Tasks Due from Week 9

  • Models of Communication
  • The Medium is the Message
  • Reading Response 7
  • Week 9 Agenda Checklist

This Week’s Topics

Check-in

Suggest a track

I can’t believe we are at Week 10 with only five classes left! If you haven’t submitted your Midterm Assessment, please do so ASAP.

Freewrite – ART OF NOTICING (10 min)

Last Week’s Prompt from Fenix:

Ask: How Did It Get That Way? “We take for granted that certain things are a certain way because we’re used to seeing them that way… Once you start asking what the backstories are, you start noticing more and more things, each with its own story.”

Paul Lukas (from ARt of Noticing)

In your language of choice, write continuously in your notebook for 5 minutes about your experience of noticing something you see every day and asking, “How did it get that way?” Don’t edit, or correct, don’t stop, just write. If you get stuck, just write the same word(s) over and over until you think of something else to write down.

Next Week’s Prompt – from Jonathan

Be Alone in Public: Eat in a crowded university dining room without the company of schoolwork, laptops or smartphones. Or friends. Make a visit to an art gallery or restuarant or a park bench, alone. It’s not a penalty to spend time alone. It’s an opportunity – to exist totally free of anyone else’s expectations, or your smartphone. What do you notice?

ARt of Noticing

Activities

Below find the information covered in this session. Complete all of the following activities, videos, and assignments.

1. Library Session with Prof. Monica Berger (30 mins)

By today, you should have completed the first three milestones for your Research Project. Review the project guidelines and the upcoming milestones.

Prof. Monica Berger will give us some tools and tips for our design research.

2. Social Media is the Message Redux (10 mins)

The main focus of last week’s class was Marshall McLuhan’s “The Media is the Message,” ways persuasive social media “massages” and changes us, and how that change/manipulation has lasting effects on society. If you didn’t watch The Social Dilemma, take a look at the trailer.

And let’s watch a little more of this video to see how persuasive technology can have lasting effects on society.

  • If fake news spreads 6x faster than real news, what will become of society if the persuasive technology used for for-profit social media advertising is allowed to continue as it is now?
  • Are the AIs of social media downgrading our free will?

Tristan Harris – A New Agenda For Tech Presentation

Tristan Harris – A New Agenda for Tech Presentation

3. Semiotics Terminology Review (20 mins)

Last week we examined Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about media. We learned that the medium is integral to the message and how we receive it. This week we will look at representation and context by exploring the use of stereotypes in media (print, radio, television, and online advertisements). In your second Research Paper, you will use the terminology and approaches that we cover this week to deconstruct a historical or contemporary advertisement that uses coded cultural message(s) of racial, ethnic, and/or gender stereotypes.

Let’s return to Saussure (sign, signifier, signified) and Peirce (symbol, icon, index) to refresh our understanding of early semiotics. We will incorporate the terms we learned in the last reading of Barthes (connoted, denoted, iconic messages, linguistic messages) and explore additional terms such as encoding, decoding, polysemic, myth, and naturalization. Lastly, we will look at Jamaican-born cultural studies scholar and activist Stuart Hall who explored how the dynamics of media representation reinforce societal power structures.

Before we go any further, let’s make sure we all understand the semiotic terms we will need to deconstruct an advertisement.

Ferdinand de Saussure

  • Sign: A sign is anything that creates meaning composed of a signifier and a signified.
  • Signifier: A word, an image, a sound, anything we see, speak or hear to refer to the sign.
  • Signified: The concept that our mind conjures in relation to the sign.

Charles Sanders Peirce

  • Icon: signifier resembles the signified
  • Symbol: arbitrary learned relationship between the signifier and signified
  • Index: signifier is caused by or linked to the signified

Roland Barthes

The topics we will be covering this week will build on reading #8: Roland Barthes’ essay “Rhetoric of the Image.” We will explore representation, context, and the use of persuasive rhetoric in advertising, specifically concerning the perpetuation of racial, ethnic, and gender biases. The work we engage in today will inform your second and last research Essay #2 and hopefully also your Research Project/Presentation.

Building on Saussure and Peirce, Barthes argued that when we construct a sign (encoding), its reception (decoding) does not take place in a vacuum. Our individual experience, society, and culture impact its meaning and how it is interpreted. In our reading this week, we looked at Barthes’ close-reading of an image, the Panzani advertisement.

Let’s review your Reading Response 7 comments, read part of the essay together, and then take a look at this breakdown of “Rhetoric of the Image” by Lesley Lanir where she covers some of the following terms.

  • Encoding: creating a message for transmission (i.e., creation and distribution of an advertisement)
  • Decoding: the process of interpreting a message (i.e., watching and interpreting an advertisement)
  • Denotation: Literal meaning (a message without code)
  • Connotation: symbolic or cultural meaning (a coded message)
  • Linguistic message: words used to convey meaning
  • Non-coded iconic message: an image with literal meaning
  • Coded iconic message: an image with a coded message
  • Polysemic: a sign that has multiple meanings
  • Myth: a widely accepted meaning of a sign
  • Naturalization: in a society, the repeated use of signs shapes their meaning

Here’s a 9+ minute video that takes us through some of these semiotic terms from a film perspective. Advertising takes a similar approach. NOTE: It’s common in media studies to refer to all media examples as “texts.”

@TheMediaInsider: Semiotics for Beginners

4. Representation and Context – Stuart Hall (20 min)

Stuart Hall was a Jamaican-born British sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. He looked at the power of mainstream media (advertising, TV, film, etc) to understand the representation of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. Here are some of the theories and terms associated with his work.

  • ReceptionTheory: This theory asserts that advertising and media are encoded and decoded. The creator encodes messages and values into media, which are then decoded by the audience. Audiences will decode the media differently and not always in the way the creator intended.
    • Dominant, or Preferred Reading: how the creator wants the audience to view the advertisement or media.
    • Oppositional Reading: when the audience rejects the preferred reading and creates their own meaning. This can happen when content is controversial, or when the audience holds different beliefs or is of a different age or culture.
    • Negotiated Reading: a compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings. The audience accepts some of the creator’s view, but also has their own views.
  • Representation Theory: There is no true representation of people or events in media. Designers/creators try to ‘fix’ a ‘preferred meaning’ through ideology or stereotyping. Historically, this is driven by people in power.

This 6+ minute video explains Hall’s Reception Theory:

@TheMediaInsider Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory Explained

This 7-minute video gives a bit more detail and context to Hall’s Representation Theory:

@TheMediaInsider Representation Theory Explained

5. Representation & Stereotype in Advertising Media (10 min)

The use of stereotypes to communicate meaning and sell products has a long history in advertising media and visual communications. Advertisers are waking up to this history and changing their approaches.

As we observed in our readings on the lack of diversity in design, leadership in the field of advertising media and design was dominated by white, heterosexual men. And as we see from our recent study of media and the message (and representation above), mainstream and social media are powerful forces for intentionally or unintentionally reinforcing societal biases. It’s changing, but women and BIPOC designers in advertising are historically underrepresented. That lack of diversity in creative leadership has allowed widely held biases to flourish.

@mrsfisher8961 Stuart Hall’s Representation Theory – Simplified

Today as AI begins to alter the creative landscape, those same biases have been baked into the learning models and data sets the AI uses. AI image generators amplify bias in gender, race and beyond. Explore this essay, “How AI is crafting a world where our worst stereotypes are realized.”

6. Assignment: Research Paper (10 min)

Choose a historical 19th or 20th-century advertisement that uses obvious and/or documented racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes to sell the product, review the sources below to support your research. Browse the references below to find an advertisement to work with or find your own!

Follow the assignment guidelines and prompts for Research Paper 2

  • First Draft is due Week 11
  • Final Draft is due Week 12

Resources

Week 10 Agenda Checklist

Below are all of the tasks, big and small, for this week. The due date is Wednesday, 11:59 pm before our next Thursday class. Timely completion of these tasks will contribute to your success in this course.

Submit your Weekly Agenda Checklist, indicating the tasks you’ve completed.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Tasks from the Week 10 Agenda
Name

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