Month: November 2020 (Page 4 of 4)

IMPORTANT TERMS:

• Semiology
• Connotation
• Counter-taboo
• Syntagm
• Metonymy
• Diegesis

UNCLEAR POINTS:

• “The idea that what we have in the scene represented is a return from the market.”
• “The absence of code desintellectuazises the message because it seems to find in nature the signs of culture.”
• “In other words, the denotation of the drawing is less pure than that of the photograph, for there us no drawing without style.”

LIST OF QUESTIONS:

• What is the difference between the cultural code and the natural non-code?
• How vital is the linguistic message to the overall reach of an advertisement?

Barthes makes an interesting point that images have intentionally messages, specifically in advertisement. Like we discussed in class ads can be targeted towards a certain demographic. He talks about “Italianicity” a lot throughout this reading and I think that advertisement purposely add subtle or maybe not so subtle hints of things a specific audience would be able to identify. Referring to his reading, he mentions Italy associate with pizza, which would be more like a culture aspect of that image, to target people who enjoy pasta and Italians. 

One of the most interesting things about this reading was the concept of finding a limit to the meaning of an image, which he also wanted to answer by writing this paper. Is there a limit to the meaning of an image? He was questioning how an image gets its meaning. The topic of signifiers is highlighted in this section. Learning about the history and the origin of an image and its meaning. I thought about a cat some of its meaning as an image. A cat is a living organism (animal), can be a pet, it’s seen as cute, and in some places not domestic cats, but Tigers are considered guardians of a city, where lions are iconic and statues of lions are common in buildings, usually at the entrance, potentially representing a guarding or safety. With these in mind, I wonder what else they can mean? Realistically, I’d say images have finite meanings, even those that have stars in them. The concept of infinite may be applicable to a few things. A JavaScript loop is infinite in concept, but only when certain conditions are in place. Space is always expanding, so technically it is infinite. Numbers can increase, but doesn’t that mean that it’s always finite? Aside from the number of meanings an image can have, I think there are a few other factors that can add to an image. The perfect example is a location and how it is perceived in different places or living organisms. Water is something that humans, animals, and plants need and so we all need it see it as a source of survival, and humans and animals use it to clean their bodies. You could also clean a plant with water, but rain can do that naturally for the most part. A tool like a phone is not seeing as useful to a plant and most likely just a toy for a cat.