Roland Barthes introduced the idea of the image and what role it plays in our lives. He discussed how we live in a world that bases the accuracy of text off of the image displayed with it. We live in the age of a picture being worth a thousand words and what you see is what you get.

In his article, Rhetoric of the Image, Barthes describes three levels of an advertisement. The linguistic level contains whatever text is attached to the message. An example of this may be a simple caption displayed on an advertisement. The second level is the coded iconic. This level contains the connotations we attach to the message, or how we decode it. The final level, the non-coded iconic, contains the denotation or literal meaning of the message. This is an important concept because Barthes explains how there is no such thing as non-coded message. “We have seen that in the image properly speaking, the distinction between the literal message and the symbolic message is operational; we never encounter a literal image in a pure state” (38). This idea describes how everything becomes relational because we always relate things to other things, whether we do it with intention or not.

I felt that Barthes explanation of the three levels of an advertisement were accurate and interesting. After reading this article I thought about the ways in which I interpret advertisements. I realized that I could only think of a small number of ads that contained absolutely no text. So can we say that a picture is worth a thousand words if there is text written across the image to prohibit misinterpretation? And does this then mean that text and images are equally important? Barthes states that “When it comes to the ‘symbolic message’, the linguistic message no longer guides identification but interpretation, constituting a kind of vice which holds the connoted meaning from proliferating” (37). I believe that this is true, no matter what the image is, text is necessary so the readers don’t misinterpret the message.