The new media have, indeed, become the new message—to paraphrase McLuhan. They have offset the individualistic and privatizing forces of the Print Age, allowing people to engage with each other in a more communal way. Even sources of authoritatively coded knowledge, such as encyclopedias, have now become open to the participation and collaboration of everyone, not just individual experts—as can be seen by the advent and spread of the various “wikis” on the Internet, which, going against all traditions of the past, allow for the collaborative editing of content by users. The advent of the Web 2.0 medium signals that the world is morphing gradually into a paradigmatically different one from any imaginable social system of the past. Take the case of signatures, which were significant in the Print Age. A signature is, of course, a person’s name written by that person. But more significantly, it is an identifying characteristic or mark of that person—an index of the Self. This view is implicit, of course, in such practices as handwriting analysis which claims to be able to detect personality characteristics in the form of the signature. Clearly, on an e-mail, a text message, and so on, the handwritten signature cannot be relayed as in the past. But the need to provide personal imprinting to messages has not disappeared. A kind of “e-signature” practice has emerged which identifies the subject of the e-mail in the style and idiosyncrasies of the language used. In effect, one can tell who the sender of an e-mail is by the type of titles of the e-mail message and by the nature of the message. The digital medium has hardly eliminated the need to convey the Self in the communication text. It has simply forced people to come up with different kinds of signifiers to do so.

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But all this has its setbacks. Over-reliance on computers has induced a mind-set that sees computers as intrinsic components of human processes. This became apparent on the threshold of the year 2000 when the “millennium bug” was thought to be a harbinger of doom. So reliant had people become on the computer that a mere technological problem—making sure that computers could read the new “00” date as “2000, and not “1900” or some other “00” date—was interpreted in moral and apocalyptic terms. That was striking evidence that computers had acquired connotative signification that far exceeded their original function as “computing machines.” Constant exposure to “virtual realities” in cyberspace, moreover, is leading surreptitiously and gradually to an entrenchment of a bizarre modern form of Cartesian “dualism,” the view that the body and the mind are separate entities. Computers allow users to move and react in a computer-simulated environment, manipulating virtual objects in place of real objects. Constant engagement in such environments is conditioning people more and more to perceive the body as separable from the mind. Contributing to this “disembodiment process” are VR devices, mentioned briefly in Chapter 6. As VR becomes more and more widespread, and less dependent on external devices, it will perhaps further entrench the process of disembodiment. So too will the continuing process of creating cyberplaces and cyberevents in cyberspace. Cyberspace is reshaping the world’s signifying orders, by turning upside down traditional ideas of human interaction, communication, representation, physical place, textuality, and even reality. In cyberspace, signifieds float around, so to speak, with no specific semiotic code in which to exist. They are “virtual signifieds” transmitted by a host of multimedia signifiers. What is emerging is a “cybersystem” without the usual constraints that traditional semiotic systems impose on representation and communication. According to Baudrillard (1998), digital media have put people in the position of having to rebuild signifying orders from the ashes of the “dead signs” of the “real” world. But, as it turns out, these new signs are not that much different from the old ones. So, Baudrillard predicts, in a short time “virtual communication” will become “real communication” again, as people begin to realize that their bodies are as much a part of creating signs as are their minds.

The tetrad and the Internet McLuhan developed four laws of media, which are synthesized under the rubric of the tetrad, and which are especially insightful in our Web 2.0 world. The laws are called amplification, obsolescence, reversal, and retrieval. A new technology will at first amplify some sensory, intellec-

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tual, or other human psycho-biological faculty. While one area is amplified, another is lessened or rendered obsolete, until it is used to maximum capacity whence it reverses its characteristics and is retrieved in another medium. A well-known, and now classic, example given by McLuhan is that of print technology, mentioned in several previous sections. Initially, it amplified the concept of individualism because the spread of print materials encouraged private reading, and this led to the view that the subjective interpretations of texts was a basic right of all people, thus rendering groupbased interpretants obsolete until it changed from a single printed text to mass-produced texts, leading to mutual readings, albeit typically displaced in time and space. This allowed for the retrieval of a quasi or secondary communal form of interpretation—that is, reading the same text connected readers in an imaginary way. These four laws can certainly be applied to understanding the contemporary Digital Age, which has amplified all aspects of communication and information access, rendering traditional print media practically obsolete or at least obsolescent. But print media are still around, having converged with digital media in new ways. Obsolescence does not mean elimination. There is always a historical flow to ideas, media, technologies, and the like. There is no sudden or abrupt interruption to the flow. So, in a basic sense, these laws can be used to describe how changes in signifying structures both mirror and lead to changes in expressivity, cognition, and worldview. A new sign system, such as contemporary emoji writing, does indeed amplify the ways in which we write messages (bolstering them visually and emotively), thus rendering purely phonetic writing obsolescent (in some ways). However, this is leading to a retrieval, and even revival, of traditional writing practices in various domains of social life, from the academic to the intellectual, as people realize the power of print literacy in many areas of contemporary life (Danesi 2016). The historical flow with print media has been rechanneled, not severed. The four laws were devised by McLuhan to explain salient patterns of change in human history that ensue from new technologies. They apply specifically to what a new technology or medium brings into the preexisting human world and what it does to that world. For McLuhan the terms technology and media are virtually synonymous—technologies are media that introduce amplifications and new ways of understanding the world. The effects and consequences of these laws are elaborated in detail in a book that McLuhan’s son, Eric, completed after his father’s death, titled Laws of Media (1988). In that book the notion of the tetrad is introduced, as a synthetic model to represent the operation of the four laws. The tetrad provides a framework for determining what changes tools, artifacts, and new media bring about in tandem. For example, applying the

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four laws to the Internet will show how that medium amplifies, obsolesces, retrieves, and reverses various features, traits, and so on: Amplifies ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Networking among denizens of cyberspace Decentralization of information sources Speed and range of information searches Access to the global village Access to connected intelligence systems Virtual communities e-systems (e-trade, e-books, etc.) Self-publishing Access to materials and information of all kinds

Reverses into ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Obsession with information itself Information overload Loss of affect Disorders of a new kind (addiction to technology) Loss of values associated with literacy Loss of sense of importance associated with traditional academic humanistic disciplines

Obsolesces ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Previous restrictions of time and space in communications National boundaries Face-to-face communication Single-source propaganda Privacy Copyright Censorship Print monopolies Retail merchandising Paper print technologies Reading print materials

Retrieves ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Writing and reading in new ways Tribalism Secondary orality (see below) Local activism New forms of interaction that actually retrieve the need to form cliques and groups

Any medium can thus be seen to have a vertical-horizontal modality; that is, it looks forward and back at the same time, amalgamating these two temporal dimensions into a flow that moves vertically and horizontally along a historical axis that resembles the Cartesian coordinate system—hence the configuration of the tetrad in the form of such a system with its four quadrants. The social-evolutionary implications are obvious—there is no future without the past and the past itself is constantly being retrieved in the present. So, to extend the analogy with the coordinate system, we can “plot” on the tetrad’s quadrants any “point” in relation to other points in it. So, when people talk about the obsession with information that the Internet has brought about, this can be mapped onto other points in the tetrad—namely the advent and appeal of new information sources, while at the same time retrieving the penchant for reading.

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Social media The main amplification that the Web 2.0 technologies have brought about is social interaction; hence the term social networks or social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that allow for people to keep in contact with each other and to disseminate ideas to each other easily, constantly, and interactively, without the constraints of time and space involved in vocal or face-to-face communication. It is assumed that the “friends” who are part of a social network share common interests or are connected in some socially meaningful way. Entry to a Facebook community, for instance, involves presenting a public profile (a selected synthesis of one’s autobiography, interests, achievements, etc.) and fitting in with the raison d’ê tre of the community. The first social network site, SixDegrees (sixdegrees.com), was launched in 1997. Users created profiles and “Friend lists.” It was closed down for a while, perhaps because the idea of a social network community was too new. Others emerged shortly thereafter, expanding the features of membership, such as allowing combinations of profiles, viewable materials, guest books, and diary pages. From 2001 to 2002, LinkedIn and Friendster made their debuts, followed by MySpace in 2003, catering primarily to musicians, teenagers, and college students. As is well known in 2004–05, Facebook was introduced, which had all the features of the previous sites, but added applications, allowing users to truly manage their profiles. With Facebook the Web 2.0 era was finally consolidated. At no other time in human history has it been possible for people to enter into regular contact with anyone they wish, joining communities that are not bound by the restrictions imposed by real-world communities. Entry to the latter is often constrained by geography (where people live), culture, and even language. Facebook has no such requirements. This has had many concrete implications for how societies now evolve. For example, the massive amount of personalized information that is available and distributed via social media has great value to the business world, causing many corporations to invest in these sites, where a single company may easily reach a target audience of millions. Social media are also used by scholars, scientists, medical doctors, and professionals of all kinds as channels for discussing ideas and exchanging research. In a phrase, social media have further solidified and expanded the connected intelligence structure of the global village. To cite McLuhan (in McLuhan and Zingrone 1997: 287): “As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of the automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’”

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Facebook Facebook is one of the most frequented social networking sites. It asks users to create a personal profile that includes biographical information, audiovisual supports (photos, videos, music, etc.), and a listing of preferences (hobbies, aesthetic tastes, etc.). Facebook was introduced in 2004 at Harvard University by student Mark Zuckerberg. By 2005, it had eclipsed Friendster. In 2006 Facebook opened its membership to anyone thirteen years of age or older. Microsoft Corporation bought a share in Facebook in 2007, making it available to anyone. It is now one of the most lucrative digital businesses, collecting revenue mainly from banner advertising and various other modes of e-business. Television networks, artists, and musicians now have Facebook sites for communicating with fans, followers, and audiences generally. The popularity of Facebook has been explored from many angles. Facebook is replacing the traditional forces that once shaped popularity, such as agents, record labels, and the like. Facebook and Twitter, and other social media sites, are where popularity is now constructed and embedded. Social network memes have replaced agents, radio announcers, TV producers, and the other previous promoters of popularity. Posting a funny photo is replacing shows such as TV’s Funniest Home Videos. Facebook has also converged with the traditional media. Fans of a TV program, a bestselling novel, a new movie, or some song, now use Facebook to promote it throughout the Internet. Facebook can start its own fads. On the official Facebook Lying Down Game page it is claimed that the idea to encourage lying down in random public places started on Facebook to become a temporary fad in 2012 before the Olympics. The question of why people expose themselves online, through profiles, photos, and other private artifacts, is a major one in the social sciences, especially given the fact that the fad effect of Facebook has subsided. Is Facebook replacing the confessional or psychoanalyst’s couch, allowing people to confess in public? Why do people desire to construct their identities on and through Facebook or other social media? These are just two of the relevant questions that the advent of Web 2.0 technology is raising. Perhaps, as some social media critics suggest, everyone has found a means for obtaining (again) those fifteen minutes of fame. Being popular or famous is a spreading obsession, perhaps spurred on by the presence of the like button on sites throughout the Internet. When the Internet came into wide use, it was heralded as bringing about a liberation from conformity and a channel for expressing one’s opinions freely. But this view of the Internet is fast becoming an anachronism. Counting the number of friends on Facebook is seemingly more crucial than venting one’s philosophical or aesthetic viewpoints. The Internet is being used more and

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more to construct a popular image of oneself, a construction process tied to rudimentary human needs—the need to present oneself in a favorable light to others, the need to confess oneself in public, the need to gossip, the need to stay connected to others, and so on. For this reason it has become addictive for many users, as they seek out other people’s reactions to their daily updated diaries. Echoing what the Frankfurt School scholars said about the Fordist world of mass-production culture in the pre-Internet era, it can be said that Facebook culture is built on the same promise of the attainment of temporary happiness. But, as individuals become more and more accustomed to the temporary joys or spasms of relief offered by Facebook, they are realizing how recurring, formulaic, and infantile most of Facebook’s possibilities really are, even if they continue to be active in it. The main reason for this may be that, having grown up in a Facebook universe, we may feel it is the only option available to us, being unable to imagine doing anything else—until something else will come along and make it obsolescent in line with McLuhan’s tetrad. The triumph of Facebook lies in its promise to allow human needs to be expressed individualistically, even though most users soon start to realize that its true force lies in the compulsive attachment it instills in them. In the past, social relations, enduring cultural traditions, and patterns of work, life, and leisure assured people that stable patterns of meaning and experience united them in real space. The Internet has shattered this assurance, forcing individuals to develop new strategies to manage the shocks of everyday life. Facebook has offered a broad range of utopian options for gaining control over meaning and experience, emancipating people from the bonds of traditional patterns of meaning-making. Yet under the spell of the new medium, these options have become strangely similar to those of the past at best, or degenerated into fetishized practices of self-enhancement. On the other hand, as the Frankfurt scholars hoped, maybe Facebook is the revolutionary tool that will finally jolt humans out of their intellectual and artistic lethargy and awaken in them the sense of individual power that is crucial for true creativity to occur in the first place. That is the paradox of the contemporary mediascape—it is both liberating and constraining the same time.

Twitter Twitter is a social networking site that was launched in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. The messages on Twitter are known as tweets—a terminology that is intended to suggest the sounds made by birds and thus, by association, the role of aviary communication both in terms of its perceived gentleness and its previous role in human communication (carrier pigeons). Tweets are inserted on a user’s profile page and delivered to subscribers known as followers, sug-

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gesting a kind of bird-pet relation between people. Twitter is essentially an SMS (short message service) service on the Internet, since it allows for text messaging to take place without text-messaging devices. As the site claims, Twitter sees itself more as an “information network” than a social networking site, although it incorporates both functions. Most tweets are conversational—exchanges between friends, associates, colleagues, and acquaintances. Despite what the company says, information is not the main attraction of Twitter; it is psychological, communicative, and social. Some have designated Twitter as a venue for social grooming, that is, for presenting oneself in a favorable way to others in order to gain attention and to gather “followers.” Institutions of various kinds, from NASA to universities, now use tweeting as a source of contact with clients and colleagues. Some critics claim that the twitterization of culture has changed how we think and react to information, as well as how we perceive interpersonal relations. It is suggested that the limited length of each tweet, the desire for followers, and the constant flow of tweets are all leading to a withdrawal from reflective communication and to an engagement in superficial exchanges. While this may be true, the critics may be missing the historical point that informal daily interaction has probably always been this way. Twitter has simply made it possible for people to enlarge the range of informal communication, not introduce it into social life. Twitter is now a kind of communal “mood indicator,” as Neuman (2014: 21) points out: Twitter is a rich source of information, and various applications have been used to search it. Twitter mood may even be used to predict the stock market. Mood or general sentiment (positive vs. negative) seems to be a powerful predictor despite its apparent simplicity.

If it is indeed possible to use Twitter and other social media to “mine sentiment” in mass behavior, then it would constitute strong supporting evidence for the communal brain construct. Anecdotal proof of this has been provided by the election of Donald Trump in the United States to the presidency. Trump uses Twitter habitually, almost obsessively, to connect with his so-called base of supporters. There is little doubt that the language style he employs and the content of the tweets “hits home” sentimentally with his supporters. As this shows, Twitter is allowing those in power to use the unconscious persuasive medium of tweets to ensconce their views in the political terrain.

YouTube YouTube is a video-sharing website, founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, that features videos posted by individuals as well as

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by musicians, artists, TV networks, and other professionals and institutions. It allows users to comment on and rate videos, transforming YouTube into a social networking site. They can also send YouTube video links to others. Today, YouTube also offers advertising, video diaries, made-for-YouTube music, channels, movies, educational materials, and the like. YouTube was purchased by Google in 2006, with a consequent burgeoning of viewership, a fact that forced television networks to use YouTube to promote their programs. In 2007, YouTube joined CNN for a series of presidential campaign debates in which users could post videos asking candidates questions. As Strangelove (2010) has argued, the YouTube phenomenon cannot be easily categorized in terms of traditional theories of media and popular culture. One can see an anonymous musician playing classical music in a clip that has been viewed over sixty million times. An inebriated person attempting to eat something also gets millions of views. A cat playing the piano goes viral. It is difficult to say what this tells us about YouTube, other than it has opened up the performance stage to virtually everyone and that anything captured on video will attract the interest of someone else somewhere in the world. In the Web 2.0 mediascape, made up of interactive social networks, the same constraints that characterize real-space communities are no longer valid. A new dynamic has emerged uniting people in virtual ways. Election outcomes, for example, are influenced as much by the chatter on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as they are by debates in auditoriums and by advertising via the traditional mass media. The new electronic environment in which our brain exists implies that it has become more and more reliant on blending patterns of understanding— including collage, pastiche, and bricolage. Collage is a word used in painting, describing a picture or design made by gluing pieces onto a canvas or another surface. Collage describes many websites. By arranging elements in a certain way, the website can create visual effects not possible with traditional printera techniques. The term bricolage emphasizes a unifying structure, not just an admixture of elements. It was introduced into anthropology by Claude Lé vi-Strauss (1962) to designate the style of many tribal rituals that mix various symbols and myths holistically in order to evoke magical feelings and a sense of communal harmony. The disparate elements become unified in the act of admixture itself. There is little doubt that bricolage describes the Web 2.0 universe perfectly. Finally, in painting pastiche refers to a mingling of elements intended to imitate or satirize another work or style. Many aspects of social media and especially YouTube involve pastiche. The jumble of images on sidebars and on social media generally is an example of how pastiche manifests itself in the mediascape today. The appropriate term mashpedia is actually employed on YouTube to characterize how pastiche manifests itself on that medium. A mashpedia is a kind of playlist that allows people to aggre-

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gate content from YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr, and the like. Similar pastiche-making texts are now available, including Kosmix, which collates content from Flickr, Google, Amazon, YouTube and many other sources. The Digital Galaxy is, clearly, where amalgams through collage, bricolage, and pastiche have led to a new overarching mashpedia textuality. This is why art and science occur alongside satirical and slapstick videos. In the past, connecting mathematics to, say, humor, would have been unthinkable (literally); now it is common. Analogies to art forms, discussions of math in comics are not only common, but also often de rigeur. A perfect example of this is how many videos on YouTube discuss the Fibonacci sequence, which has penetrated popular culture as well, being found in everything from The Da Vinci Code to a Criminal Minds episode (“Masterstroke”). Math is no longer abstract and pure, considered in isolation from the world; it is viewed as part of a mashpedia within the world.

Meme culture Overall, cyberspace has led to a “meme culture,” where trends come forth quickly and disappear just as quickly. This goes contrary to all the technologically supported cultures of the past—radio culture, cinema culture, television culture, and so on—which created the conditions for stabilizing certain trends. In meme culture, there is little or no stability—trends literally come and go. As we have seen several times, Roland Barthes (1957) argued that the constant craving for new things, new spectacles, new fads, new celebrities, and so on, is a state of mind fueled by marketplace culture. Obsolescence is, in such a culture, something to be avoided, whether it is the type of television set one has or the mobile digital device one has recently purchased. In the Internet Age, Barthes’ view seems to have become a fact as we are bombarded more and more by neo-fads, neo-styles, and neo-celebrities. The Internet has been a powerful democratizing force, giving everyone a voice and a locus for bringing to light new ideas, new artistic forms, and the like. But it has also given a powerful strident voice to faddishness and trendiness. As in all previous eras of human life, there needs to be a balance between the serious and the faddish, the ephemeral and the stable.

The computer and the mind In the mediascape, it is now a common thing to find robots, cyborgs, and other “intelligent” machines featured as heroes or villains, and possess-

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ing qualities that only the heroes and villains of myth and legend were once portrayed as embodying. The representation of machines as having human qualities and, vice versa, of humans being little more than biological machines has been a popular one in all media for some time. But the interest in intelligent machines is not limited to the media. In certain sciences of the mind, such as AI, the question is now raised with all sincerity if truly intelligent computers can be built to live alongside humans. This is why specific kinds of “smart” (AI) devices that interact with us on a daily basis, from smartphones to Google’s Alexa, are being constructed with the sole purpose of duplicating the complex functions of human thought. But, it is misguided, in my view, to assume a similarity between human and machine intelligence. The former grew out of lived experience and developed through historical forces; the latter has been literally invented by humans themselves. The belief that computers can think autonomously is really no more than a secular version of the philosophy known as animism—the view that there is a spirit in all things, animate and inanimate. The secular version can be called machinism. Given the importance of the computer in the Digital Galaxy, the belief in machinism is expanding daily, especially since media representations are constantly transmitting images of robots and cyborgs embodying all the qualities that were once considered uniquely human—altruism, spirituality, artistry, and so on. It is therefore relevant to discuss machinism in the context of the theme of the present chapter. In part, the idea of intelligent machines has been energized by the remarkable advances in the technology of computer hardware, software, and networks. In the Digital Galaxy, such technology reinforces the illusion that knowledge and information exist independently of their makers. But human signs are not equivalent to computational data that can be neatly classified as true or false. Rather, human signs are designed not only to convey information, but also to provide perspective, emotion, and other impenetrable aspects of human consciousness that machines will never be able to fathom. The following discussion is not based on ludditism. I welcome all technological changes that make life routines easier to carry out; but the notion that the machines that help us out, made by us, will become us and even surpass us is a difficult one to accept semiotically, as will be discussed here.

Machinism The science of AI is an offshoot of the technology of computers. It emerged in the middle part of the twentieth century to provide a technical symbolic language for modeling certain aspects of human cognition in computer software.

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One of its primary objectives is attempting to answer the question of what the human mind is and if it is possible to recreate it in the form of algorithms. This whole line of inquiry, however, begs the question of what the word mind designates in the first place. As a noun, it is used commonly to denote the faculty of thinking, reasoning, and acquiring and applying knowledge. As we saw in this book, the problem is that the denotative meanings of words can only be determined in reference to other meanings. The meaning of mind simply cannot be established in the absolute, but only in relation to other word structures and only in oppositional ways: for example, mind versus heart; mind versus body; and so on. From such oppositions we establish semiotically, what makes the mind unique in human terms. The mind-as-machine metaphor is just that—a metaphor. P. N. Johnson-Laird has identified three types of “minds as machines,” in his book Mental Models (1983: 24): 1 “Cartesian machines” that do not use symbols and lack awareness of themselves; 2 “Craikian machines” (after Craik 1943) that construct models of reality, but lack self-awareness; 3 “Self-reflective machines” that construct models of reality and are aware of their ability to construct such models. The computer software designed by AI engineers to simulate human mentality produces type (1) and type (2) forms of intelligence. But, at present, only human beings are capable of the type (3) form. Unlike a Cartesian or a Craikian machine, a human being is not only capable of constructing models of the mind, but is aware of doing so. AI theorists claim that type (3) awareness is definitely within the realm of computers leading to the singularity, as mentioned briefly in a previous section (Kurzweil 2005). The computer is one of our greatest intellectual achievements. It is an extension of rational intellect. As makers of objects and artifacts, we have finally come up with a technology that will eventually take over most of the arduous work of ratiocination and of habitual tasks, from driving a car to writing formulaic texts. In this regard, the caveat with regard to viewing the computer as a competitor issued eloquently by the psychologist Arnheim (1969: 73) in the late 1960s is still valid today: “There is no need to stress the immense practical usefulness of computers. But to credit the machine with intelligence is to defeat it in a competition it need not pretend to enter.” The belief of AI researchers that computers can become truly intelligent is not something that has crystallized in the Digital Galaxy. It is, as a matter of fact, an ancient one. In some Sumerian and Babylonian myths, for instance, there are descriptions of inanimate matter being brought to life. The modern form of machinism, however, traces its origin to the publication

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of Mary Shelley’s grotesque and terrifying 1818 novel Frankenstein (Chapter 3). Machinism has, ever since, become a modern-day mythology. This is why we talk of computers as if they were human—as being “infected” with “viruses”—and why so many robot characters are found in media narratives today. AI and the media have, in a fundamental sense, joined forces. Both have contributed to inculcating the popular view of computers as counterparts of human mentality. As Howard Gardner (1985: 6) has aptly pointed out, from its very outset AI has been shaped by the view that there exists a level of mind wholly separate from the biological or neurological, on the one hand, and the sociological or cultural, on the other, that works like an electronic computer. Even though not all AI scientists think in this way, this “machinist bias” is, as Gardner (1985: 6) phrases it, “symptomatic” of the whole enterprise. By developing computer programming theory, AI scientists insist that everything from problem-solving to emotions and creativity will eventually become intrinsic features of machine intelligence. The basis for this view is, clearly, the concept of machine, which is a mathematical abstraction tracing its roots to the work of the mathematician Alan Turing (Chapter 5). Turing showed that four simple operations on a tape—move to the right, move to the left, erase the slash, print the slash— allowed a computer to execute any kind of program that could be expressed in a binary code (as, for example, a code of blanks and slashes). As long as one could specify the steps involved in carrying out a task and translating them into the binary code, the Turing machine—now called a computer program—would be able to scan the tape containing the code and carry out the instructions. Although Turing himself was well aware of the limitations of his notion, openly admitting that it could never come close to emulating the more spiritual aspects of human consciousness, to many AI theorists his clever insights suggested that humans were, in effect, special kinds of protoplasmic machines, whose cognitive states, emotions, and social behaviors were not only representable in the form of computer-like programs, but that mechanical machines themselves could eventually be built to think, feel, and socialize like human beings. Even concepts such as the soul or the spirit are really no more than fanciful notions for referring to the intelligence of an advanced Turing machine in the mortal brain and body of an animal. Consciousness is really no more than a consequence of the workings of a biological program that allows humans to express and modify the emotions of their brains and the impulses of their bodies. The AI movement is really a contemporary outgrowth of the “Cartesian project” that ushered in the modern era of mechanistic philosophy. According to Descartes, all human problems, whether of science, law, morality, or politics could eventually be solved by developing a universal method of phi-

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losophy based on logical computation. This project seemed realizable when the engineer Claude Shannon demonstrated that information of any kind, in both animal and mechanical systems of communication, could be described in terms of binary choices between equally probable alternatives—as we saw in the opening chapter. By the 1950s, enthusiasm was growing over the possibility that computers could eventually carry out human thinking processes, since the brain was thought to be really no more than a Turing machine operating on the basis of its own kind of biological binary code. By the 1960s, phenomenal advances in computer technology seemed to make Descartes’ dream a reality. But it is beyond the capacities of machines to feel, imagine, invent, dream, and construct rituals, art works, and the like. These are derivatives of bodily and affective experiences. AI theories and models of consciousness can perhaps give us precise information about the nature of the formal properties of mental states; but they tell us nothing about how these states were brought about in the first place. In a fundamental sense, machinism is a product of conceptual metaphorical thinking: the mind = a machine (Chapter 2). This is not to imply that technological discoveries are purely metaphorical and thus imaginary. On the contrary, technology is a product of human ingenuity; metaphor is a cognitive strategy for understanding that very ingenuity.

Singularity theory The belief that AI will outdo natural intelligence was propounded concretely by Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, and developed ever since by Kurzweil and a cadre of AI researchers. Simply put, this is the view that there will come a moment in time when AI will have progressed to the point of greater-than-human intelligence. That moment will occur when an “upgradable” intelligent software becomes self-sufficient without human intervention, capable of self-improvements, with each new self-improvement causing an intelligence explosion that will, in turn, lead to a powerful artificial super-intelligence that will surpass all human intelligence. Kurzweil predicts that the singularity should occur around 2045, when AI technologies will be so advanced that they cannot be stopped by human intervention. Self-awareness is tied to language. The “inner speech” that psychologists talk about is a manifestation of this unique state of mind (Vygotsky 1962, 1978). Also, unlike a machine, a human being can construct tools, artifacts, and technologies at will in order to extend its biological capacities; machines have to be programmed specifically to do so, lacking the imagination as a faculty in and of itself. Singularity proponents claim that they have gone

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beyond anthropomorphism, and that the software in a machine is reaching the point where the interconnections made within the software will generate self-awareness. McLuhan actually saw the humor in all this. As he satirically put it: “The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb” (McLuhan 1968: 55). In Understanding Media, McLuhan remarked that we love our technologies because they are uniting forces: “Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus” (McLuhan 1964: 105). Given the spread of the AI mind-set throughout the current mediascape, it is relevant to take a step back and look at how we have ourselves imagined the origin of human intelligence. One relevant story is the myth of Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a Titan and a benefactor to humanity. He and his brother Epimetheus were given the task of creating humans and animals, providing them with the endowments they would need to survive. Epimetheus gave the various animals gifts of courage, strength, swiftness, and feathers, fur, and other protective coverings. Prometheus then fashioned humans in a nobler form enabling them to walk upright. After he went to heaven and stole fire from the gods to give to humanity, he incurred the wrath of Zeus, who thus had Prometheus chained to a rock, where he was constantly preyed upon by an eagle until he was freed by the hero Hercules. The moral of the story is a relevant one—fire was the technology that endowed humans with sapience and liberated them from their animal heritage. Without it, they would have remained at the level of instinctual life. Technology, in other words, liberated humans from the constraints of biology, allowing them to live through a world of their own making. Ascribing human qualities to computers has become so widespread that it is only a small step to believing that they are indeed forms of new Promethean life. This harbors within it a mythical allure that leads to psychological verisimilitude—namely the sense that in making our machines in our own image, they might someday become truly like us. It is no coincidence that the myth of Prometheus has a final chapter to it—the story of Pandora. Zeus sent the beautiful Pandora to Earth to counteract the blessing of fire, which, to reiterate, Prometheus had stolen. The gods gave Pandora a box, warning her never to open it. Her curiosity overcame her, however, and she ended up opening it, releasing innumerable plagues and sorrows into the world. Only Hope, the one good thing the box had contained, remained to comfort humanity in its misfortunes. In Sumerian and Babylonian myths there were accounts of the creation of life through the animation of clay (Watson 1990: 221). The ancient Romans

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were fascinated by automata. Since the turn of the twenty-first century the quest to animate nonbiological machines has been relentless. It has captured the imagination of a large segment of our image-makers. Movie robots and humanoid machines have all the attributes of gods. As Watson (1990: 228) notes, theories like the singularity may be “a premonition of disaster and nothing more than simple incredulity.” Today, humans may indeed be experiencing a “feeling of astonishment” at finding themselves for the first time ever “at the center of everything” (Watson 1991: 228). As William Barrett (1986: 160) remarks, if a machine will ever be built with the features of the human mind it would have “a curiously disembodied kind of consciousness, for it would be without the sensitivity, intuitions, and pathos of our human flesh and blood. And without those qualities we are less than wise, certainly less than human.”

Big brother is watching There is one more danger that computer-based technologies have actualized—namely the fact that Big Brother is always watching us, as George Orwell had so frighteningly predicted in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The fact that we no longer care that we are being watched constantly is evidence of this actualization. Data on all of us is being constantly compiled for whatever reason through Waze, Google Maps, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Amazon, Alexa, Siri, and countless other AI devices. We are now part of a system of big data, becoming ourselves little more than “bits” in the data, much like the novelist Hermann Hesse had predicted in his 1960 novel Magister Ludi and the psychologist Carl Jung as well throughout his writings. The “spying devices” mentioned above, which serve Big Brother perfectly, search for trends in individuals, and in society as well, all the time. A lot of this is positive, since big data are used to spot business trends, crime patterns, diseases, and so on. Again, this is the paradox of living in today’s technological world. In actual fact, as Big Brother technologies continue to make the world a huge data system, with people projected into the system as numerals, people are searching out the protection and emotional shelter of the “tribe” more and more. This is because, like most other species, humans have always lived in social groups, not in some abstract space. The tribe remains the type of collectivity to which human beings instinctively relate even in modern times. In complex city-societies, where various cultures, subcultures, countercultures, and parallel cultures exist in constant competition with each other, where the shared territory is so large that it becomes an abstraction or figment of mind, the tendency for individuals to relate to tribal-type groupings or arrangements

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that exist within the larger societal context manifests itself regularly. People continue to perceive their membership in smaller groups as more directly meaningful to their lives. This inclination toward re-tribalization reverberates constantly within modern-day humans, and may be the source of the angst and sense of alienation that many city-dwelling individuals feel, living in large, impersonal social systems. Re-tribalization involves re-embodiment, since it engages people in faceto-face contact. The manifestations of this are everywhere. Even though people today see themselves as interconnected to world events (through the Internet), they still have a strong desire to live in the real world. So, rather than having resolved conflicts among people by allowing them to get into contact, the paradox of everyday life in the Digital Galaxy is that it engenders both “globalism” and “tribalism” at once.

Further reading Semiotics has entered the field of AI and computer media study starting in the mid-1990s. Among the studies that may be relevant, the following can be mentioned. Andersen, Peter Bø gh. 1997. A Theory of Computer Semiotics: Semiotic Approaches to Construction and Assessment of Computer Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andersen shows how specific forms of computer programming are products of the sign systems used by programmers. Therefore, to understand how computers function in human life one must take into account sign theory, the context of computer use, and other noncomputational factors. O’Neill, Shaleph. 2008. Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction. New York: Springer. O’Neill looks at the theories used in computer programming, suggesting a reformulation of several basic concepts. Tanaka-Ishii, Kumiko. 2010. Semiotics of Programming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book’s importance lies in having shown that the supposed differences between the models of the sign break down when writing programs for generating language.

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Chapter 8 Advertising I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public. —Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

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he messages of advertisers are everywhere. They are on billboards, on the radio, on television, on buses and subways, in magazines and newspapers, on posters, on clothes, shoes, hats, pens, on mobile devices, on social media sites—and the list could go on and on. To say that advertising is a ubiquitous form of communication in today’s world is an understatement—it is estimated that the average American is exposed to thousands of advertisements a day and watches many years’ worth of television and Internet commercials over the course of a lifetime (Kilbourne 1999). Using both verbal and nonverbal techniques to make its messages as persuasive as possible, advertising has become an integral category of modern-day signifying orders designed to influence attitudes and lifestyle behaviors by covertly suggesting how we can best satisfy our innermost urges and aspirations through consumption. As the American author E. B. White (1899–1985) aptly observed in 1936, in a New Yorker article (July 11): “Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams—Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.” Given its obvious importance to understanding modern signifying orders, it is little wonder that advertising has become a target of great interest to media semiotics. The two questions that media semiotics attempts to answer in this domain are: (1) How does advertising textuality encode meanings? (2) How do advertisers create signification systems that are perceived by people as meaningful? Those will be the questions that will guide the discussion in this chapter. As such, advertising is itself a medium in the McLuhanian sense, constituting an integral part of the mediascape itself.

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What is advertising? After the publication of Vance Packard’s 1957 polemical and eye-opening book on the psychosocial effects of advertising, The Hidden Persuaders, an outpouring of studies started subsequently examining the impact of advertising on individuals and on society at large. The implicit question that most of the studies entertained, without answering it in any definitive fashion, was whether advertising had become an unconscious psychological force molding cultural mores and individual behaviors, or whether it constituted no more than a mirror of deeper cultural tendencies within urbanized contemporary societies. With the migration of advertising to all corners of the digital mediascape, from pop-up ads on websites and social media sites to entire ad programs on YouTube, the studies have continued, but the social fuss over the effects of advertising broadly, impelled by Packard’s exposition has subsided, as we have all become accustomed to the advertising medium as part of everyday life. Without going into the debate here, suffice it to say that there is one thing on which virtually everyone agrees—advertising has become one of the most recognizable and appealing forms of mass mediation to which everyone in society is exposed. The images and messages that advertisers promulgate on a daily basis delineate the contemporary social landscape. In themselves, they are not disruptive of the value systems of the cultural mainstream. Rather, they are effective because they reflect “shifts” already present in society. Advertising is no longer just the servant of commercial interests. It has become a common strategy adopted by anyone in society who wants to persuade people to do something: for example, to endorse a political candidate or to support a cause. Business firms, political parties and candidates, social organizations, special-interest groups, and governments alike advertise routinely in various media to create favorable images of themselves in the minds of people. Since the 1960s advertising campaigns have also been mounted and directed toward issues of social concern (cancer, AIDS, human rights, poverty, etc.). The term advertising derives from the medieval Latin verb advertere “to direct one’s attention to.” It designates any type or form of public announcement or representation intended to promote the sale of specific commodities or services, or to promote some cause, raise awareness about some issue, and so on. Advertising is to be distinguished from other kinds of representations and activities aimed at swaying and influencing opinions, attitudes, and behaviors such as propaganda, publicity, and public relations. Today, advertising has evolved into a form of persuasive social discourse intended primarily to influence how we perceive the buying and consumption of goods.

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Advertising discourse ranges from simple notices in newspapers and magazines to sophisticated multimodal lifestyle ads on the Internet. Advertising has, therefore, become a kind of privileged discourse that has replaced, by and large, more traditional forms of discourse—sermons, political oratory, proverbs, wise sayings, and so on—which in previous centuries had rhetorical force and moral authority. Advertising exalts and inculcates Epicurean values. It envisions human beings as “recurrent units” that can be classified into “taste groups,” “lifestyle groups,” or “market segments,” which can be managed and manipulated according to the laws of statistics. As the psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1957: 19–20) warned several decades ago, we live in an age that views a human being dangerously as a cog in an assemblage rather than as “something unique and singular which in the last analysis can neither be known nor compared with anything else.” Apart from its uses in politics, social awareness movements, and the like, the study of advertising falls into two main categories: (1) consumer advertising, which is directed toward the promotion of some product, and (2) trade advertising, in which a sales pitch is made to dealers and professionals through appropriate trade publications and media. The focus of this chapter is on the former, which can be defined more specifically as a form of rhetorical discourse designed to promote the sale of marketable goods and services. Consumer advertising, incidentally, gave birth to the first agency for recording and analyzing data on advertising effectiveness in 1914 with the establishment of the Audit Bureau of Circulations in the United States, an independent organization founded and supported by newspaper and magazine publishers wishing to obtain circulation statistics and to standardize the ways of presenting them. Then, in 1936 the Advertising Research Foundation was established to conduct research on, and to develop, advertising techniques with the capacity to enhance the authenticity, reliability, efficiency, and usefulness of all advertising and marketing research. Today, the increasing sophistication with statistical information-gathering techniques and metadata analysis, as discussed in the previous chapter, makes it possible for advertisers to target audiences on the basis of where people live, what income they make, what educational background they have, what websites they visit frequently, which places they go to eat out (via GPS analysis), and so on in order to determine their susceptibility to, or inclination toward, certain products and services. Advertising is closely linked to marketing science. Advertisers and marketing agencies conduct extensive and expensive surveys to determine the potential acceptance of products or services before they are advertised at costs that may add up to millions (maybe billions) of dollars. If the survey convinces the manufacturer that one of the versions exhibited will attract enough purchasers, a research crew then pretests various sales appeals by

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showing provisional advertisements to consumers and asking them to indicate their preference. After the one or two best-liked advertisements are identified, the advertiser introduces it in a test market. On the basis of this market test the advertiser-manufacturer can make a decision as to whether a national campaign should be launched. By spreading advertising messages constantly through numerous and varied media, the aim of campaigns is to saturate the mediascape with its messages. This creates the illusion that there is a correlation between the products advertised and meaning systems. As Barthes often claimed in his writings, for this reason advertising is identifiable as the root cause of neomania. Through adaptive change, advertisers are constantly trying to ensure that any shifts in social or entertainment trends (fashion, music, values, popularity of media personalities, etc.) are reflected in their advertising texts as well. Indeed, the contemporary mediascape is distinguished above all else by a dynamic interplay between advertising, pop culture trends, and general social tendencies, whereby one influences the other through a constant synergy.

A snapshot history The first advertising texts of human civilization were the many outdoor signs displayed above the shop doors of ancient cities of the Middle East. As early as 3000 BCE, the Babylonians used such signs to advertise the products in the stores themselves. The ancient Greeks and Romans also hung signs outside their shops. Since few people could read, the merchants of the era used recognizable visual symbols carved in stone, clay, or wood for their signs. Throughout history, poster and picture signs in marketplaces have, in fact, constituted popular media for disseminating information and for promoting the barter and sale of goods and services. The use of shop signs and posters continued uninterrupted right into medieval times. With the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, fliers could be printed quickly and cheaply, and posted in public places or inserted in books, pamphlets, newspapers, and other print media. The flier had an advantage over a poster or shop sign because it could be reproduced and distributed to many people living near and far apart. The growing use and influence of advertising in the nineteenth century led to the establishment of the first advertising business by Philadelphia entrepreneur Volney B. Palmer in 1842. By 1849, Palmer had offices in New York, Boston, and Baltimore in addition to his Philadelphia office. In 1865, George P. Rowell began contracting with local newspapers as a go-between with clients. Ten years later, in 1875, N. W. Ayer and Son, another Philadelphia advertising company, became a rival of Rowell and Palmer. In time, the firm hired writers

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and artists to create print ads and carried out complete advertising campaigns for clients. It thus became the first ad agency in the modern sense of the word. By 1900, most agencies in the United States were writing ads for clients, and were starting to assume responsibility for mounting advertising campaigns. By the 1920s, such agencies had become themselves large business enterprises, constantly developing new techniques and methods that would be capable of influencing the so-called typical consumer. It was at that point in time that advertising came to be perceived primarily as an instrument of persuasion. Business and psychology had joined forces by the first decades of the twentieth century, broadening the attempts of their predecessors to build a textual bridge between the product and the consumer’s consciousness. In the 1920s, the increased use of electricity led to the possibility of further entrenching advertising into the social landscape through the use of new electronic media. Electricity made possible the illuminated outdoor poster; and photoengraving and other printing inventions helped both the editorial and advertising departments of magazines create truly effective illustrative material that could be incorporated into ad texts. The advent of radio led to the invention and widespread use of a new form of advertising, known as the commercial—a mini-narrative or musical jingle revolving around a product or service and its uses (Chapter 4). The commercial became immediately a highly persuasive form of advertising, since it could reach masses of potential customers, print literate or not, instantaneously. The commercial became even more influential as a vehicle for disseminating advertising messages throughout society with the advent of television in the early 1950s. TV commercials of the day became instantly familiar creating a perception of the product as being inextricably intertwined with the style and content of the commercials created to promote it. Today, the Internet has come forward to complement and supplement both the print and commercial (radio and TV) forms of advertising. However, advertising textuality has not changed drastically from the way it was fashioned by the traditional media. As in TV commercials, Internet advertisers use graphics, audio, and various visual techniques to enhance the effectiveness of their messages. The difference is that Internet advertising allows advertisers to keep track of effective strategies and adapt instantly. In effect, the Internet provides advertisers with new technologies to get a message across—e-mail marketing, social media, mobile devices. Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo, and other sites now include ads which users themselves can pass on to others in their social network. In 2012, Facebook implemented Promoted Posts, whereby businesses could pay to feature their ads in news feeds. This was followed in 2013 with the launch of video ads. In 2013, Twitter allowed advertisers to use data from browser histories to insert ads related to the interests of Twitter users. In the same year, Instagram permitted advertisers to sponsor photos and videos.

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Advertising on websites is delivered by a server, whereby an ad is embedded into a web page, attracting attention to it by linking it to the advertiser’s page. Such banner ads show how advertising is converging with digital communication, allowing marketers to monitor ad campaigns in real time and thus to target market interests through click tags. Banner ads, critics claim, raise the problem of constant intrusion by advertisers into cultural and communicative events. Similarly, the metadata collected through digital media (previous chapter) allows advertisers to tap into people’s habits and desires silently and, thus, effectively. The “language” of advertising has become the language of virtually everyone—even of those who are critical of it. As Twitchell (2000: 1) aptly puts it, “language about products and services has pretty much replaced language about all other subjects.” We assimilate and react to advertising texts unwittingly and, in ways that parallel how individuals and groups have responded in the past to authoritative and canonical texts, we utilize such texts unconsciously as templates for planning, interpreting, and structuring social actions and behaviors. Slogans are embedded in everyday conversations. Advertising has become a ubiquitous, all-encompassing form of social discourse. As McLuhan (1964) quipped, the medium in this case has indeed become the message.

Embedding the ad message The two main techniques used by advertisers to embed advertising into the mediascape are called positioning and image-creation. Positioning is the placing or targeting of a product for the right people and in the right media. For example, ads for beer are normally positioned for those who will likely drink it, such as, for instance, college students seen at parties (on TV commercials), whereas ads for perfume are positioned, by and large, for audiences who are interested in socializing romantically (as can be seen in perfume commercials on TV). The advertising of the Mercedes Benz automobile is aimed at socially upscale car buyers; the advertising of Dodge vans is aimed, instead, at middle-class suburban dwellers. Creating an image for a product inheres in fashioning a “personality” for it with which a particular type of consumer can identify. The product’s name, packaging, logo, price, and overall presentation create a recognizable character for it that is meant to appeal to specific consumer types. Take beer as an example. What kinds of people drink Budweiser? And what kinds drink Heineken instead? Answers to these questions would typically include remarks about the educational level, class, social lifestyle, and so on of the consumer. The idea behind creating an image for the product is, clearly, to speak directly to particular types of individuals,

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not to everyone, so that these individuals can see their own personalities represented in the images created by advertisements for the product. Brand image is further entrenched by the technique of mythologization. This is the strategy of imbuing brand names, logos, product design, ads, and commercials intentionally with some mythic meaning. For instance, the quest for beauty and the conquest of death, among other mythic themes, are constantly being woven into the specific images that advertisers create for certain products. In the case of beauty products, this strategy often can be literally seen in the people who appear in ads and commercials. These are, typically, attractive people, with an “unreal,” almost deified, quality about the way they look. They are the Adonises and Aphrodites of the modern world. Another way in which advertisers entrench product mythology is through logo design. Take, as an example, McDonald’s golden arches logo. Most people today go to fast-food restaurants to be with family or with friends, so as to get a meal quickly and because the atmosphere is congenial. Most people would also admit that the food at a McDonald’s restaurant is rather tasty and that the service is fast and polite. Indeed, many today probably feel more “at home” at a McDonald’s restaurant than in their own households. This is, in fact, the semiotic key to unlocking the meaning that the McDonald’s logo is designed to create. The arches reverberate with mythic symbolism, beckoning good people to march through them triumphantly into a paradise of order, cleanliness, friendliness, hospitality, hard work, self-discipline, and family values. From the menu to the uniforms, McDonald’s exacts and imposes standardization. The message created unconsciously by the golden arches logo is that McDonald’s is an orderly place that will “do it all for you,” as one of the company’s past slogans so aptly phrased it. In sum, advertisers often create images that, below their surface appearance, tap into unconscious desires, urges, and mythic motifs. In a phrase, the modern advertiser stresses not the product, but the benefits that may be expected to ensue from its purchase. The advertiser is, clearly, quite adept at setting foot into the same subconscious regions of psychic experience that were once explored by philosophers, artists, and religious thinkers.

Advertising as rhetorical discourse No matter what medium is used, and no matter what the product involved might be, the basis of advertising discourse is rhetorical. Advertisers use sophisticated rhetorical techniques to construct their ad pitches, suggesting meanings through allusion, metaphor, irony, analogy, humor, and the like. At a practical level, naming a product has an indexical function, that is, it allows consumers to identify what product they desire to purchase (or not).

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Consider the name “Armani” given to high fashion shoes. At a denotative level, the name allows us to identify the shoes, should we desire to buy them. However, this is not all it does. The use of the manufacturer’s name, rather than some invented name or expression, assigns an aura of artistry, craftsmanship, and superior quality to the product. The shoes can thus be perceived to be, metaphorically, the “work” of an artist (the manufacturer). Designer names such as Armani, Gucci, and Calvin Klein evoke images of their products as objets d’art, rather than images of mere clothes, shoes, or jewelry; so too do names such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati in the domain of automobiles. The manufacturer’s name, in such cases, extends the indexical-denotative meaning of the product considerably. This extensional process is metaphorical, encapsulated in the formula Armani shoes are works of art. The language (brand name, slogan, tagline, etc.) created to ensconce product image into the social mind-set is a de facto metaphorical one. When people buy an Armani or a Gucci product, they feel that they are buying the equivalent of a painting, a sculpture, a work of art to be displayed on the body; when they buy Poison, by Christian Dior, they sense that they are buying a dangerous, but alluring, love potion; when they buy Moondrops, Natural Wonder, Rainflower, Sunsilk, or Skin Dew cosmetics they might feel that they are acquiring some of nature’s beauty resources; and when they buy Eterna 27, Clinique, Endocil, or Equalia beauty products they might sense that they are getting products imbued with scientific validity. No-name products do not engender such systems of metaphorical connotations. In the medieval period, trades people and guild members posted characteristic signs outside their shops, leading to the notion of trademark. Medieval swords and pottery, for instance, were advertised with identifiable symbols so buyers could trace their origin and determine their quality. Among the bestknown trademarks surviving from that era are the striped pole of the barbershop and the three-ball sign of the pawnbroker shop. Brand names were first used toward the end of the nineteenth century when American firms began to market packaged goods under the names. Previously, everyday household products were sold in neighborhood stores from large bulk containers. Around 1880, soap and toothpaste manufacturers started naming their products so that they could be identified. The concept of trademark remained, evolving into the logo. The first modern-day brand names and accompanying logos (visual signs standing for the brands) were thus invented. They included Ivory, Pears, Sapolio, Colgate, Kirk’s American Family, and Parker’s pens. Soon afterward, other manufacturers jumped onto the bandwagon, adding names such as Royal Baking Powder, Quaker Oats, Baker’s Chocolate, Hire’s Root Beer, Regal Shoes, Waterman’s Pens, Bon Ami, Wrigley, and Coca-Cola to the growing list of products that were being identified with brand names and thus created with rhetorical or allusive properties.

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Like miniature poems, many brand names stimulate our imagination, impelling us to glean sense from them. By coining brand names as conceptual metaphors, manufacturers and marketers are fine-tuning their message rhetorically and persuasively. Sometimes the rhetorical form is not written or spoken, it is simply implied, as an ad for Lacoste clothes showed a few years back, rendering visually the metaphor of floating on air to connect the soaring feeling of wearing the light and spiffy clothes to the product. Other major rhetorical strategies used in advertising include metonymy and irony. These are connected to the product’s function and social perception. Clearly, an ironic tagline for a Chanel perfume product would not work; whereas one for Budweiser beer would be more effective. This became obvious in Budweiser ad campaigns of the early 2000s, when the beer company changed its image to keep in step with the changing cultural climate. Its approach consisted in putting on skits that young urban males presumably enjoyed. The strategy worked beyond the company’s expectation. In early 2000, for example, one of the Bud commercials showed the movie dog Rex chasing an imaginary Budweiser beer truck, leaping blindly over a hedge, and plunging face first into a van producing a comical effect. In 2001, a commercial showed Cedric the Entertainer’s dream date go awry when his shaken-up bottles of Bud Light spilled on his date. The commercial was, clearly, imitative of the nerdy humor of the sitcoms and movies of the era. In 2002, a Budweiser ad showed a wife luring her husband to the bedroom with the promise of Bud Light. He dives for the beer and slides out a window on their satin sheets. In 2004, another ad showed a yuppie’s pedigreed pooch fetching him a Bud Light and biting his crotch to get some of it. Some other features and strategies of rhetorical advertising style include the following: ll

Jingles and Slogans: These have the effect of reinforcing the recognition of a brand name, since they tend to work at an unconscious metaphorical level: I’m lovin’ it; Finger lickin’ good; and so on.

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Use of Imperative Verbs: This creates the effect of advice coming from an unseen authoritative source or from some natural biological impulse; it is an allusive device: Just do it; Trust your senses; and so on;

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Formulas. These create the effect of making meaningless statements sound truthful, a technique called tautology: Triumph has a bra for the way you are; A Volkswagen is a Volkswagen; and so on;

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Alliteration. The repetition of sounds increases the likelihood that a brand name will be remembered; this is a typical poetic device: The Superfree sensation (alliteration of s); Guinness is good for you; (alliteration of g), and so on;

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ll

Absence of language. Some ads strategically avoid the use of any language whatsoever, suggesting, by implication, that the product speaks for itself;

ll

Intentional omission. This technique is based on the fact that secrets grab our attention: Don’t tell your friends about . . .; Do you know what she’s wearing?; and so on.

It is relevant to note that the discourse style of ads and commercials matches the meaning and function of a product. So, it is informal and colloquial for products such as Budweiser, but elegant and refined for high-class products such as a BMW automobile or a Chanel perfume. For many cosmetic items it is often sultry and seductive. Advertising thus adopts discourse styles to suit its purposes: a commercial can take the form of an interview, a testimonial on the part of a celebrity, an official format (Name: Mary; Age: 15; Problem: acne), and so on. In this sense, advertising discourse and social semiotic structure are one and the same. The semiotic code behind perfumes is different than the one behind hamburgers and it shows up in the rhetorical structure of the related advertising discourse.

Creating a signification system As the above discussion suggests, advertising aims to create a signification system for a product using rhetorical and image-making techniques. This is achieved, first and foremost, by giving it a brand name and, whenever possible, creating an appropriate logo, as just discussed. By assigning it a name, the product, like a person, can be recognized in terms of its name. No wonder, then, that trademarks—which is the legal term for brand name—are so fiercely protected by corporations and manufacturers. So important is the brand name as an identifier of the product that, on several occasions, it has become the general term to refer to the product type. Examples include aspirin, cellophane, and escalator.

Branding As was discussed in Chapter 2, the name Acura was designed to be imitative of the phonology of both Japanese and Italian words. By metaphorical extension, it is designed to evoke, arguably, the perceived qualities of both the Japanese and Italian cultures. In effect, the name on its own generates a signification system for the product. Here are other examples of how some

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names are constructed to generate specific kinds of metaphorical signification systems and thus to bring about a general branding process that embeds the product into memory, in the same way that the metaphorical semantics of common words does. ll

Names referring to the actual manufacturer evoke connotations of “tradition,” “reliability,” “artistry, “sophistication,” and so on: for example, Armani, Benetton, Folger’s, and so on;

ll

Names referring to a fictitious personality elicit specific kinds of images: for example, Wendy’s evokes the image a “friendly young girl,” Mr. Clean of a “strong toiler,” and so on;

ll

Names referring to some aspect of nature bestow upon the product the qualities associated with nature such as “water,” “health,” “cleanliness,” and so on: for example, Tide, Surf, Cascade, Aqua Velva, Mountain Dew, and so on;

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Names constructed as hyperboles emphasize product “superiority,” “excellence,” and so on: for example, MaxiLight, SuperFresh, UltraLite, and so on;

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Names constructed as combinations of words elicit composite meanings: for example, Fruitopia (“fruit + Utopia”), Yogourt (“yogurt + gourmet”), and so on;

ll

Some names are designed simply to tell what the product can do: for example, Easy Off, Lestoil, One Wipe, Quick Flow, Easy Wipe, and so on;

ll

Some names are designed to show what can be accomplished with the product: for example, Close-Up Toothpaste, No Sweat Deodorant, and so on.

To be effective, however, brand naming techniques must keep in step with the times. For instance, carmakers now look at naming trends that appeal to a generation of Internet users who have become accustomed to a different style of communication. Cadillac, for instance, announced a new model with the monogram name CTS as far back as 2001. Names using just letters and numbers have, in fact, become widespread. Acura itself has transformed its line of models with names such as TL, RL, MDX, RSX. Such names are consistent with “Internet discourse,” a type of highly telegraphic form of communication that is centered on monogrammatic and alphanumeric signifiers. On the other side of the naming equation, such abbreviations are hard to remember, especially for older customers who have just tapped into Internetese. Incidentally, branding was, originally, the searing of flesh with a hot iron to produce a scar or mark with an easily recognizable pattern for identifi-

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cation or other purposes. Livestock were branded by the Egyptians as early as 2000 BCE. In the late medieval period, trades people and guild members posted characteristic marks outside their shops, leading to the notion of trademark. Logos, as discussed, are the pictorial counterparts of brand names. They are designed to generate the same kinds of connotative signification systems for a brand through the visual modality. Consider the apple logo adopted by the Apple computer company. It is, clearly, an iconic sign suffused with latent religious connotations suggesting, above all else, the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, which revolves around the eating of an apple that was supposed to contain forbidden knowledge. In actual fact, the Hebrew account of the Genesis story tells of a “forbidden” fruit, not specifically of an apple. The representation of this fruit as an apple came about in medieval depictions of the Eden scene, when painters became interested in the Genesis story artistically. Now, the biblical symbolism of the apple as “forbidden knowledge” continues to resonate in our culture, since at least medieval times; and that is arguably why the Apple computer company has not only named itself Apple, but has also chosen the icon of this fruit as its logo, symbolizing the fact that it, too, provides access to “forbidden” knowledge to those who buy and use its products. Incidentally, the logo shows an apple that has had a bite taken from it, thus reinforcing the link between the company icon and the Genesis story by associating the use of Apple computers and products with Eve, the mother of humanity. Logos are now displayed on products for all to see. Until the 1970s, logos on clothes, for instance, were concealed discretely inside a collar or on a pocket. But since then, they can be seen conspicuously. Ralph Lauren’s polo horseman and Lacoste’s alligator, to mention but two, are now shown prominently on clothing items. They constitute symbols of “cool” (Klein 2000: 69) that legions of people are seemingly eager to put on in order to convey an aura of high-class “blue-blooded” fashionableness.

Ad campaigns An advertising campaign is a systematic method of media-based advertising that may run for several months, or longer. The objective of the campaign may be to demonstrate a product’s superiority over competing brands, to change the image of the product or company, or to achieve some other goal. The agency must also determine the target market—the people who are likely users of a product and at whom the advertising will be aimed. Ad campaigns have been a part of branding strategy since at least the turn of the twentieth century. They are the equivalent of town criers, but with a vast technological

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voice, so to speak. Some have become so familiar that they are now part of cultural lore. There is little doubt that the modern-day ad campaign traces its roots in the nineteenth century to the strategies of P. T. Barnum to promote his spectacles such as his circus through the technique of putting posters throughout the countryside—note that the word campaign derives from the Latin for “countryside”—so that he could reach as many people as possible. Ad campaigns transform products into historical artifacts. Coca-Cola bottles from the turn of the century or Parker pens from the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, have become prized collectibles, having almost as much value as ancient artifacts or works of art. In a fascinating book, titled Twenty Ads that Shook the World (2000), James Twitchell argues this very point. He discusses ad campaigns that have become, in effect, part of the broader social history of America. As he aptly puts it (2000: 8): “They got into our bloodstream.” Ad campaigns have become sophisticated not only in their content, but also in the way they use technology to deliver their messages. As mentioned, there always has been a partnership between advertising and new mass communication technologies, with advertisers being among the first to use them. The use of multiple media technologies to deliver ad campaigns is now a standard strategy of all the big brands. Traditional or offline media are used in tandem with new satellite and online media, which include such marketing techniques as pay per click advertising, banner ads, e-mail marketing, and blog marketing. Online advertising techniques (among many others) include: ll

polite advertising, whereby a large ad is downloaded in pieces to minimize disruption of the content being viewed

ll

pop-ups, whereby a new window opens in front of the one being viewed, displaying an advertisement

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pop-unders, whereby a new window is loaded or sent behind the window being viewed so that the user does not see it until closing one or more active windows

ll

mobile ads, which are ads sent to an SMS device.

Placement Another major strategy for embedding a brand into the signifying order is to showcase it in movies and TV programs—a strategy known more specifically as placement. The intent is to tap into social trends and signifying systems, so as to be noticed by society not simply as a brand, but as something much

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more. As Alex Frankel (2004: 81) aptly puts it: “The most common marketing definition of a brand is that it is a promise—an unspoken pact between a company and a consumer to deliver a particular experience.” Sometimes, the brand itself becomes a fad that shapes trends in society. This phenomenon can be called “reverse branding.” In the 1950s, for example, Silly Putty, Slinkies, and Hula Hoops became so popular that they were the inspiration of songs and narratives. Silly Putty was introduced in 1949 by advertising marketer Peter C. L. Hodgson, who discovered a substance developed by General Electric researchers looking for a viable synthetic rubber. The useless silicone substance could be molded like soft clay, stretched like taffy, and bounced like a rubber ball. Slinky was a coil toy that could be made to “walk” down a staircase by itself by placing it on a higher step in a specific way. The Hula Hoop was a light plastic hoop that could be whirled around the body for play or exercise by the movement of the hips. These products became icons of pop culture, remaining so to this day, because they were promoted constantly through the media. In the 1940s and 1950s brand placement was a simple matter. In radio and TV programs such as Texaco Theater, General Electric Theater, Kraft Theater, the program itself was associated exclusively with one sponsor. Children’s programming, like the Mickey Mouse Club (which premiered in 1955), was similarly sponsored. The show used young actors hired by Disney who became themselves icons of childhood culture, promoting the whole Disney brand of products. But this form of sponsorship was not applicable to all kinds of programs and formats. In its lieu, other branding strategies soon crystallized and spread across media. Often, the sponsor would be included as part of the script, thus making the distinction between program content and a sponsor a blurry one. The movies entered the placement fray in 1982 when the extraterrestrial creature in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. was seen snacking on Reese’s Pieces—increasing sales for the product enormously. That event started the trend of brand placement in Hollywood. In 1983, for example, movie actor Tom Cruise donned a pair of Wayfarers (Rayburn sunglasses) in Risky Business, and sales for the product shot up, as did generally the wearing of sunglasses to convey a “cool look.” Placement is now so common that it goes largely unnoticed. Its main objective is to amalgamate brand identity with pop culture, spectacles, and other areas of the mediascape. An example was the launch of the teenage-directed television serial Dawson’s Creek in January of 1998. All of the characters in the program were outfitted in clothing and accessories made by J. Crew. They appeared, in fact, to be models that had stepped out of the J. Crew catalogue; and the actors were featured in the catalogue that very same month. Two seasons later, as the “cool look” changed in society, the characters got a makeover and a new wardrobe from American Eagle Outfitters. And, once again,

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the company used the actors as models for their own purposes, featuring them on their website and in-store promotions. Psychologically and socially, all this has had a number of consequences. Being a part of an “in-crowd” today entails sensitivity to the right brand of shoes, T-shirt, jeans, and so on. Through the brand we now symbolize our own “brand” of lifestyle. This is why brand names are so powerful—they provide a “coded” membership entry card to a lifestyle sector. New mobile devices today are such entry cards, designed to be tucked away, but also displayed conspicuously as accessories. The celebrity endorsement of brands can also be seen as a form of placement. It is an effective strategy because it transfers what people perceive in the celebrity to the product. So too is the creation of fictitious characters to promote specific brands (as mentioned previously). Many of these have become pop culture celebrities themselves, independently of the products they represent. Mr. Clean, Uncle Ben, Charlie the Tuna, Hostess’ Twinkie the Kid, were even featured in cameo roles in a 2001 animated film called Foodfight.

Advertising textuality Advertising textuality can be defined simply as the construction of advertisements and commercials on the basis of specific codes or signification systems built intentionally into products. Among the various ways to do so is to simply insert oneself into the social mainstream and co-opt it in ingenious ways. Another way is to use the same kinds of techniques of artists. Combining the two creates a textuality that is both intertexual and subtextual, in the semiotic sense of these terms. Intertextuality implies that the brand itself alludes to other texts of cultural significance, either canonical or current; subtextuality refers to the fact that its signifying system is based on metaphorical-rhetorical themes as discussed above.

Co-option The most effective strategy of advertising is not only to keep up with the times but also to co-opt them. In the 1960s, for example, the self-proclaimed “rebels” and “revolutionaries,” referred to generally as “hippies,” who genuinely thought they were posing a radical challenge to the ideological values and lifestyle mores of the mainstream consumerist culture, ended up becoming the incognizant trend-setters of the very culture they

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decried, providing it with features of lifestyle and discourse that advertisers have, since the 1960s, been able to adapt and recycle into society at large. Counterculture clothing fashion was thus quickly converted into mainstream fashion, counterculture music style into mainstream music style, counterculture symbolism and talk into society-wide symbolism and discourse—hence the crystallization of a social mind-set whereby every individual, of every political and ideological stripe, could be a vicarious participant in the “youth revolution.” The use of the “hippie image” in ads and commercials of the era occurred at a point in time when advertisers decided it was in their best interest not to fight the images of youth insurgency but rather to embrace them outright. One highly effective early strategy of this “if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them” approach was the development of an advertising code that mocked consumerism and advertising itself. The strategy worked beyond expectations. Being young and rebellious came to mean having a “cool look”; being anti-establishment and subversive came to mean wearing “hip clothes.” The corporate leaders had cleverly “joined the revolution,” so to speak, by deploying the slogans and media images of youthful rebellion to market their goods and services. “New” and “different” became the two key words of the new advertising and marketing lexicon, coaxing people into buying goods, not because they necessarily needed them, but simply because they were new, cool, hip. The underlying system of signification of this ingenious marketing strategy allowed consumers to believe that what they bought transformed them into ersatz revolutionaries without having to pay the social price of true nonconformity and dissent. Campaigns, such as the Pepsi Generation and the Coke universal brotherhood ones, directly incorporated the images, rhetoric, and symbolism of the hippie counterculture, thus creating the illusion that the goals of the hippies and of the soft-drink manufacturers were one and the same. Rebellion through purchasing became the subliminal thread woven into the pop culture mind-set that the marketing strategists were starting to manipulate and control effectively. The Dodge Rebellion and Oldsmobile Youngmobile campaigns followed the soft-drink ones, etching into the nomenclature of products themselves the powerful connotations of hippie rebellion and defiance. Even a sewing company, alas, came forward to urge people to join its own type of surrogate revolution, hence its slogan “You don’t let the establishment make your world; don’t let it make your clothes.” In effect, by claiming to “join the revolution,” advertising created the real revolution. This is why, since the late 1960s, the worlds of advertising, marketing, and entertainment have become totally intertwined with youth lifestyle movements, both responding and contributing to the rapid fluctuations in social trends and values that such movements entail.

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Sociologically, the end result has been a further obliteration of the crucial emotional difference that traditional cultures have maintained between the social categories of young and old. This is why nowadays the rhetoric of youth is quickly transformed by advertising textuality into the rhetoric of all; why the fashion trends of the young are recycled and marketed shortly after their invention as the fashion styles of all; and why the fluctuating aesthetics of the youth culture are quickly incorporated into the aesthetics of society at large. Cultural cool has, in effect, become the social norm. The word “co-option” was introduced into advertising studies by Thomas Frank in his insightful 1997 book, The Conquest of Cool. Frank proposed it to describe the dominant strategy of big brand advertising in the 1960s to appropriate the symbols of counterculture lifestyle as their own, adapting and recycling them on their own consumerist terms. A perfect example of a brand that has consistently used co-option as a strategy is the Gap, a company founded in 1969 in San Francisco. The name, in fact, was coined in reference to the “generation gap” between young and old people. One of the company’s first slogans was “Fall into the Gap.” Not surprisingly, Gap products are now marketed to all ages. It too has co-opted the “forever young” theme. This is why their commercials have typically featured musical artists from the present and the past. The subtext of the commercials is an obvious one: “Your age and musical preferences are irrelevant; we are all in the gap (the same lifestyle) together.” Here is a sampling: ll

1998: “Khakis swing” featuring Jump, Jive, an’ Wail by Louis Prima (a jazz artist of the 1940s and 1950s)

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1999: “Everybody in cords” featuring Mellow Yellow by Donovan (a star of the hippie era)

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2001: “Give a little bit” featuring Give A Little Bit by Supertramp (a popular rock band of the 1970s and 1980s)

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2005: “How do you wear it?” featuring Lady by Lenny Kravitz (a 1990s music star)

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2006: “The skinny black pant” featuring Back in Black by AC/DC (a hard-rock band popular in the 1980s but making a comeback in the mid-2000s)

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2017: “To perfect harmony” featuring Janelle Moná e to promote the Gap’s campaign theme of peace and unity with the Freddie Scott ­classic “(You) Got What I Need.”

The lesson learned from the success of the co-option strategy by big business is that the road into any marketplace is paved not only by economic savvy, but also by cultural savvy. The counterculture reformers saw the world’s all-pervading sense of alienation and of rootlessness as caused by materialism. This,

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they claimed, had undermined the human values shared by common folk, leading to a loss of social stability and to the rise of individual feelings of anxiety and dissatisfaction. The hippies felt that they were doing something meaningful to combat alienation. They fought against misery and oppression. They sought to reestablish the spiritual over the material. But as it turned out, they ended up being the unwitting instruments of the marketers. The hippies did not pull the plug on capitalism; they merely allowed market strategists to give it a new and highly appealing dynamism. Ad campaigns are not only designed to co-opt trends and turn them to advantage for the product, they are often intended to create a “history” for a product, thus linking it to a sense of cultural continuity and communal tradition. This is done, in part, by simply getting the product “out there,” so to speak, into social consciousness. The Coke campaigns, for example, have always been designed to appeal to everyone. This is why nearly everyone alive today will recognize Coke and have some understanding of its signification system. This works especially well for products and services that appeal to everyone—automobiles, cosmetics, insurance, food, beverages, pain tablets, and so on. It cannot be used for “controversial” products, such as cigarettes and alcohol, and for things that do not have a broad appeal (e.g., certain music styles and certain types of books). Advertising is powerful because it offers recognizable “objects” and “solutions” providing the hope of more money and better jobs, security against the hazards of old age and illness, personal prestige, praise from others, more comfort, increased enjoyment or pleasure, social advancement, improved appearance, better health, erotic stimulation, popularity, emotional security, and so on. The effectiveness of the techniques used to engender such meanings is limited only by the ingenuity of the advertiser, by the limits of the various channels of communication used to disseminate the product’s textuality, by certain legal restrictions in place where the advertising messages are delivered, and by standards self-imposed by the advertising industry. It is no exaggeration to say that the history of modern pop culture is intrinsically interwoven with the history of advertising. In looking back over the last century, it is obvious that the messages of advertisers, their styles of presentation, and the ways in which they have used language have become the very fabric of modern modes of representation and communication. As McLuhan (1964: 24) aptly put it, advertising has become the “art” of the modern world.

Advertising as art In addition to the strategies of branding and co-option, the advertiser has become adept at using the arts and crafts more generally to make products

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stand apart from others and to increase their appeal. The advertiser has, in effect, tapped into one of the most unique of human instincts—the “art instinct”—an impulse for fantasy and desire that involves the entire range of feelings and emotions that differentiate humans from other life forms. Many modern-day artists have been employed to create ads and commercials, from Ridley Scott who was hired by the Apple Corporation to Salvador Dalí  by the Gap and Datsun. But even without the employment of artists, advertisers now produce ads and commercials which rival paintings and other art forms. Of course, we recognize advertising art for what it is, art with a commercial objective, but it pleases us nonetheless. The difference between so-called real art and advertising art is highlighted eloquently by Hoffman (2002: 6) as follows: In the hierarchy of cultural criticism the lines drawn between art and advertising started out fairly clear. Art is high. Advertising is low. Art is elite and refined. Advertising is vulgar and democratic. Art is original. Advertising is derivative. Art is a product created by people to express their personal vision. Advertising is created by people who get paid to sell a product. Art is defined by the truth of the insight it expresses. Advertising expresses the insight of truisms. Art is disturbingly honest. Advertising is only as honest as it has to be, and occasionally less. Art is eternal. Advertising is ephemeral.

Today, the commercials shown at the Super Bowl garner as intense a reaction that any veritable work of art has ever garnered in the past. People rate their favorite commercials online and download the most popular ones to safekeep like they would a work of real art. Clearly, the topic of advertising art is a central one. Recall from Chapter 2 that the term interpretant is used in semiotics to refer to any meaning that we glean from a sign in a specific personal, social, historical, or physical context. The interpretant of products is not anymore a view of them as simple products, but as something much larger. That has been the most profound effect brought about by advertising art on the modern mind-set. Among the first to understand the impact that advertising has had on our perception of products as meaningful objects were the pop artists. The practitioners of pop art started out, not surprisingly, in the world of commercial design. Andy Warhol, for example, was a designer of shoe ads before venturing into the domain of pop art. The pop art movement was inspired by the mass production and consumption of objects. For pop artists, the factory, supermarket, and garbage bin became their art school. But despite its apparent absurdity, many people loved pop art, no matter how controversial or crass it appeared to be. In a certain sense, the pop art movement bestowed on common people the assurance that art was for mass consumption, not just for an é lite class of cognoscenti. Some artists duplicated beer bottles,

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soup cans, comic strips, road signs, and similar objects in paintings, collages, and sculptures; others simply incorporated the objects themselves into their works. Using images and sounds that reflected the materialism and vulgarity of modern consumerist culture, the pop artists sought to provide a view of reality that was more immediate and relevant than that of past art. They wanted the observer to respond directly to the object, rather than to the skill and viewpoint of the artist. As Hoffman (2002: 101) has aptly put it: Pop, like advertising, is interested in the concept more than the rendering. It uses the objects that inhabit the world every individual of every class takes for granted—the mundane, mass-produced stuff that is all around us. The things you use and like. Pop artists don’t use these things because there is nothing else to paint, they use them to make a point.

The pop art movement surfaced in the 1940s and 1950s, when painters like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns strove to close the gap between traditional art and mass culture. Rauschenberg constructed collages from household objects such as quilts and pillows, Johns from American flags and bull’s-eye targets. The first full-fledged pop art work was Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Home So Different, So Appealing? (1956, private collection) by the British artist Richard Hamilton. In this satiric collage of two ludicrous figures in a living room, the pop art hallmarks of crudeness and irony are emphasized. American artist Roy Lichtenstein became so interested in mass-produced commercial illustrations, especially comic strips and advertisements, that he created works portraying comic strips on canvas surfaces. Lichtenstein’s paintings include words simulating sounds or a portion of dialogue, as in real comic strips. Pop art developed rapidly during the 1960s, as painters started to focus their attention on brand-name commercial products, producing sculptures of hamburgers and other fast-food items, blown-up frames of comic strips, and theatrical events staged as art objects. Pop artists also appropriated the techniques of mass production. Rauschenberg and Johns had already abandoned individual, titled paintings in favor of large series of works, all depicting the same objects. In the early 1960s Warhol carried the idea a step further by adopting the mass-production technique of silk-screening, turning out hundreds of identical prints of Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell’s soup cans, and other familiar products, including identical three-dimensional Brillo boxes. To quote Hoffman (2002: 101) again, pop art and advertising art converged in the same era, one becoming indistinguishable from the other, and thus signaling “the total triumph of the selling state in American culture.” Advertising art in the form of packaging, product design, and the ingenious and constant mass creation of new ads and commercials has become a kind of cultural meta-art. Fashion and lifestyle magazines are virtually art work

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catalogues, displaying visual images that are not unlike those of portrait photographers. No wonder, then, that advertising is being acknowledged officially as veritable art more and more; having even its own prize categories at major film festivals. Although we may superciliously be inclined to condemn its objectives, as an aesthetic-inducing experience we invariably enjoy it. Ads convince, please, and seduce. And they invariably contain a subtext—a meaning below the surface that engages us in an inner semiotic self-dialogue, not unlike the kind of self-dialogue we engage in when viewing paintings in an art gallery. Aware of the obliteration of the boundary between pop art (and art generally) and advertising art, some brands have incorporated art techniques explicitly and directly as part of their construction of brand image. One of these is Absolut Vodka, which has employed some of the world’s top artists to construct their ads, blurring the line between art and brands even further. On their website, the brand shows its “top ads” proudly, as would any art catalogue or technical study. Absolut Vodka even has its own art museum, accessible through the Web. Apparently, people rip out its print ads from magazines, or download them from the Internet, collecting them as they would works of art. Given the success of Absolut Vodka, it is little wonder to find that other brands have followed suit, using art explicitly in the design of their ads, no matter how controversial this technique is. As Hoffman (2002: 122) aptly puts it: “The land where art and commerce meet continues to be a fertile place for marketers who are willing to take risks and court controversy.” Synesthetic ads have also become common; these allow viewers to indulge in an ersatz form of sensory voyeurism. They allow entrance into a multidimensional sensorium of the mind. The synesthetic effect occurs not from individual elements in the surface text, but in their relationships to each other. Thus the sensation of cold comes across not from viewing, say, an ice cube by itself, but from observing its placement on a body in an ad. The erotic sensation derived from viewing the lips in ads comes not from the nature of lips themselves, but from their erotic symbolism as portrayed in all kinds of other texts, that is, through intertexuality. Another main art technique is surrealism. Consider a classic Coco Chanel ad campaign that emerged in the 1990s. The ads show a voluptuous, young woman dressed up to resemble a bird, with a tail. She has a rope tied around her ankle, and is dressed in erotic clothing (sexy stockings, black gloves, etc.). The number of meanings suggested by the text is unquantifiable. The woman appears to come at us out of a dream. Who is she? Where is she? Who is holding the rope (which goes beyond the actual ad text)? One possible interpretation is suggested by the name Coco itself, which was the nickname of the late founder of Chanel, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. Its phonetic quality suggests onomatopoeically the sound a bird is perceived to make. Coco is

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also an abbreviation for “cocaine,” which is not only a narcotic, but also an aphrodisiacal intoxicant. Together with the visual image, the text seems to suggest that the perfume will allow females to be “sexually wild” and “uninhibited.” Reinforcing this interpretation is a ravenous, “bird-like” expression on the model’s face. The metaphorical association of the female figure to a bird is a deeply embedded one in our culture. In English slang, for example, a young woman is called a “chick.” The oversized Coco bottle, with its vivid amber color, juxtaposed against the dark background, is highly suggestive of fire and flames, and, thus, of “burning desire.” But the above interpretation is only one of many others that are possible. The woman in the ads is barefoot, which is suggestive of the female’s biological role as “mother” and as an “earth-goddess.” The woman holds a bottle of Coco next to her face and breast, as she would a child. And while the woman’s bare back, shoulders, and scanty attire produce erotic imagery, her slightly turned bodily orientation, concealing the front part of her body, is suggestive of modesty. The ad campaign was (and still is), in a phrase, a masterpiece of surrealist art. The dark void that surrounds the woman, and the fact that she seems to appear mysteriously “out of nothingness,” suggest a surrealist dream sequence. As Judith Williamson (1996) has astutely pointed out, texts like the Coco Chanel one constitute “surrealist puzzles.” In general, ads for perfume, clothes, alcoholic beverages, and other lifestyle products are designed to produce either a synesthetic reaction, to pose surrealist puzzles, or to generate mythic images. This is because the products are all about desire, and surrealist art is a perfect conduit for the conveyance of desire, especially subconscious desire. Hoffman (2002: 71) summarizes the use of surrealism in advertising eloquently as follows: Unlike the way they use classical painting, advertisers don’t often reproduce the actual surrealist images. More often they transpose the visual rhetoric of surreal paintings with a glib indifference to the deeper issues and ideas that spawned the movement in the first place. Part of the comfort art directors felt when they presented surreal images to their clients must have sprung from the fact that surrealism, like advertising, is at its heart about desire.

All of us have moments when we need to escape, as the expression goes. We can do so by reading (novels, comics), watching movies, navigating the Web, engaging in VR, and so on. We escape, in a word, through fantasy. Art is a form of fantasy. In advertising, the product is, clearly, a subtle means through which the viewer’s fantasy can be fulfilled. Advertising has created, or more correctly recreated, a true Fantasyland of the psyche, to which anyone can have access by simply viewing ads and commercials. Much like children’s fantasies, ads allow us to escape into the world of dreams where they become real.

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Further reading Among the works of direct interest to media semiotics in the study of advertising, the following can be mentioned: Kress, Gunther. 2017. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Taylor & Francis. Kress’ semiotic investigation of visual design provides a perspective with which to decipher the images in advertising. Skaggs, Steven. 2017. Fire Signs: A Semiotic Theory for Graphic Design. Cambridge: MIT Press. This comprehensive treatment of the semiotics of graphic design illustrates how semiotic ideas undergird the construction of ads, logos, and the like. Oswald, Laura. 2015. Marketing Semiotics: Signs, Strategies, and Brand Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oswald extends semiotics into the study of various technological domains that characterize modern-day marketing and advertising.

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Chapter 9 Impacts of the media We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality. —J. G. Ballard (1930–2009)

I

t is ironic that a common theme in contemporary media representations is the one warning people about the nefarious control that media moguls— the “Elliott Carvers” of the world (Introduction)—now exercise over vast numbers of people across the globe. Movies, popular book exposé s, TV documentaries, and websites about the “dangers of the media” are common. Therein lies the paradox of modern culture—it is a world in which media have become not only the means for controlling public thinking, but also for critiquing mediation itself in all its dimensions. The media are now perceived as a force for good and a source for bad at the same time. The mediated world has allowed vast numbers of people access to the kinds of representations to which only the é lite had privilege in the past; but it has also created a society-wide “distraction mind-set,” whereby entertainment is pursued relentlessly by hordes of people, as is “newness,” “faddishness,” and “coolness.” The paradox of mediation has been the underlying theme of this book. The same culture that is capable of producing a work of inestimable cinematic art, such as Amadeus, is also capable of producing American TV wrestling matches, which are little more than mind-numbing, inane spectacles. The goal of this book has been, in effect, to discuss this theme from the particular standpoint of semiotic analysis, whose aim it is, basically, to interpret media representations in terms of how they are put together textually, that is, in terms of how a specific representation, X, is capable of generating a system of meanings, Y, in some specific way, X = Y. To a semiotician, the

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specific medium in question is irrelevant, since print, audio, film, television, computer, and advertising media and genres produce, essentially, the same array of meanings. They do so by using different kinds of signifiers. The semiotic study of media is, therefore, essentially a study in signifier difference and in how this difference changes the delivery and impact of texts and their messages. This final chapter has three objectives: (1) to go over schematically the main features of semiotic analysis; (2) to look a little more closely at the kinds of impacts that the media purportedly have on people; and (3) to offer concluding reflections on the relation between the media and contemporary culture.

Overview The recording of ideas in a pictographic medium in early times made it possible to store and pass on knowledge and, thus, to establish a continuity to human ideas and sentiments. With the advent of alphabetic writing, print became a powerful medium paving the way toward the establishment of a worldwide civilization. The Gutenberg Galaxy, as we saw, subsequently extended the availability of print and diversified its functions. One of these was distraction. When the book became widely available and affordable through printing press technology, it also became a medium through which people could pass their leisure hours enjoyably. The distraction function became even more prominent with the advent of electronic and digital media. One of the subsidiary themes of this book has been that new media are not substitutive, but extensional: for example, print extended orality, radio extended print, television extended radio, and so on. Many people assume that print literacy is the most elevated mode for encoding and communicating knowledge, and that all other kinds of media are somehow “inferior” to print. But this assumption is not correct; nor is the one which claims that new media are disruptive of “true” culture—whatever that may be. The many kinds of media used today may have indeed become vital cogs in the global consumerist-driven economic machine, as social critics descry, but they have in no way impugned the basic imaginative nature of human representation. On the contrary, they have provided even more fuel for the imagination to reign supreme in human affairs. Moreover, movies, pop music, TV programs, and even viral videos have made it possible for more people than at any other time in history to put their imaginations on display. Today’s Digital Galaxy is really an extension of the Gutenberg Galaxy. When Gutenberg invented movable type to print the Bible, he made possible a veritable revolution in human mental evolution and culture by making ideas

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readily available to a larger population. But rather than homogenizing the world, his revolution led to greater diversity and variety in representation, as we saw in Chapter 3.

The semiotic perspective As argued mainly by illustration throughout this book, the constituents of the mediascape are elements in a technologically based system of meaning. Since these elements are specific kinds of signifiers media semiotics is a central science for understanding the interplay between media and meanings. Differences among the media are, therefore, more often than not differences in the “physics” of representation, rather than differences in content. Indeed, as the genres of one medium are adapted by another, their content is recycled, not discarded—for example, when print genres were adopted by electronic media they were not changed as to their meanings; rather, they were converted into parallel genres delivered through new physical channels. Most movies, TV programs, and other media representations do little more, therefore, than recycle the same kinds of signifieds in new ways. Figuring out how this is accomplished is one of the primary goals of media semiotics, as we have seen throughout this book. Semiotic analyses of media texts will vary, first and foremost, according to type of text, code, or signifying system. In the case of a text, X, whose meaning, Y, is transparently obvious, the process of figuring out its X = Y structure is rather straightforward. This type of analysis can be shown as a straight line, whereby, X is imputed to mean Y directly: Figure 9.1  The relationship between X and Y plotted linearly.

X

Y

Linear analysis An example is a news report in a newspaper, whereby the text aims to report the content of some newsworthy event directly (e.g., the results of a political election and the scores of a series of hockey games). Obviously, the ways in which the X = Y relation is represented will vary according to newspaper, according to the writer, and so on. But, under normal circumstances, the overall structure of the interpretation is linear, and thus generally entails a straightforward analysis. A second main kind of text, X, is one in which its meaning, Y, is determinable in a roundabout, spiral fashion: that is, by taking into account historical factors, intertextuality, and so on. This type of analysis can be shown graphically as a spiral (see Figure 9.2 below).

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Figure 9.2  The relationship between X and Y, plotted as a spiral.

As an example consider, once again, the Coco Chanel ad campaign discussed in the previous chapter. The interpretation of its subtext was determined to have a whole series of mythical connotations. Now, such an analysis was made possible not in isolation but by virtue of the fact that its mythic signifieds have appeared over and over, and across time, in such representations as ancient stories (e.g., the myth of Diana), contemporary movies (e.g., Fatal Attraction), and so on and so forth. It is understandable, therefore, not linearly, but in terms of its historical interconnectedness to other texts encoding the same kind of signified. A third main kind of text, X, is one in which its meaning, Y, is accessed in a back and forth, zig-zag fashion: that is, by comparing its features with the features of other texts. This type of analysis can be shown graphically in Figure 9.3. As an example, take a media character such as the Lone Ranger. The serial of the same name originated in radio in 1933 on Detroit’s WXYZ. It began with the fourth movement of the overture from the 1829 Rossini opera William Tell and an announcer saying, “A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-yo Silver, the Lone Ranger rides again.” With his aboriginal partner, Tonto, the masked hero became a media personality when the show moved to television, becoming a regular on Saturday morning television in the 1950s. Why was The Lone Ranger so popular? First of all, the program constituted a weekly morality play, pitting the forces of Good against the forces of Evil. The mysterious lawman, whose identity was hidden behind his signature mask, was a modern-day mythic hero. His white horse was a symbol of purity and honesty. His trusty companion was a symbol of equality among the races and of the wisdom of aboriginal peoples. The simple plots, in which potential victims were saved from the claws of ruthless gangsters, struck a basic chord among audiences. Now, the comic book, radio, TV, and movie versions of The Lone Ranger all delivered this very same set of “­meaning ­elements,” that is, of elements that can be compared, contrasted,

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Figure 9.3  The relationship between X and Y, plotted as a zigzag.

and related to each other and to the elements present in other representations about heroes. It is unlikely to find radically different semiotic interpretations of the above texts. For example, in the Coco Chanel ad, one may arrive at a different subtext that involves feral women. But the process of getting to the subtext is the same. It is spiral, as it has been characterized above. Similarly, one may wish to emphasize some mythological aspect of the basic storyline over another in the Lone Ranger text, or else flesh out some other feature of the serial. But the process of establishing the overall meaning of the text through a zig-zag process of comparison tends to remain fairly constant. What is interesting, therefore, is not always what something means, but rather how it is represented. Different TV programs today represent the same type of morality play as The Lone Ranger in diverse ways to suit changing social realities. The many science-fiction and lawyer programs on TV, for instance, deliver essentially the same content as The Lone Ranger serial, but in an “updated way,” incorporating into it a complex array of subtexts referring to contemporary psychological, social, and cultural issues. Needless to say, many TV programs, movies, radio dramas, and so on break with such patterns, treating philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic themes in truly innovative ways. As mentioned above, and throughout this book, the paradox of contemporary media-based representation is that it is both distractive and creative, conformist and innovative.

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The media syntext Obviously, the whole line of inquiry that semiotics presupposes leads to conclusions and findings that cannot be proved. They can only be argued and debated. But this produces, in itself, critical understanding and self-reflection—both of which are crucial “filters” for screening mediated messages. A large chunk of contemporary semiotic analysis of media is influenced by Barthes’ view of pop culture as a huge distraction factory, aimed at uprooting the traditional forms of art and meaning-making. Many today blame technology as the cause of this uprooting. But this is not true, as has been argued throughout this book. Media technology has led to a democratization of art. Today, anyone can download any piece of classical music, a classic movie, and so on. Moreover, even television, with its focus on distraction, has a good side to it. It provides comfort and companionship for many people, especially elderly ones, during long solitary evenings. In Chapter 3, the notion of syntext was introduced to describe the way in which newspapers synthesized such disparate things as news reporting, movie reviews, comics, and so on into an overall collage. The same term can be used to characterize the entire mediascape in which we live. It is one huge syntext that imparts coherence within, and continuity among, the multifarious representations to which we are exposed on a daily basis. As a consequence, the media have converged semiotically to become an overarching social text. People utilize the media social text to evaluate their lives, to emulate various components of its content (e.g., lifestyle), and so on. The ultimate goal of media semiotics is to describe and analyze this syntext through a step-by-step analysis of the separate media forms (print, audio, etc.) that constitute it. This implies the study of how specific signifiers are interconnected to each other. The interconnectedness of signifiers in a culture is the reason why, from tribes to advanced technological societies, signifying orders impart a sense of wholeness and, thus, of purpose to the activities that people carry out. In effect, the extraction of meaning from specific media products is dependent upon knowledge of how they are linked within a specific culture. The main implication for the study of media that crystallizes from semiotic analysis is that the meaning of a specific representation (a TV program, a music genre, etc.) is determinable largely in terms of its interconnectedness to other representations. As an example of how a specific text “works semiotically” as a component of a larger syntext, let us turn to the domain of advertising. Consider the ads used to promote a man’s cologne, named resonantly Drakkar noir, which filled the pages of magazines all over the world a few years ago, and whose campaigns are still evident on websites

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throughout cyberspace. In general, the ads spotlighted a cologne bottle, with a ghastly, frightful black color and a strange shape. Darkness connotes fear, evil, and the unknown. Forbidden things take place under the cloak of night. The sepulchral name, Drakkar noir, reinforces the feeling that something dark and scary, but nevertheless sexually desirous, will materialize by dousing oneself with the cologne. The guttural sound of Drakkar—obviously suggestive of Dracula, the deadly vampire who would mesmerize his sexual prey with a mere glance—instills both a surreptitious fear and cupidity in the consumer. The theme of vampirism can be extracted from this text for the simple reason that it is part of social textuality. The Dracula legend was introduced to the modern world through the pen of Bram Stoker, whose novel Dracula was first published in 1897 and has remained in print ever since. His treatment became the yardstick by which all future vampires in literature and film would be measured. The figure of Dracula has, in effect, become a part of pop culture lore. Clearly, the overall presentation of the cologne was not designed in a random fashion. Rather, it was structured to evoke a connotative chain of meanings that are interconnected textually and historically: Darkness = evil = something desirable = Dracula = sexuality = and so on. Needless to say, other connotative interpretants can also be envisioned, because the vampire figure also symbolizes other things, especially the breaking of taboos. The figure of Dracula challenges authority, putting forward a fine line between passion and power, and resuscitating the mythical search for eternal youth and immortality. Stoker’s Dracula was the embodiment of Evil, but the Dracula that finds its way into modern-day representations has evolved into a much more ambivalent creature—a clear reflection of the blurring of the boundaries between Good and Evil in pop culture.

Media as extensions A constant theme throughout this book has been McLuhan’s idea that our media are extensions of ourselves. It is worthwhile revisiting this theme one final time. The basic idea is that tools are extensions of some sensory, physical, expressive, or intellectual capacity, and thus that technology overall is our attempt (and intrinsic need) to enhance our biology. Are signs and sign structures tools extending sensory-anatomical-neural capacities, allowing us to do things that would be impossible otherwise? If so, this would require tweaking semiotic theory, somewhat along the lines suggested by the biosemiotic movement, starting with the work of Jakob von Uexkü ll (1909). Von Uexkü ll

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suggested that the world of objects and information (the Umwelt) is perceived in a particular way by a species via the particular neural-anatomical structures with which it is endowed by nature, and this allows the species to construct its own necessary models of that world (the Innenwelt) so as to be able to understand it on its own terms and thus cope with it. In the case of humans, the modeling process is a sophisticated one that involves abstract symbolism. This is perhaps why humans do not simply react to stimuli; they interact inventively, creatively, and symbolically with them. They change stimuli into sign forms of the world that then can be used to further explore that world. This means, ultimately, that humans are in charge of their own evolution. This might seem to be a preposterous idea to some, but in recent decades, biologists have come increasingly to adopt von Uexkü ll’s basic perspective, calling human evolution autopoietic, as discussed briefly already. Technology is autopoietic, allowing humans to shape their own evolution, in partnership with nature. Essentially, McLuhan argued that we create tools, at first, to extend ourselves—to see farther, to run faster, to think more quickly, and so on. Once we have the necessary tools for doing so, we extend them further and further to create sophisticated tool systems and technologies. As a consequence, our own evolution is guided autopoietically, that is, through the conditions, activities, and meanings generated by the very tools we have made, rather than through strictly biological processes. We are, in effect, makers of our own world, or as he aptly remarked, we live in “a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology” (McLuhan 1968: 85). As the Print Age gave way to the Electronic Age and then to the Digital Age, the tools for knowledge-making and communicating also changed; also we derive a different sense of our own bodies, the organic substances that have been extended. As McLuhan (1970: 180) put it, “When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.” But print communication has not disappeared. The lesson is that human evolution is guided by the forces of technological innovations but such innovations do not cut the chains in the historical chronicle that we ourselves have fashioned. To summarize with McLuhan’s own words (1962: 3): “Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.” The advent of the mass media has been a critical factor in shaping modern-day human life. Although the nature of mass communications has fascinated thinkers across the ages, it was not until fairly recently that it has been studied scientifically in relation to how we process information.

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Impacts on writing A subtext throughout this book is that writing and reading have been essential to human evolution. From pictography to alphabets and beyond, we have literally written ourselves into conscious existence. Writing practices are mediated social-representational practices. The two mirror each other as the late Jacques Derrida (1976) claimed. Derrida believed that written discourse has misguided us in answering profound existential questions by creating linguistic categories, and precise definitions, for this task, etching them into written texts. The assumption that language is a tool that encodes ideas without distortion is rendered useless when one looks at the history of writing and all the changes it has undergone. Derrida analyzed philosophical discourse and found it to be highly entangled, circular, and serving the particular interests of the philosopher. It was hardly a tool for gaining truth about reality, which is elusive by its very nature. Derrida’s main contention was that the meaning of a written text cannot be determined in any absolute way because it shifts according to who reads it, when it is read, how it is read, and so on. Thus authorship is a myth, and only the reader can determine meaning. He rejected the traditional way scholars interpreted literary works as reflecting the author’s views. A narrative text has no unchanging, unified meaning, because the author’s intentions cannot be unconditionally accepted. There are an infinite number of legitimate interpretations of a text that are beyond what the author intends. Hence, the text “deconstructs” itself over time. By their very nature, writing practices are self-referential. Thus, what appears true in a text turns out to be only a specific opinion. In a sense, Derrida is correct. Society is a fiction, an overarching representational medium, created by humans to carry out activities in an orderly and structured way, with writing a means by which these can be recorded for reproduction. This has changed somewhat in the Internet Age, as argued throughout, since all previous media have become obsolescent, to use McLuhan’s notion, but retrieved in various ways, such as multimodal and visual writing. Alphabetic writing has been the norm in world culture since ancient Phoenicia and Greece. But with the dawn of the Internet Age, writing systems have changed significantly.

Visual writing French philosopher René  Descartes was among the first to originate the idea of a universal or common language in the 1600s, although the quest for a “perfect language” goes back to antiquity and narratives such as the Tower of

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Babel story, in which God punishes humanity for its hubris of wanting to build a structure reaching heaven, by giving it multiple languages, so that people could not understand each other and thus fail in their attempt to build the tower. Several hundred artificial languages have been invented since Descartes put forth his proposal. The seventeenth-century clergyman, John Wilkins, wrote an essay in which he proposed that a true universal language would have words in it that were free of ambiguity. Volapü k—invented by Johann Martin Schleyer, a German priest, in 1879—was one of the earliest attempts to construct such a language that would gain moderate diffusion. The name of the language comes from two of its words meaning “world” and “speak.” Today, only Esperanto is used somewhat as an artificial language. As is well known, it was devised by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, a Polish physician. Its core vocabulary consists mainly of root word parts common to the Indo-European languages. Its closeness to Romance languages, such as Spanish, would make it easily understandable to speakers of those languages; but this constitutes an obvious bias toward such languages, thus decreasing its universality. Esperanto was also designed to obviate fracturing of any sort and, as described by Zamenhof, to be immune from outside interferences that would introduce variation into its grammar and vocabulary. However, research has discovered that Esperanto has undergone simplification and diversification. So, the concept of a “universal language” spoken by everyone seems to be a pipe dream. Diversity is a principle of nature and of human life and society. But in the Internet Age, the need to develop a universal mode of communication has resurfaced. The interesting thing is that through multimodality, Internet communications have verged toward a more pictographic and broadly visual form of symbolism, retrieving ancient visual writing, much like McLuhan had predicted. But even before the current era, the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz put forth a visual-symbolic language, which he called a characteristica universalis, consisting of a code of visual characters that could be used unambiguously to express common philosophical, mathematical, and scientific concepts. His goal was, therefore, to make technical communications easier and free of misunderstanding. His basic construction technique was ideographic, based on Chinese characters, at least as understood by Europeans in Leibniz’s era. The global expansion of economic, scientific, and political relations in Leibniz’s era made his project, actually, a more broadly practical one, prefiguring the modern Internet Age, even though Leibniz critiqued other attempts to create universal languages, such as the one by Wilkins (mentioned above), for everyday practical purposes. He maintained that his system was to make mathematical and scientific concepts much more precise, free of the vagaries of language. Needless to say, Leibniz’s visual-symbolic language never caught on, since it was limited to mathematics and logic. A significant attempt to make

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universal writing a reality for everyone came from the mind of Charles Bliss (1949) and his so-called semantographic movement. While living in China, Bliss became interested in Chinese shop signs, which he erroneously thought were written in ideographic script. He learned how to read them, realizing that he had been reading them not in Chinese, but through the conceptual filter of his own language of German. From this experience, he set out to develop a system of picture writing recalling Leibniz’s system, attempting to make written communication universal through the construction of symbols that could be easily comprehended by anyone. The system he developed, called Blissymbolics, caught the attention of psychologists and educators, because it produced genuine results. In 1965, a teaching center in Canada adopted Bliss’ system successfully to teach children with cerebral palsy to communicate. The center hypothesized that it might help the children master the spoken word (as it did). Bliss himself saw this as a use of his system for the wrong reasons. He criticized the center acerbically, but eventually his symbols were incorporated fruitfully into various therapeutic-clinical pedagogies designed for children with learning problems. Despite Bliss’ objections, this usage brought his system of writing to the forefront as a pedagogically effective one. Bliss’ system was devised in an era of expanding international tourism and communications. This led many to believe that a new symbol-based language was needed to facilitate global interactions. Blissymbolics, to some, was the perfect solution. But it also did not catch on. One reason for this is that people associate their own forms of writing with their culture, historical practices, and modes of literacy. To shatter these is literally unthinkable.

Emoji writing The propensity for a mode of writing that retrieved some of the iconic characteristics of pictography found a context in the Internet Age in the form of writing called emoji, which gained widespread diffusion starting in 2010. By 2015 it had become a veritable universal visual code. This was acknowledged in that year by the fact that the Oxford Dictionary chose, as its “Word of the Year,” an emoji—the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji (see Figure 9.4).

Figure 9.4  Face with tears of joy emoji.

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Not only was it not a “word” in the traditional sense—it was a pictograph—but it turned on its head the very definition that the dictionary itself had always adopted for the meaning of a written “word”—a representation of the individual sounds of the spoken word. It was not the only event in 2015 that brought out the growing communicative and social significance of emoji. Musicians, artists, politicians, and advertisers, among many others, started using them in their tweets, on their Facebook pages, on Instagram, on websites, and in other digital venues. With an ever-increasing repertory of emoji symbols currently available (including smileys with more skin tones), it has become obvious that the emoji phenomenon is not just a “cute” means of visually sprucing up a written text, but rather a veritable “sign of the times.” On its website, the Oxford Dictionary explained that it chose an emoji over a traditional phonetic word because it “captures the ethos, mood, and preoccupations” of the contemporary world. Is traditional writing on the wane since the arrival of Web 2.0 technologies? Is the kind of literacy that has served us so well since at least the sixteenth century lost its social value and prestige, as the Oxford Dictionary’s choice indirectly suggested? Unlike the Print Age, which encouraged, and even imposed, the exclusive use of alphabetic writing in most message-making media and domains of literacy, the current Internet Age encourages different modes (including visual and audio) to be utilized in tandem with alphabetic (and nonalphabetic) scripts in the composition of messages. This new kind of multimodal writing system harbors a broad range of implications within it, from the demise of the Print Age to an evolutionary shift in human communication systems and practices. With the appearance and spread of emoji, there seems to be a kind of retrieval of pictographic writing to express ideas and emotions directly, including tone, through a simple, almost primal, imagery. The way we read and write informal messages is not only radically different from the previous era, but it may also indicate a dramatic shift toward a more holistic and imaginative mode of expression, reminiscent of the cave-dwelling etches of our hominid ancestors. The emoji form of writing is a new medium, extending various emotive aspects of language into writing forms. Emoji in themselves are not revolutionary—the technology behind them is. So, they will likely morph or disappear as the technology changes. In the meanwhile, there is an unconscious psychosocial subtext in the emoji themselves; they invariably seem to add a “sunny” cheerful tone to common everyday written communications, standing out against the dark realities and conflicts of the contemporary world. They seem to say, implicitly, “Smile, life is short.” It is no coincidence, in my view, that the most popular emoji symbols bear the color of the sun. A word written with alphabet characters is designed to represent its sound structure, so as to match the spoken word. On the other hand, emoji are essentially visual signs that stand for referents directly, often replacing alphabetic

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words. In most informal written texts, such as tweets and text messages, emoji are used in tandem with the alphabet, producing what can be called a “hybrid writing code,” which allows interlocutors to use both the traditional alphabet and emoji symbols to create messages that effectively blend phonemic with iconic-pictographic referential systems (Danesi 2016). Most emoji are essentially stylized iconic signs similar to sketches. The iconicity varies in degree, of course. For example, a cloud emoji is a visual iconic sign that suggests the outline of a cloud. A sunrise emoji, on the other hand, is an ideographic iconic form, showing the shape of a sun as it rises up from a background (see Figure 9.5). Other suggestive iconic modalities of emoji include value, color, and perspective. Value refers to the darkness or lightness of a line or shape. It plays an important role in portraying contrasts of various kinds. Color conveys various modalities of meaning. In the cloud emoji, the grayish-white color stands for the actual color of clouds (as we perceive it); in some emoji, however, it can suggest various emotions (such as boredom). Perspective refers to a simulative mode of representation, intended to evoke some feature of perception, such as movement. The sunrise emoji is designed to impart a sense of the sun moving upward, this possessing indexical qualities. In effect, emoji are rarely just iconic; in many cases they blend several semiotic modalities, such as indexicality and symbolism, at once, with one or the other being foregrounded. It is relevant to note here that although emoji surfaced as a means to enhance a broader comprehension of written texts in an age of instant communications across the globe, culturally stylized emoji have nonetheless emerged for various reasons. Even facial emoji (or smileys) have undergone modification based on culture-specific needs. The creators of smileys attempted to make them as culturally neutral as possible. The use of yellow to color the smiley was an obvious stylistic ploy to remove recognizable facial features associated with race or ethnicity. Roundness also seems to attenuate specific details of facial structure that would otherwise suggest personality or identity. But, almost right after their spread into common usage, new emoji were constructed that embedded culturally based meanings, either explicitly or unwittingly. So, different colors to represent the face have now become common. It is perhaps more accurate to say, therefore, that some emoji are higher on a culturally neutral “universality scale” of interpretation than others.

Figure 9.5  Cloud and sunrise emoji.

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The smiley, with or without color modifications, can be located higher up on the scale than can, for example, a golf cart emoji which is likely to have midscale comprehensibility; and others still, such as the live long and prosper emoji, are likely to have a lower-scale comprehensibility. The latter emoji alludes to a pop culture referent—the 1960s Star Trek program on American network television where it was used as the Vulcan peace sign. Although the sign has become somewhat of a common symbol in many parts of the world, its interpretation is constrained by various factors, such as the age of the emoji users and their geo-historical background. The smiley and face with tears emoji are found on virtually all mobile device keyboards, no matter what language is involved. They are stylized, almost comic-book-like, pictographs that can (and do) replace words and phrases. They are meaning-enhancing devices that are amalgamated with alphabetic writing in a hybrid fashion, although there are now texts that are composed entirely of emoji. It is not certain, however, that this “emoji-only” mode of writing is spreading broadly. The hybrid system continues to be the most prominent one in informal writing. The foregoing discussion was meant to convey that technology, mediation, and social practices are fused in a constant evolutionary dynamic. A change in one entails a change in the other. These are caught up in a kind of evolutionary cycle, according to McLuhan’s four laws. As we have seen, the instant alphabets came into wide use in antiquity; visual writing became obsolescent but it did not disappear. It found its retrieval in other modes of visual representation, such as art. In a fundamental way, paintings and sculpture are forms of writing that are holistic and interpretable by anyone, even those without alphabetic literacy. Emoji writing is its own visual art form; the difference is that the symbols are predetermined and thus, like alphabet characters, chosen from a keyboard or app. Emoji have made writing art a commodity for one and all.

Impacts on mind and culture The above discussion and, in fact, the discussion throughout this book begs the question of the impact of mediation on people. Many influential thinkers today point the finger at mass communications technology and the mass media as “perverting influences.” The German philosopher Jü rgen Habermas, for instance, claimed that Western industrial democracies had created a mediated culture solely in the service of economic efficiency. Barthes and Baudrillard, as we have seen, also blamed the economically rooted media for inculcating the view that pleasure was the chief good in

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life and that the pursuit of consumption was the basic goal of life. Since the late 1950s, “media bashing” has become prevalent from both the right and the left of the political and moral spectra. The media are blamed for causing everything from street violence and family breakups to philosophical nihilism. Are the mass media the tools of moral destruction that Habermas, Barthes, Baudrillard, and others descry? There is no doubt that the media used in a culture to represent ideas have an impact on the way people living in that culture perceive the world. This is, actually, an old view. Already in the ancient world, the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) claimed that Egyptians thought differently from the Greeks because they wrote their books from right to left rather than from left to right, as did the Greeks. Herodotus thus put forward the notion that the physical characteristics of the medium used by a culture to carry out its representational activities determined how the members of that culture understood the world. A similar view was articulated by the fourteenth-century Algerian scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who wrote a truly fascinating treatise in which he noted that the subtle behavioral differences that existed between nomadic and city-dwelling Bedouins were due to their differences in language and in how they used such differences to represent reality. The same type of view was reiterated centuries later by the philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), the philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), and the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). A little later, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) claimed, tout court, that technological society had deprived human life of meaning. He called the psychic state that such a society induced nihilism—a term that has become widely used. It is easy to blame the products of “media semiosis” for thwarting the more “noble goals” of life that people would otherwise purportedly pursue. But then, this would mean that the “blamers” have some secret knowledge of what those goals are and, more importantly, of why people should pursue them. As at any other period of human history, it is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint what is “ennobling” and what is “demeaning” from the current slate of media representations. History teaches, in fact, that representations that accomplish the former tend to persist on their own, while those that do the latter will disappear into oblivion very quickly, also on their own.

The hypodermic needle view Various branches of mass communications and media studies have arisen specifically to study the impacts of media critically. These are based typically on content analysis, that is, on a description of the kinds of content that media

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messages contain and the purported effects that such content has on people. The general impression one gets from reading the relevant research in this domain is that media content no longer just mirrors cultural values but, rather, that it now largely shapes them (Meyrowitz 1985; Croteau and Hoynes 1997; Dutton 1997; Berman 1998; Ryan 1999; McChesney 1999). If true, then it is clear that this situation has been brought about by the diffusion of media. The Big Brother that George Orwell described in his 1949 novel, seemingly, has been reified in the form of one worldwide computer screen. The theory that the mass media can directly influence behavior is called Hypodermic Needle Theory (HNT). It claims that media are capable of directly swaying minds with the same kind of impact a hypodermic needle has on the body. The phenomenon of “junk food” is often cited in support of this theory. When fast-food eateries first appeared in the 1920s, called diners, and then expanded in 1950s, called burger “joints,” they were designed to be socializing sites mainly for adolescents. The food served at such places was viewed to be “junk” injurious to one’s health and only to be consumed by young people, because their metabolism could ostensibly break it down more quickly and because they could purportedly recover from its negative health effects more easily than older people. But in no time whatsoever junk food, promoted by effective advertising campaigns, became an indulgence sought by anyone of any age, from very young children to seniors. The compulsion to consume junk food has, consequently, become a fact of contemporary life, inducing dangerous eating habits. The inordinate consumption of junk food is, in fact, one of the main factors contributing to the rise in obesity (Schlosser 2000). Obesity is at odds with the ultra-slim body images that the media perpetrate as the norm for attractiveness. This disjunction of fact and image has generated culture-based diseases, previously unknown. Anorexia nervosa, the fear of gaining weight leading to excessive weight loss from restricted food intake and excessive exercise, is one of these. Predictably, it occurs chiefly during adolescence, especially in young women, who tend to perceive body image as critical to their sociability among peers. Sufferers may also exhibit bulimia, the habit of eating large quantities of food followed by induced vomiting. No standard therapy for anorexia nervosa exists But the hypodermic needle view of media-induced eating disorders ignores history. The ravages of overeating or undereating are not just contemporary phenomena. They have always been symptomatic of the excesses of affluent lifestyles. A more moderate version of HNT is thus called for. One such version is Multistep Flow theory. This asserts that media impacts are indirect and are mediated by specific community values. This view is in fact partially verifiable, since people within different social classes come up with very different interpretations of media products. They tend to perceive them

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as interpretive communities, which are inclined to coincide with real communities such as families, unions, neighborhoods, and churches. All this raises the question of who has the right (if any) of deciding what goes into the media syntext. The danger in pin-pointing certain representations as “harmful” and others as “acceptable” is akin to the dangers posed by such movements as the Inquisition in Europe and McCarthyism in the United States. In actual fact, most people can easily distinguish between what is art and what is not. Great works of art foster engagement; many popular media artifacts, on the other hand, are designed solely to provide distraction, even though often times the dividing line between engagement and distraction is blurry indeed. Many of the forms intended originally for distraction have themselves evolved into works of highly engaging art. Some pieces of jazz and rock music, as we saw in Chapter 4, are worthy of being listed alongside the works of the great classical composers; many movies, as we saw in the fifth chapter, are among the greatest works of visual art ever created; and even some TV programs, past and present, have significant artistic merit. Some types of advertising, too, are artistically interesting in and of themselves. Although we may be inclined to condemn the overall objectives of advertising, as an aesthetic-inducing experience we invariably enjoy it. Advertisements sway, please, and seduce. It is useless, in my view, to propose drastic measures to censor or repress media expressions of any kind, in order to counteract any purported hypodermic needle effect. For one thing, media messages produce such an effect only if individuals are already predisposed toward their content; and for another, media moguls will find ways around such measures. Even if it were possible in a democratic culture to control the contents of media, this would invariably prove to be counterproductive. The answer is, in my view, to become aware of the meanings that are generated by the media. When the human mind is aware of the hidden meanings in texts, it will be better able to fend off any undesirable effects that such texts may cause. For the sake of concreteness the idea of distraction versus engagement can be formulated in terms of a “continuum.” At one end of this continuum, one can easily locate music that is intended solely for distraction, and remains as nothing more than that over time. At the other, one can easily locate music intended mainly for engagement, even though it may have been intended originally for entertainment. For instance, the operas of Giuseppe Verdi (1813– 1901), as great as they are, had an initial distraction function—people went to them to be entertained, plain and simple. The fact that such music rose above its entertainment function is a consequence of various factors, not the least of which is the musical genius of the composer. Everyone in our mediated world can easily locate a jingle such as the Alka Seltzer one (Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is) at the distraction end, and a musical work such as Mozart’s

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powerful Requiem Mass at the other. As apparent as this line of reasoning is, it nonetheless brings out concretely that people, by and large, can discern quality in the smorgasbord of options that our media culture makes available. The problem lies in media products that fall on other parts of the continuum, creating cultural confusion. Needless to say, the interpretant is a major factor in determining where someone will locate a specific text on the continuum. Recall from Chapter 2 (and elsewhere in this book) that this term refers to the specific type of meaning that an individual, as a member of a social group, will derive from a text. Human beings are not automaton-like consumers of cultural meanings; they are creative users of these meanings. The problem with our mediated culture is that the critics and defenders of media are both right. The goal of the distraction industries is to promote a consumerist lifestyle. Day in and day out the fragmented images of life coming out of the media are bound to influence our overall view that reality is illusory and surreal, that human actions are a montage of disconnected images, desires, feelings, and that the only achievable goal of life is pleasure through consumption. It is also true, as such media critics argue, that the messages of consumerism are modern-day surrogates for traditional forms of religious or philosophical discourse. But within the same mediascape it is possible to expose the banality of consumerism and the dangers of technology through blogs, social media, and the like. Therein lies the paradox of modernity.

Secondary orality As McLuhan anticipated, the world of digital communications would bring back a form of secondary orality that manifests itself in patterns of cognition, interpretation, expression, and even education which, although shaped fundamentally via writing media, are nonetheless associated with features of orality. Orality (communicating by vocal speech and gesture) is often opposed to literacy (expression by writing and reading). In social-evolutionary terms, the two modalities are related to different cognitive styles and kinds of cultures. Oral culture is poetic and imitative; literate culture is reflective, logical, and stresses originality, and its societies are civilized. As McLuhan argued, the primary form of orality is the fundamental one and still exists in many societies or groups. For example, criminal gangs and cults are organized in the same way as oral tribes, with a leader and with word-of-mouth interactions; and in the age of electronic communications, a secondary form has emerged which has blended, strangely, with writing, transforming writing

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into a quasi-oral medium. Written communication in social media has many features of orality: 1 It is elliptical and compressed (lacking many punctuation marks and correct grammar), in ways that parallel oral speech. 2 It is synchronous (occurs in real time) like vocal speech, while it can be edited, like writing. 3 It is informal and highly conversational in style and mode of delivery. 4 It encourages immediate replies from one’s interlocutor, as in oral communication. Primary orality is based on natural mediation (the human voice) whereas secondary orality is based on artifactual media. This is why McLuhan was always interested in the phenomenon of writing, because it revealed how mediation extended sensory structures and influenced cognition and cultural evolution. The work of Derrick de Kerckhove, one of McLuhan’s students at the University of Toronto, is highly relevant here. He is the one who introduced the term “connected intelligence” at the threshold of the Web 2.0 revolution (Kerckhove 1997). This notion is also known vicariously as “distributed cognition” or “networked intelligence.” It suggests that we are more interested in the extroverted form of intelligence, as it is distributed through the social mediascape, than in individual acts of intelligence, even if we sometimes pay tribute to them as such. The interests of the group are more important than the fame of the individual in this mediascape

Connected mediation In cyberspace, communications and interactions occur and move literally at the speed of light, and because of this the contemporary denizens of cyberspace feel caught in the present. Consequently, we tend to believe that there is no sense of the future. In the Print Age, with its emphasis on linear progression, humanity constructed linear-narrative models of history which suggested that the future was infinitely far away and that personal and social evolution was involved in finding a path toward it; in cyberspace, there is no cognitive linearity of this kind; there is only connectivity which literally makes us feel entrapped within some network structure without any possibility of individual agency. This is the same pattern of consciousness experienced by those who live in primary oral cultures—the difference is that the space and environments in which primary orality existed were restricted and had boundaries that reassured people of their location in the world. In

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Table 9.1  Orality versus Literacy Culture

Orality

Literacy

involves a minimal vocabulary (around several thousand words) because the words and phrases have to be remembered by members of the oral community

involves an ample and potentially infinite vocabulary preserved in books and other writing media that can be accessed atemporally

learning takes place through oral dialogue learning takes place through printed via an apprenticeship format texts analytically and is the basis of educational knowledge transmission favors extroversion since understanding involves listening to the stories told by a shaman or other group leader together with the group within a communal listening format

favors introspection since reading is a solitary activity that stimulates self-reflection

assigns great importance to tradition, assigns importance to innovation, given that the elders are the custodians debate, and critical reflection of knowledge and thus play a dominant role in the culture produces a “heroic” culture because history must be memorable and this is attained through epic and heroic narratives

produces an “anti-heroic” culture favoring instead psychological analyses of people’s actions and of history

produces an “episodic” mind-set, whereby produces a “linear” mind-set that sees the episodes of a culture’s past are historical episodes as laid out in a embedded into each other progression just like the linearity of written texts

secondary orality environments, on the other hand, there is no sense of space and time and their reassuring boundaries. People feel suspended nowhere and everywhere. The problem with the world today is fundamentally a McLuhanian one—it exists in bits and pieces, bytes and ideas, blending into a mishmash of thought that, when counterposed against the styles of the Print Age, can be perceived as confusing. Does this mean that philosophical reflection is on the brink of disappearing, as some would say? After all, philosophy itself is a product of print culture, not of primary oral cultures, who rely primarily on what anthro-

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pologists call folk wisdom and word magic. So, the warning inherent in this line of argument is that it is now our responsibility to sift through the slogans and memes and critique them more philosophically. In other words, the paradox is that in our connected world, philosophical reflection is being constantly retrieved because we somehow feel that it is still in our best interests. Setting the new technologies against previous ones is wrong-minded. Clarity and distinctiveness are still possible in this era; indeed they are goals to be set. The Print Age made individualism a value and a priority, stressing privacy over public exposure. It generated what can be called an “individualist brain,” a form of consciousness that perceives every individual as an independent person who possesses an inalienable right to their own opinions, independently of what others think, and independently of authority structures (including laws and established wisdom). Individualism holds that a civilized society can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a collectivity, as such, has no rights other than the set of rights of its individual members. In individualist societies, the communal or collective brain is seen as belonging to a previous stage of human evolution typical of pre-literate societies. If there are “collective thoughts,” these are seen as deriving from a consensus of individual thoughts pooled for the common good. All the functions of body and mind are seen as private. They cannot be shared or transported. In this paradigm, we inherit the ideas of other individuals, but we make of them what we ourselves want or need. We learn from each other, not from specified social-political figures or leaders. Individual creativity assumes great importance in such a system, and tribal forms of knowledge are seen as primitive or superstitious. The individualist brain is an ideal, shaped by socio-technological forces at work in the human organism. As such it is a worthy one; but it also has a serious downside. Mental diseases, clinically diagnosed, are part of this downside. For this reason clinical psychology, not religion, has emerged to harmonize the mind scientifically with its surroundings. Movements such as psychoanalysis, existentialism, absurdism, surrealism, and postmodernism could never have emerged in a tribal society where the harmony of the group is emphasized; they are products of the individualist brain which is subject to alienation and anomie. It is little wonder that in the Web 2.0 world, where a virtual “communal brain” has crystallized, such movements and psychological practices hold less sway and similar movements have surfaced only sporadically and ineffectively. In academia, individualism has brought about debates and studies on identity, alterity, and other constructs of the individualist mind, bringing the tendencies of the romantic idealists into sharp social focus with truly individualist artistic movements from expressionism to postmodernism. The notion of personal identity—if it emerges at all—has little value in communal group-

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ings, where the only identity that has value is that of the leader—the shaman, the noble, the hero, and so on—who determines groupthink. But as mentioned throughout this book, social changes brought about by technology always present a paradox. The individualist brain has not disappeared completely; it shows up in different ways in social media, such as in the profile and the new ways in which identity is constructed through it. Identity is no longer something that is shaped by external social forces of the real world; it is negotiated online through self-portraiture. So, the paradox is that the individualist brain seeks a locus within the communal brain, much like individual cells in the brain have specific functions but are more important as contributors to the overall functions of the brain. Maybe the human brain is intrinsically a blender of disparate elements, and thus pastiche and collage are inevitable modes of knowing that derive from its neural structure. If so, then the current electronic universe is truly, as McLuhan would often point out, an externalized brain, showing its connected nature physically in the form of electronic circuits, pathways, interconnections, and so on. As de Kerckhove (1997) argues, the mediascape has tapped into the essential outline structure of the brain, allowing us to step outside the linearity of the individualist brain and to see, feel, and hear more. The dangers of technology include notions such as the singularity and what Neil Postman called in 1992 a “technopoly,” defined as a society that has become totally reliant on technology and seeks authorization in it, as well as deriving recreation from it, and even taking its orders from it. This results when technology saturates the world with information. Postman identifies three paradigm shifts based on technologically directed evolution: 1 Tool-using cultures are those that use tools to solve physical problems of existence and to serve an emerging world of ritual symbolism and art. These cultures are theocratic and unified by a metaphysical view of the world. 2 Technocratic cultures are those that employ cognitive tools, such as the alphabet, for creating a particular worldview or “thought-world,” as he called it. This serves to overthrow the previous metaphysical thought-world—for example, heliocentricity overthrew the belief in the Earth as the center of the universe. Technocracy impels people to invent, hence the rise of science and literacy. A technocratic society is still controlled “from above,” that is by religious, educational, and social institutions. 3 Technopoly is a “totalitarian technocracy,” evolving on its own. It reduces humans to seeking meaning in machines and in computation.

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Postman warned that those who do not see the downside of technology, constantly demanding more innovation and therefore more information, are in effect silent witnesses to a new form of mind control. The only way to improve the situation, as Postman saw it, would be to get people to use technology smartly by being educated in the history, social effects, and psychological biases of technology. That has actually been one of the subtexts of this book, which is in no way Postmanian, but has been intended to give an interpretive frame to the mediascape. That frame, as iterated throughout, is a semiotic one.

Concluding reflections Semiotic inquiry is grounded on the assumption that there exists a “need for meaning” in all human beings and that this is, arguably, the reason why media products of all types are so engaging. They provide representations that feed our need for meaning. This need has, of course, not only led human beings to create profane carnivalesque culture forms, but also to invent myths, art, rituals, languages, mathematics, science, and other truly remarkable things that set it apart from all other species. The mediated culture in which we live today is, really, no more than a contemporary vehicle for satisfying this need, no matter how bizarre or trivial its representational products may appear to be. And, of course, let us not forget that those in the media themselves are often the ones who are determined to “make the world better.” Hordes of TV reporters, newspaper journalists, and the like are constantly holding the “system” accountable. Creative media makers also provide truly meaningful alternatives to the “dumbed-down” fare that dominates the “distraction factory.” Cultures resolve their problems and set their future goals dynamically and synergistically from within. While it is true that the globalization of media has transformed the world into a consumer-frenzied “factory” with mega-companies controlling its operation, it is also true that constant changes to this factory are coming from within, making it unstable at best. The only thing is to ensure that future generations understand the historical and signifying forces at work in the operation of this factory. Simply put, it behooves us to make sure that our children will be able to distinguish a meaningful news documentary from an ad for running shoes. Ironically, the best way to do this is through the media. Deep down inside we all harbor an intuitive understanding that for all the flaws of the media, ultimately human beings will come down on the side of democracy and not be allowed to let themselves be controlled by a few.

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That is the lesson of all failed social experiments in mind control. Despots cannot confine and imprison the human imagination for very long. The ancient Israelites used the word hychma to describe this aspect of human nature, defining it as the “science of the heart.” That science will not let the tyrants steal the heart of humanity.

Further reading As mentioned several times in this book, the notion that the mind, the body, and culture are interconnected now comes under the rubric of biosemiotics. Among the works in this field are the following. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2008. Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. Scranton: University of Scranton Press. Hoffmeyer looks at how biosemiotics has developed since the early 1990s. He looks especially at the semiotic nature of information. Kull, Kalevi. 2011. Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life is the Action of Signs. London: Imperial College Press. Kull argues that life is semiosis, otherwise it is just physical matter. This is the key notion in biosemiotics and Kull elaborates it extensively. Sebeok, Thomas A. and Danesi, Marcel. 2000. The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sebeok and Danesi claim that the main goal of biosemiotics is the study of modeling phenomena, which are embedded in semiosis at different levels. Posner, Roland, Klaus Robering, and Thomas A. Sebeok (eds.). 1997– 2004. Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur / Semiotics: A Handbook on the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture. 4 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. This four-volume collection of essays written by experts in the various fields and subfields of contemporary semiotics provides the broadest and most technical introduction to the discipline, covering everything from sign theory to advanced topics in biosemiotics.

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Glossary abstract referent  concept formed in the mind and thus not directly demonstrable actant  role, theme, and so on (a hero, an opponent) that recurs in all kinds of stories addressee  receiver of a message; the individual(s) to whom a message is directed addresser  the sender of a message; the creator of a message advertising  any type or form of public announcement designed to promote the sale of specific commodities or services aesthesia  the experience of sensation; in art appreciation it refers to the fact that our senses and feelings are stimulated holistically by art works alliteration  the repetition of the initial consonant sounds or features of words alphabet  the graphic code whereby individual characters stand for individual sounds (or sound combinations) anchorage  Roland Barthes’ notion that visual images in advertisements are polysemous (having many meanings) which are, however, anchored to particular meaning domains by specific interpreters animism  the attribution of a spirit to plants and inanimate objects archetype  an original model or type after which other similar things are patterned artifact  an object produced or shaped by human craft, especially a tool,

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a weapon, or an ornament of archaeological or historical interest; by extension, any media form (a TV program, a recording, etc.) artifactual medium  any human artifact (a book, a painting, etc.) that extends the natural modes of message creation and delivery artificial intelligence  the branch of computer science concerned with the development of machines having the ability to carry out human mental functions audience  specified groups of individuals toward whom media products are directed autopoiesis  view that organisms participate in their own evolution biosemiotics  the study of semiosis and its relation to biological processes bipedalism  capacity to walk upright on two feet birth and rebirth myth  a myth informing people about how life can be renewed or about the coming of an ideal society or savior blog  a personal website or web page on which people record opinions, blogosphere  the system of blogs on the Internet book  set of written, printed, or blank pages fastened along one side and encased between protective covers brand image  the creation of a personality for a product: that is, the intentional creation of a product’s name, packaging, price, and advertising style in order to create

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a recognizable personality for the product that is meant to appeal to specific consumers brand name  name given to a product bricolage  blending of symbols, language, and other modes of representation in a ritualistic way CD-ROM  (Compact Disc Read-Only Memory) compact disc for reading digital data, allowing users to navigate to topics within a page of text by simply clicking them on channel  the physical means by which a signal or message is transmitted character  a person portrayed in an artistic piece such as a drama or novel closed text  text that elicits a singular, or a very limited, range of interpretations code  the system in which signs are organized and which determines how they relate to each other and can thus be used for representation and communication codex  type of proto-book used in the Middle Ages, used specially to write about classic works or the Scriptures cognitive compression  the term used in this book to refer to the fact that TV presents personages, events, and information globally and instantly leaving little time for reflection on the topics, implications, words, and so on contained in a message, thus leading to a state by which information is desired and understood mainly in a “compressed” form collage  a piece of art or a text made by combining various different materials or forms comics  narratives told by means of a series of drawings arranged in horizontal lines, strips, or rectangles, called panels, and read like a verbal text from left to right communication  social interaction through messages; the production and exchange of messages and

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meanings; the use of specific modes and media to transmit messages compact disc (CD)  small optical disc on which information such as data or music is encoded conative  the effect of a message on the addressee concept  a connection made by the human mind (within cultural contexts) conceptual metaphor  a generalized metaphorical formula that defines a specific abstraction (love = sweet) conceptual metonym  a generalized metonymical formula that defines a specific abstraction (the face = the person) concrete referent  something existing in reality or in real experience and is, normally, perceptible by the senses connotation  the extended or secondary meaning of a sign; the symbolic or mythic meaning of a certain signifier (word, image, etc.) connotative chain  a chain of connotations associated with a product as generated by ads and commercials about the product, by the brand name used, and so on connotative index  the degree of connotation associated with a product; a measure of the number of connotations generated by an ad, commercial, brand name, and so on consumer advertising advertising directed toward the promotion of some product contact  the physical channel employed in communication and the psychological connections between addresser and addressee context  the situation—physical, psychological, and/or social—in which a sign or text is used or occurs, or to which it refers conventional sign  a sign that has no apparent connection to any perceivable feature of its referent;

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a sign created by human beings in specific social contexts cosmogonic myth  myth explaining how the world came into being cultural modeling  the association of various concrete ideas with an abstract one, producing an overall, or culture-specific model, of the abstract idea culture hero myth  myth describing beings who discover a cultural artifact or technological process that radically changes the course of history cuneiform writing  system of writing whereby characters are formed by the arrangement of small wedge-shaped elements; used in ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian cultures decoding  the process of deciphering a text on the basis of the code or codes and the media used denotation  the primary, intentional meaning of a sign, text, and so on diachronic  the historical dimension of signs Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)  radio broadcasting system that consists of transmitters and receivers using digital formats Digital Galaxy  term coined to imitate Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy to characterize the new social order ushered in by the invention of computer media digital media  computer-based systems of transmission Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) telephone service that transmits audio, video, and computer data over conventional phone lines and via satellite digital television  television that is transmitted in a digital (computerbased) format Digital Versatile Disc (DVD)  digital disc that allows for the reproduction of audio, video, graphics, and so on

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Direct-Broadcast-Satellite (DBS)  television service that allows individual households to receive hundreds of channels carried by satellites directly into their homes discourse  written or spoken communication or debate using keywords, codes, and the like to make the message meaningful to a specific group displacement  the ability of the human mind to conjure up the things to which signs refer even though these might not be physically present for the senses to perceive e-book  digital book (published on the Internet) Electronic Galaxy  term coined to imitate Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy to characterize the social order ushered in by the invention of electronic media electronic media  devices such as records and radios that allow for the sending and reception of electromagnetic signals e-mail  (electronic mail) online service that permits people to send messages to each other via the Internet or some other computer network system emoji  picture words selected from a keyboard or app to construct messages emotive  the addresser’s emotional intent in communicating something encoding  the use of a code or codes to select or create a sign or text according to a medium through which the sign will be transmitted eschatological myth  a myth that describes the end of the world e-toon  digital comic or cartoon (published on the Internet) e-zine  digital magazine (published on the Internet) Facebook  social networking site that allows “friends” to interact through it feedback  reaction to transmitted messages that informs the sender as to the nature of its reception

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fiction  a literary work whose content is produced by imagination and is not necessarily based on fact ground  the part of a metaphor that generates meaning Gutenberg Galaxy  term coined by Marshall McLuhan to characterize the radical new social order ushered in by the invention of the printing press hardware  actual physical computer and the associated physical equipment directly involved in the performance of its data-processing or communication functions hermeneutics  the science or art of interpretation of texts hieroglyphic writing  ancient Egyptian system of writing, in which pictorial symbols were used to represent meaning or sounds or a combination of both High-Definition Television (HDTV)  television broadcasting system that consists of transmitters and receivers using digital formats history fabrication  the term used in this book to refer to the fact that TV both shapes and documents historical events hypertextuality  system for linking different texts and images within a computer document or over a network icon  a sign that has a direct (nonarbitrary) connection to a referent iconicity  the process of representing referents with iconic signs ideograph  writing symbol that represents abstract ideas pictorially image  representation of a product or service in order to enhance its value aesthetically, socially, and so on image schema  mental impression of locations, movements, shapes, and so on index  a sign that has an existential connection to a referent (indicating that something or someone is located somewhere)

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indexicality  the process of representing referents with indexical signs information  measure of data that can be stored and retrieved by humans or machines interactive  medium where audiences can participate in the medium directly, not passively Internet  matrix of networks that connects computers around the world interpretant  the process of adapting a sign’s meaning to personal and social experience interpretation  the process of figuring out what some sign (word, text, program, etc.) means intertextuality  the allusion within a text to some other text irony  the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning iTunes  app for downloading music, movies, and so on jingle  an easy rhythmic and simple repetition of sound, and so on, as in poetry and music juvenilization  social phenomenon by which people think of themselves as “forever young” both physically and socially keyword  in discourse, a word that connects the speaker subtly to a particular group literacy  ability to understand and use written language to transmit knowledge logo  a distinctive company or brand signature, trademark, colophon, motto, newspaper nameplate, and so on logograph  full symbol or character representing a word magazine  paper-based publication consisting of a collection of articles or stories, or both, published at regular intervals marketing  the business of positioning goods and services to the right audience

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meaning  the concept that anything in existence has a design or purpose beyond its mere occurrence mechanical medium  any device or technological system that extends both natural and artifactual media (a telephone, a radio, etc.) media convergence  convergence of all media into digital formats and, thus, their integration into a single transmission system media genre  category of media product that is used to create and deliver messages to audiences mediascape  the virtual or imaginary landscape of the mind created by the media mediation  intercession of a medium between a referent and its representation, and thus between what people perceive and the reality behind the perception medium  the physical means or process required to encode a certain type of message and deliver it through some channel to a specific type of receiver meme  an image, video, expression, and so on, that is passed from one Internet user to another message  communication transmitted by words, signals, or other means from one person, station, or group to another metalingual  the communicative function by which the code being used is identified metaphor  the signifying process by which two signifying domains (A and B) are connected (A = B) explicitly or implicitly metonymy  the signifying process by which an entity is used to refer to another that is related to it MP3  means of compressing sounds into a very small file multimedia  combined use of several media, such as movies, music, print, and so on producing a type of representation on a computer system

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that integrates printed text, graphics, video, and sound multimodal  use of several communicative or representation modes myth  any story or narrative that aims to explain the origin of something mythologizing effect  the term used in this book to refer to the fact that TV imbues its characters with a mythological aura mythology  the set of mythic connotations associated with some media product name  a sign that identifies a human being or, by connotative extension, an animal, an object (such as a commercial product), and event (such as a hurricane) nano-celebrity  short-lived celebrity created in online venues narrative  something narrated, told, or written, such as an account, story, tale, and even scientific theory narrative mode  the use of narrative as the cognitive means by which something is conceptualized and then expressed—“narrated”—in verbal and/or nonverbal ways narrative structure  the presence of universal elements of plot, character, and setting in storytelling practices narrativity  the innate human capacity to produce and comprehend narratives narratology  the branch of semiotics that studies narrativity narrator  the teller of the narrative narreme  a minimal unit of narrative structure narrowcasting  broadcasting designed to reach specific types of audiences natural medium  any biologically inherited ability or capacity for encoding and decoding a message, including the voice (speech), the face (expressions), and the body (gesture, posture, etc.) natural sign  a sign that is produced by Nature (such as a symptom)

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newspaper  paper-based publication, usually issued on a daily or weekly basis, the main function of which is to report the news noise  some interfering element (physical or psychological) in the channel that distorts or partially effaces a message novel  a fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters object  a synonym for referent or signified; what a sign refers to online services  computer services made available through commercial computer networks to which subscribers pay monthly or hourly fees onomatopoeia  the feature of words by which they represent a referent through the simulation of one or several of its audio features (drip, boom, etc.) open text  text that entails a complex interpretive range opposition  the process by which signs are differentiated through a minimal change in their forms (signifiers) orality  the use of spoken language to transmit knowledge Othello effect  lying in order to emphasize the truth paradigm  a structural relation between signs that keeps them distinct and therefore recognizable paradigmaticity  a differentiation property of signs parallelism  the repetition of linguistic patterns (sentences, phrases, etc.) pastiche  artistic work or text consisting of a combination of elements taken from various sources persona  the Self that one presents in specific social situations phatic  a communicative function by which contact between addresser and addressee is established

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phonography  writing system in which characters stand for parts of words pictography  writing using pictures playlist  a list of recorded songs or pieces of music chosen by radio stations or individuals plot  the plan of events or main story in a narrative podcast  multimedia digital file made available on the Internet for downloading to a media player poetic  a communicative function based on poetic language pop art  artistic movement depicting objects or scenes from everyday life and employing techniques of commercial art and popular illustration positioning  the placing or marketing of a product for the right people postmodernism  the state of mind which believes that all knowledge is relative and human-made, and that there is no purpose to life beyond the immediate and the present pragmatics  study of language as used in social contexts Print Age  age when alphabetic writing prevailed and the main code for recording information print media  media based on paper (or similar) technology propaganda  any systematic dissemin­ ation of doctrines, views, and so on refle­cting specific interests and ideologies (political, social, etc.) public relations  the activities and techniques used by organizations and/or individuals to establish favorable attitudes and responses in their behalf on the part of the general public or of special groups publicity  the craft of disseminating any information that concerns a person, group, event, or product through some form of public media pulp fiction  popular and cheap magazines containing stories of adventure, romance, crime, and so on

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radio  technological system for sending audio signals through the air without wire, that is, via electromagnetic waves receiver  the one who decodes a message redundancy  repetition of parts of a message built into codes for counteracting noise referent  what is referred to by a sign (any object, being, idea, or event in the world) referential  the communicative function by which a straightforward meaning is intended representamen  Peirce’s term for the physical part of a sign representation  the process of giving a form to some referent with signs rhetoric  the study of the techniques used in all kinds of discourses, from common conversation to poetry semantic differential  the technique used in semiotics for fleshing out connotations from a concept or representation semantics  the study of meaning in language semiology  Ferdinand de Saussure’s term for the study of signs, now restricted, by and large, to the study of verbal signs semiosis  the comprehension and production of signs semiosphere  the universe of signs complementing the biosphere, the universe of organisms semiotics  the science or doctrine that studies signs and their uses in representation sender  the transmitter of a message sense ratio  the level at which one of the senses is activated during the encoding and decoding of forms setting  the place and conditions where a narrative takes place sign  something that stands for something (someone) else in some capacity

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signal  any transmission, natural or mechanical signification  the relation that holds between a sign and its referent signification system  system of meanings evoked by something significs  study of the relation of signs to bodily processes signified  that part of a sign that is referred to (the referent); also called image, object, or concept signifier  that part of a sign that does the referring/the physical part of a sign signifying order  the interconnected system of signs, texts, codes, and so on that constitute a culture singularity  the moment when AI will overtake natural intelligence slogan  a catchword or phrase used to advertise a product smartphone  phone with multimedia capabilities (computer, search engine, etc.) software  programs, routines, and symbolic languages that control the functioning of the hardware and direct its operation source domain  the set of vehicles (concrete forms) that is used to deliver the meaning of an abstract concept structure  any repeatable or predictable aspect of signs, codes, and texts subtext  a concealed system of connotative meanings within a text symbol  a sign that has an arbitrary (conventional) connection with a referent symbolism  symbolic meaning in general symptom  a bodily sign that stands for some ailment, physical condition, disease, and so on synchronic  the study of signs at a specific point in time (usually the present) synecdoche  the signifying process by which a part stands for the whole

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synesthesia  the evocation of one sense modality (e.g., vision) by means of some other (e.g., hearing); the juxtaposition of sense modalities (e.g., loud colors) syntagm  the structural relation that combines signs in code-specific ways syntagmatic  the structural relation by which signs are combined in codedependent ways syntext  term used in this book to refer to a text such as a newspaper that creates the illusion that there is connectivity among what would otherwise be perceived as fragmented random events tabloid  a newspaper with pages half the size of those of a standard newspaper, popular in style and dominated by sensational stories target domain  what a conceptual metaphor is about (the abstract concept that is metaphorized) tautology  a statement that is meaningless but enunciated as necessarily true technology  the system of objects made by humans technopoly  view that technology can become itself despotic if people rely on it completely television  technological system for sending audio and visual signals through the air without wire, that is, via electromagnetic waves tenor  the subject of a metaphor text  a complex sign put together in a specific way textuality  the complex of meanings generated by texts topic  the subject of a metaphor

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trade advertising  advertising that is directed toward dealers and professionals through appropriate trade publications and media transmission  the sending and reception of messages trope  a figure of speech; figurative language generally Turing machine  computer program Twitter  social networking site where brief messages, called tweets, are created and communicated vehicle  the part of a metaphor that makes a concrete statement about the tenor virtual reality (VR) computer simulation of a real or imaginary system that enables a user to perform operations on the simulated system, which shows the effects in real time visual rhetoric  approach to visual texts, such as ads in magazines, that deconstructs them as if they were rhetorical messages Wi-Fi  group of technical standards enabling the transmission of data over wireless networks World Wide Web  an information server on the Internet composed of interconnected sites and files, accessible through a browser program Web 1.0  the World Wide Web before the advent of social media Web 2.0  the World Wide Web after the advent of social media writing  the process of representing speech with characters yellow journalism  journalism based on sensationalism and exaggeration YouTube  video-sharing website

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Index Abelard, Peter  39 absurdism  271 actant  84, 85, 275 ad campaign  130, 228, 230, 231, 232, 238–9, 242, 243, 244, 253, 248, 254, 257 Addison, Joseph  97 addressee  52, 53, 58, 275 addresser  52, 53, 58, 275 advertising  13, 89, 90, 95, 96, 99, 128, 129, 130, 131, 227–50, 267, 275 aesthetic  11, 18, 53, 243, 275 Aiken, Howard  202 Akerman, Chantal  154 Akira, Kurosawa  153 Allen, Woody  151 alliteration  235, 275 alphabet  6, 9, 14, 16, 23, 24, 75, 76, 259, 262, 263, 264, 275 anchorage  26, 275 Anderson, Lindsay  153 animation  142, 149 animism  219, 220, 275 anorexia nervosa  266 Antonioni, Michelangelo  141, 148 Apple Computer Corporation  203, 238, 245 Arau, Alfonso  154 archetype  74, 275 Aristotle  38, 39, 48, 65, 166 Armstrong, Gillian  154 Armstrong, Louis  111, 116, 117 ARPANET  20, 207 artifactual medium  12, 269, 275 artificial intelligence  162, 219, 221, 222, 275 audience  31, 32, 275 audience ethnography  131 audience flow  131 audience research  129, 130, 132 Augustine, St.  38, 39, 46, 48 authorship  25, 142, 208, 259 autopoiesis  60, 275 Babbage, Charles  19, 199, 202 Baird, John Logie  18, 176

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Barthes, Roland  2, 24, 25, 32, 33, 38, 41, 42, 58, 59, 62, 63, 69, 126, 198, 218, 230 Baudrillard, Jean  42, 178, 183, 198, 210 Beckett, Samuel  159, 160 Bell, Alexander Graham  16 Beresford, Bruce  154 Bergman, Ingmar  152 Berners-Lee, Timothy  20, 207 Bertolucci, Bernardo  148 Big Brother  224, 266 binary opposition  28 binary structure  40 biosemiotics  40, 257, 274, 275 bipedalism  10, 275 birth and rebirth myth  73, 275 blending  99–100 blockbuster  63, 150, 155, 156, 172 blog  91, 92, 93, 275 blogosphere  91, 92, 275 Boccaccio, Giovanni  82 book  14–15 brand  233 brand image  233, 247, 275 branding  236–40 brand name  233, 234, 235, 236, 275 bricolage  57, 217, 276 broadcasting  31, 128, 178 Browning, Tod  149 bulimia  266 bull’s-eye model of communication  29, 30 Buñuel, Luis  146 Bunyan, John  85 Burroughs, Edgar Rice  101, 103 Byron, Augusta Ada  202 cable television  18, 22, 156, 157, 179, 182, 183, 185 Campbell, Joseph  74 Capra, Frank  149 caricature  102 Carné, Marcel  149 Carroll, Lewis  60 Cartesian  210, 212, 220, 221

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Index Cassirer, Ernst  27 CD  2, 115, 276 CD-ROM  87, 276 celebrity  137–9 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de  82 Chahine, Youssef  154 channel  29, 30, 31 Chaplin, Charlie  145, 147 character  26, 39, 43, 61, 83, 276 Cheops, King  81 Christie, Agatha  85 Cimino, Michael  151 cinema  142–55, 158–9 Cisse, Souleymane  154 Clair, René  146 classification  208, 209 closed text  35, 105, 276 code  16, 30, 36, 50–5, 276 codex  77, 276 Coen brothers  100 cognitive compression effect  188, 191, 276 collage  90, 217, 218, 246, 276 Collins, Wilkie  85 color  47, 49, 50, 55 comics  42, 90, 94, 102–5, 276 communication  9, 10, 24, 29–31, 276 computer  19–23, 199, 220, 221 computer mediation  200–7 conative function  53, 276 conceptual metaphor  66–9, 276 conceptual metonym  69, 276 connected intelligence  213 connected mediation  269–70 connotation  45, 46, 47, 49, 276 contact  53, 276 content analysis  265, 266, 267 context  51, 53, 276 conventional sign  38, 39 convergence  21, 23, 279 co-option  241–4 Coppola, Francis Ford  150 corporate blog  92 cosmogonic myth  72, 277 Crane, Roy  103 Cronenberg, David  154 cuneiform writing  13, 23, 75, 277 cyberpunk  151, 162 cyberspace  24, 64, 79, 86, 138, 165, 178, 210, 218, 269 cybersystem  210 DAB  22 Dalí, Salvador  146, 245 Dawkins, Richard  64

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299

DBS  18, 22, 277 decoder  30 decoding  30, 205, 277 delivery mode  30 DeMille, Cecil B.  145, 156, 172 demotic writing  75 denotation  44, 277 Derrida, Jacques  40, 85, 259 De Sica, Vittorio  148, 156 detective story  24, 81, 85, 86 diachronic  39, 40, 277 diaries  131 Dick, Philip K.  161 Digital Age  3, 258 digital communication  24, 30 digital culture  99 Digital Galaxy  7, 16, 18, 21, 71, 86, 93, 99, 135, 155, 172, 199, 200, 218, 219, 277 digital media  12, 15, 27, 99, 115, 116, 232 digital television  18, 177, 277 digital world  209–10 digitization  21, 22 director  142, 143 Dirks, Rudolph  102 discourse theory  56–60 disembodiment  5, 210 Disney, Walt  74, 149, 240 displacement  34 distraction  5, 18, 24, 81, 94, 152, 251, 252, 256, 267, 273 documentary  142, 196 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan  85 Dreyer, Carl-Theodor  146 Duchamp, Marcel  146 Du Maurier, Daphne  170 DVD  22, 157, 277 Eastwood, Clint  151 Eckert, John Presper  200, 203 Eco, Umberto  35, 37, 105, 158 Edison, Thomas  108, 141 Egoyan, Atom  154 Eisentsein, Sergey  146, 170 electronic books  86, 87, 277 Electronic Galaxy  7, 18, 107, 128, 146, 277 electronic media  7, 12, 17, 24, 127, 207, 253, 277 embodied cognitive science  56, 60 emoji  211, 261–4, 277 emotive function  53, 277 encoder  30 encoding  30 encyclopedia  79, 209 engagement  18, 267

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300

Index ENIAC  200 enunciative mode  12 Epimetheus  223 eschatological myth  73, 277 existentialism  271 Facebook  188, 213, 214–15, 231, 277 fake news  37, 182 Farnsworth, Philo T.  18 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner  152 fast food  233, 246, 266 Faulkner, William  83 feature film  142, 143 feedback  29, 30, 277 Fellini, Federico  148, 152 fiction  61, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85 film. See cinema Flaubert, Gustave  61 Ford, John  149 Forman, Milos  143, 153 Foucault, Michel  35 four laws of media  210, 211, 212, 264 Frank, Thomas  243 Franklin, Benjamin  105 Freed, Alan  109 Freud, Sigmund  74 Frye, Northrop  73 Gance, Abel  146 gangster film  147, 154 Gardner, Erle Stanley  85 genre  31–2 genre blog  93 Glass, Philip  165 global village  7, 23, 24, 146 Godard, Jean-Luc  152 Greimas, Algirdas, J.  40, 61, 84 Grierson, John  149 Griffith, D. W.  144 ground (of a metaphor)  66 Grumpy Cat  139 Gutenberg, Johannes  6, 14, 77 Gutenberg Galaxy  6, 15, 77, 93, 146, 200, 208, 252, 278 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás  154 Habermas, Jürgen  264 Harry Potter movies  155 HBO  18, 156, 177, 181, 185 HDTV  22, 177, 278 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  265 Heidegger, Martin  265 Hercules  42, 49, 62, 85, 223 Herder, Johann Gottfried von  265

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Herodotus  265 Hershfield, Harry  103 hieratic writing  75 hieroglyphic writing  14, 75, 278 hip-hop culture  111, 113, 117, 123–6 Hippocrates  38 historical inquiry  2 history fabrication effect  188, 190, 278 Hitchcock, Alfred  149, 169–71 Hjelmslev, Louis  40 Hollerith, Herman  202 horror film  149 Humboldt, Wilhelm von  265 Huston, John  149 Huxley, Aldous  162 hyperlink  136 hypertextuality  86, 87, 205, 278 hypodermic needle theory  132, 265–6 IBM  19, 202 icon  48, 49, 50, 263 iconicity  50 ideograph  75, 260, 261, 263, 278 index  48, 49, 278 indexicality  49, 50, 233, 263 indie  113, 114, 155 information  10, 11 interactive  12, 30, 184, 278 interactivity  12, 13, 30, 184 interfacing  17, 204, 205 Internet  199–220 interpretant  40, 44, 142, 205, 211, 245, 278 interpretation  3, 9, 11, 28, 29, 35, 45, 132, 211, 253–55, 278 intertextuality  57, 81, 241, 278 interviews  131 irony  69, 193 iTunes  115, 126, 136, 278 Jacquard, Joseph Marie  201, 202 Jakobson, Roman  40, 52, 53 Jancsó, Miklós  153 Jarman, Derek  153 jazz  109, 111, 112, 113, 117, 118 Jazz Age  109 jingle  130, 231, 235, 267, 278 Jobs, Steve  137, 204 Johnson, Mark  66, 67 Johnson, Samuel  95, 97 Jordan, Neil  153 Joyce, James  83 Julien, Isaac  153 Jung, Carl  74, 224, 229 juvenilization  24, 278

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Index Kaige, Chen  153 Kenji, Mizoguchi  153 keyword  56, 278 Khaldun, Ibn  265 Korda, Alexander  149 Kubrik, Stanley  161 Kuhn, Thomas  6 Kurzweil, Ray  164, 222 Lacan, Jacques  40 Lakoff, George  66, 67, 69 Lang, Fritz  146, 149 Lean, David  152 Leduc Paul  154 Lee, Spike  151 Léger, Fernand  152 Leibniz, Gottfried  201, 260, 261 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  40, 57, 73, 217 literacy  14, 15, 23, 24, 59, 72, 75, 77, 79, 80, 205, 268, 270, 278 Locke, John  37, 39, 40 logo  59, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, 278 logographic writing  13, 278 Lotman, Juri  40, 55, 70 Lucas, George  150 Lumière brothers  141 Lynch, David  151 McCarthy, Joseph  188, 190 McCarthyism  267 McLuhan, Marshall  1, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 76, 77, 137, 176, 189, 210, 211, 223, 257, 258 machine  13, 19, 28, 162, 163, 164, 201, 202, 219, 220, 221, 222 machinism  219, 221, 222, 223, 224 magazine  97–113, 278 magazine publishing  97–9 Makavejev, Dusan  153 Mann, Thomas  83 Marconi, Guglielmo  17, 127 marketing  13, 51, 127, 229, 239, 240, 242, 244, 278 market segment  229 Masahiro, Shinoda  153 Mauchly, John William  200, 203 Maxwell, James Clerk  17 mean world syndrome  188, 189 mechanical medium  12–13, 279 media  1, 2, 3 media convergence  21–3, 279 mediascape  3, 6, 279 media semiotics  2–3 mediation  11, 26–7, 251, 279 media types  11–12

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301

medium  6–7, 279 Méliès, Georges  144 meme  64, 138, 139, 279 meme culture  218 Menzel, Jirí  153 message  9–10 metaculture  77 metalingual function  53, 279 metaphor  64–6, 279 metonymy  69, 279 Miller, Henry  71 mobile device  22, 115, 136, 206, 231, 264 mobile media  206 Moore, Gordon  204 Moore’s Law  204 More, Sir Thomas  161 Morris, Charles  34, 40, 56 Morse, Samuel F. B.  16 Morse Code  16 motion pictures  142–3 movie theater  148, 156, 157, 159, 172, 173 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  143 MP3  115, 177, 279 MTV  111, 122, 123, 124 multimedia  30, 115, 210, 279 multimodal  30, 92, 205, 259, 260, 262, 279 Multistep Flow Theory  266 Murnau, F. W.  146 Murrow, Edward R.  129, 188, 190 musical score  143 music video  111 myth  42, 62, 63, 64, 72, 73, 74, 254, 279 mythic code  44 mythic hero  43 mythologization  233 mythologizing effect  188, 189, 196, 279 mythology  25, 43, 62–4, 72, 196–8, 233, 279 Nagisa, Oshima  153 name  49 nano-celebrity  116, 138, 139, 279 nano-scape  17 nano-technology  23, 203 narrative  52, 61, 63, 69, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 134, 144, 166 narrative code  52, 61 narrative sign  60 narrative structure  60–1, 62, 82, 84, 279 narrative text  51, 52, 81, 85, 259 narrativity  61, 62, 279 narratology  61, 279 narrator  61, 86, 279 narreme  84, 279

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302

Index narrowcasting  31, 279 natural medium  11–12, 279 natural sign  38–9, 279 neomania  24, 33, 126 Netflix  18, 22, 156, 181, 185 Neumann, John von  203 news  19, 58, 78, 87, 88, 129, 133, 134, 182, 191, 195 news broadcasting  181 news channel  182 newsmagazine  182 newspaper  22, 78, 87–8, 94, 95, 96, 97, 103, 133, 230, 280 newspaper blog  93 newspaper publishing  88–91 niche audience  113 nihilism  166, 265 Nipkow, Paul  176 noise  29, 30, 280 Nolan, Jonathan  170 nominalists  39 novel  52, 81–6, 280 object (in sign theory)  39, 40, 59 objectivity  23, 76, 77, 89 Obstinate Audience Theory  132 online  21, 22, 92, 114 online advertising  239 online comics  104 online game  158 online magazine  99 online medium  92, 156 online mythology  63–4 online newspaper  88, 90, 91, 93 online radio  23, 135–6 online services  92, 280 online television  185 onomatopoeia  41, 48, 280 open text  36 opposition  28, 47, 62, 119, 220, 280 oral communication  30, 72 oral culture  6, 11, 72, 79, 207 orality  23, 24, 72, 77, 79, 105, 268, 170, 280 oral myth  72 oral mythology  72–4 Orwell, George  162, 224 Othello effect  61, 280 Ouedraogo, Idrissa  154 Outcault, Richard Felton  102 Pabst, G. W.  146, 149 Pandora  223 paper  14–15

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papyrus  14 paradigmatic structure  47, 48, 280 paradigm shift  6, 14, 23, 77, 105, 108, 203, 206 Pascal, Blaise  201 Pasolini, Pier Paolo  148 pastiche  217, 218, 272, 280 Peirce, Charles S.  37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 48, 56 Pereira dos Santos, Nelson  154 personal blog  92 personal computer  15, 203, 204–6 phatic function  53, 280 phonograph  108 phonographic writing  14, 75, 280 photocopying  15 photoengraving  231 photograph  26, 59, 97, 139, 141, 214 photography  8, 69, 94, 141, 207 pictograph  6, 9, 13, 74, 75, 76 pictography  6, 9, 13, 74, 76, 252, 259, 261, 262, 280 pinball  157 Pintilie, Lucien  153 placement  239–40 Plato  38, 39, 105 playlist  115, 280 Pliny the Elder  79 plot grammar  84, 105 podcast  23, 31, 132, 136, 155, 280 Poe, Edgar Allan  85 poetic function  53, 280 pop art  245–7, 280 pop culture  23, 24, 33, 81, 85, 101, 102, 116, 240, 257 pop music  107, 108–14, 116, 117, 121, 123, 126, 127 Porter, Edwin S.  144 positioning  232, 280 post-humanism  164 Postman, Neil  272, 273 postmodernism  158, 159–63, 164, 165, 166, 271, 280 Potter, Sally  153 Powell, Michael  152 pragmatics  280 primary orality  269 prime time  135, 195 print  14–15, 280 Print Age  25, 78–9, 104, 209, 258, 262, 269, 270, 271, 280 programming  18, 31, 131, 133, 136, 177, 178, 185, 194, 195 Prometheus  42, 43, 44, 62, 85, 223 propaganda  129, 228, 280

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Index Propp, Vladimir  61, 84, 105 Proust, Marcel  83 publicity  228, 280 public relations  228, 280 publishing  15, 80, 86, 88, 97, 98, 108 pulp fiction  100–2, 280 question blog  93 radio  12, 17–18, 22, 107, 112, 127–9, 137, 178, 179, 281 radio advertising  120 radio broadcasting  107, 109, 112, 113, 127–9 radio genre  133–5 radio program  131–2 rap  111, 123, 124, 125, 126 ratings  129, 131, 195 Ray, Satyajit  153 reality television  183, 184, 191 receiver  27, 29, 30, 281 Reception Theory  132 record  12, 22, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 124 recorded music  108 recording  7, 22, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 117, 118 record label  113, 115 redundancy  29, 280 Reed, Carol  152 re-embodiment  55, 225 reference  35 referent  8, 34, 38, 40, 41, 280 referential function  53, 280 Reggio, Godfrey  165 Reisz, Karel  153 representamen  40, 85, 280 representation  7–9, 280 rhetoric  58, 59, 280 rhetorical discourse  233–6 Richardson, Tony  153 Rocha, Glauber  154 rock music  36, 109–13, 118–24 Rossellini, Roberto  148 Rossini, Gioacchino  114, 254 sacred sign  39 salience transfer  188 Sander, Helke  152 Sanders-Brahms, Helma  152 Sarnoff, David  127, 128 Sartre, Jean-Paul  84 satellite radio  136 satellite technology  15, 22, 23, 206

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satellite television  176, 185, 186 Saussure, Ferdinand de  37, 39, 40, 41, 56 Schepisi, Fred  154 Schikard, Wilhelm  201 scholasticism  49 Schramm, Wilbur  30 Schultz, Charles  104 science  160, 162 science-fiction  81, 86, 161, 162 Scorsese, Martin  150 Scott, Ridley  151, 161, 245 screenwriter  142, 143 Sebeok, Thomas A.  38 secondary orality  268–9 semantic differential  46, 47, 281 sematology  40 Sembéne, Ousmane  154 semiology  37, 56, 281 semiosis  265, 281 semiosphere  55, 281 semiotic analysis  35–6 semiotic method  2, 3, 9, 32–4 semiotics  1, 2, 8, 281 semiotic theory  2, 8, 37–40 sender  12, 27, 29, 281 Sennett, Mack  145 sense ratio  11, 281 sensory modality  9–10 serial  101, 134, 169, 181 Shaffer, Peter  143 Shannon, Claude  28, 29, 222 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft  83, 161 Shikibu, Murasaki  82 Shohei, Imamura  153 sign  6, 7, 8, 9, 25, 32, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 281 signal  7, 10, 17, 28, 281 signification  8, 27, 44, 47, 281 signification system  27, 34, 45, 281 significs  40, 281 signified  8, 9, 27, 34, 35, 38, 40, 281 signifier  8, 9, 27, 34, 35, 38, 40, 281 signifying order  35, 36, 53–5, 281 singularity  164, 220, 222, 281 sitcom  26, 68, 69, 133, 175, 180, 197, 281 Slenderman  64, 74 slogan  232, 235, 281 smartphone  17, 281 SMCR model of communication  30 soap opera  32, 129, 134, 181 social code  116–17 social media  115, 176, 188, 213 social text  175, 193–6, 256 Solas, Humberto  154

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Index Sontag, Susan  65 source domain  67, 68, 281 specialty channel  184, 196 Spielberg, Steven  150, 151 , 156, 240 Spitzer, Leo  58 Steele, Richard  97 stock character  32, 133, 134 Stoker, Bram  257 Stone, Oliver  151 streaming  123, 136, 157, 185 Strindberg, August, structure  1, 32, 33, 36, 281 subtext  81, 281 Superman  42–53, 64 surrealism  146, 247, 248, 271 Swift, Jonathan  194 Swinnerton, James Guilford  102 symbol  13, 48, 49, 50 281 symbolism  50, 281 symptom  38, 281 synchronic  39, 281 synesthesia  11, 281 syntagmatic structure  48, 65, 281 syntext  88, 94, 177, 256, 281 tabloid  90, 94, 282 talk show  32, 135, Tarantino, Quentin  154, 155 target domain  67, 281 tautology  235, 282 technical blog  93 technocracy  272 technology  10, 219–23, 282 technopoly  272, 282 telegraphy  15–16 telephone  16 television  18–19, 282 tetrad  210–12 text  32, 35, 282 textual blending  99–100 textuality  57, 282 theater  51, 159 thriller  169–70 Tin Pan Alley  108, 112 topic (of a metaphor)  67, 282 trade advertising  229, 282 transmission  9–10, 282 trope  69, 282 Truffaut, François  152 Turing, Alan  162, 202, 221 Turing machine  202, 221, 222, 223, 282 Turing test  162, 163, 164 TV trope  196–7

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Twitter  215–18, 282 Two-Step Flow Theory  132 types of signs  48–50 UNIVAC  203 urban legend  74 URL  209 Uses and Gratifications Theory  132 variety show  134, 178, 181 vaudeville  109, 133, 134 vehicle (of a metaphor)  66, 282, Verdi, Giuseppe  267 Verne, Jules  162 Vertov, Dziga  146 video  156–8 Vigo, Jean  149 viral video  138 virtual reality  31, 282 Visconti, Luchino  152 visual rhetoric  58–9 Wajda, Andrzej  153 Walpole, Horace  83 Warhol, Andy  137, 183, 245, 246 Web 1.0  21, 104, 282 Web 2.0  12, 21, 24, 104, 209, 213, 214, 217, 269, 282 webcast  131, 136, 185 Wedekind, Frank  83 Weir, Peter  154 Welles, Orson  134, 148 Wells, H. G.  162 Wertmuller, Lina  148 Western  35 Whale, James  149 White, E. B.  227 Wiene, Robert  145 Wi-Fi  20, 22, 282 wiki  21, 25, 209 Woolf, Virginia  83 World Wide Web  12, 16, 20–1, 207, 282 Wozniak, Stephen  204 writing  6, 13, 14, 23, 74–80, 282 Yasujiro, Ozu  153 yellow journalism  90, 282 Yimou, Zhang  153 YouTube  112, 115, 116, 216–18, 282 Zeus  223 Zhuangzhuang, Tian  153 Zworykin, Vladimir K.  18

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