2nd blog post

There are a number of things that effect how a person reads images and advertisements, including the audience, context, intertextuality, and captions. The audience refers to the implied reader and how the audience is positioned in, for example, a photograph. Because an audience ranges in an infinite number of individuals, images and texts are open to an infinite number of possible interpretations as well. The context, or how and in what environment an image is placed, also great affects how a reader interprets an image. For example, an advertisement placed in a newspaper and magazine can have two different intentions even if they are the same advertisement. Also important is intertextuality, or “reading images in relation to other images with which we are familiar” (152). Captions also have the ability to hold an image to a specified meaning.

Also important in interpretation is the idea of semiotics. As was discussed in class (and from the reading in Media & Society), we learned that semiotics is the science of signs or the study of signs and sign systems. Simply put, it is the study of how things become meaningful. Most importantly, we use semiology to read images and advertisements with little knowledge of doing so.

Using semiology is an incredibly important part in understanding media texts. It sets guidelines and checkpoints of things to do when we encounter an image, and guides us through different meanings of the media text. Most importantly, it “stresses the relation of one text to others and to society as a whole” (160). We must use semiology in order to understand the place of media in society. However, using semiliogy also limits our interpretations in a number of ways. For one, one sign or signifier can always refer to something else, and that “something else” can refer to another “something else”, so on, so forth. This idea of “differance” is so complex that a final meaning is never deferred. Overall, this concept is easy to apply to media images because everyone’s experience of interpreting is different.