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Beyond Semiotics: The pragmatics of mediated communication

Beyond Semiotics: The pragmatics of mediated communication. Helen Wood, University of Manchester Academy of Finland October, 2006 How to Study Russian Media. The limits of semiotics. Semiotics descended from Saussure as a dominant legacy in the Anglo-American tradition of media studies

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Beyond Semiotics: The pragmatics of mediated communication

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  1. Beyond Semiotics: The pragmatics of mediated communication Helen Wood, University of Manchester Academy of Finland October, 2006 How to Study Russian Media.

  2. The limits of semiotics Semiotics descended from Saussure as a dominant legacy in the Anglo-American tradition of media studies • It is difficult to fix meaning in non-factual media • It is difficult to fix meaning in postmodern, open, polysemic texts • Changes in new media environments suggest a move ‘beyond’ questions of representation and meaning • Semiotics maps a literary model of ‘text and reader’ onto media forms

  3. Why Volosinov • Marxism and the Philosophy of Language offers critique of Saussure • Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole suggests that we can only study language as it is fixed in time • Argues for the dynamic, diachronic nature of language in contexts • The ‘drive belts’ of social change (Bakhtin Speech Genres) • Why in media studies would we want to hold on to a model of fixity? Pragmatics can offer a different route.

  4. New media - beyond meaning? • Meaning has traditionally been studied in relation to the politics of representation. • It has become more complicated in a new media era of self-representation, instant messaging, new models of non-linear distribution etc. • Because we are struggling over the politics of representation does that mean there is no meaning? • (Scott Lash, Terranova, Poster)

  5. Pragmatics • Meaning is played out in contexts. • Stripping mass communications out of models of communication per se has not allowed us to analyse context fully. • Meaning is also contained in the utterance (parole) not just in the sentence (a unit of grammar)

  6. Speech Acts • Austin, How to Do Things With Words • Speech acts perform certain functions: they mean what they do • E.g. this is the basis of Judith Butler’s argument about gender performativity and the stylized repetition of acts. • Feminist media studies should take up the opportunity to think through the relationship between the media and the social temporality of identity.

  7. Communicative relationships • Bakhtin’s call for a focus upon speech genres, rather than the over dominant emphasis upon literary genres • A focus on the utterance is important because, "it can determine others' responsive positions under the complex conditions of speech communication in a particular cultural sphere" (Speech Genres and Other Essays 1986:76). • This can be made useful to determine the communicative relationships between media and audiences.

  8. Mechanics and methodology • The dynamic and messy nature of the relationship between broadcasting and audiences is visible beyond the text/reader dichotomy • Media in time as communicative events • Mechanics – ‘a branch of mathematics dealing with motion and tendencies to motion’ (OED) • A mechanism, ‘a system of mutually adapted parts working together’ • Mutual production of a communicative exchange

  9. Moments of television • A ‘moment’ – a small portion of time - a product of force from a line of action to a particular point • Television as experiential in time, physically and dynamically taking place. • Gets us closer to the imbrication of textuality and subjectivity.

  10. Extract [Alice/The Time,The Place,talk show discussion program on ‘should the elderly pay for their own care?’] Talking With Television University of Illinois Press

  11. Extract [Angela/ This Morning daytime magazine program, segment on fertility] In ‘The Mediated Conversational Floor: An interactive approach to audience reception Media, Culture and Society 29 (1)

  12. Data reveals mechanisms • In relation to talk shows, data reveals mechanisms of self-reflexivity, which relate to politics of neo-liberalism, individualisation and the gendering of those debates • Second project. ESRC funded reality television project with Beverley Skeggs and research assistant Nancy Thumim (18 months of 30 month project) Programs of self-work like Wife Swap, Supernanny, You Are What You Eat etc.

  13. Meaning in performance • Reality TV offers a mechanism of moral arbitration • Performative functions which are revealing of contemporary class politics • Both types of programs are difficult to pin down in an exact politics of representation • This audience research asks questions about how what programs do is revealingof what they mean

  14. Media and Meaning • Not functionalism, but a politics of function over form • Not beyond meaning, but meaning established in communicative contexts • Not active power, but power registered in all communicative activity • How are media involved in responsive acts? • How do they contribute to the ‘drive belts’ of social change?

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