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Media & Society: 06

Media Theory: Approaching texts’

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Approaches to Texts and media products: Framing, semiotics.

Tasks

The assessment for this course requires you to write THREE short papers. There will be FOUR in total so you need to decide which you want to write; only submit three, there are no extra marks for submitting more than three!

The deadline for first of the Short Papers (SP1), on media theory’, is approaching, check details here.

Slides

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Reading

Chapter 13 Media Content: Issues, Concepts and Methods of Analysis”, McQuail, D. (2010) Mass Communication Theory. SAGE, London.

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Other material

BBC podcast on epistemology

A BBC podcast In Our Time” on the notion of truth’, and how philosophers have approached understanding it… (maybe they’ll give us some advice eh?)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss philosophical approaches to truth. Pontius Pilate famously asked: what is truth? In the twentieth century, the nature of truth became a subject of particular interest to philosophers, but they preferred to ask a slightly different question: what does it mean to say of any particular statement that it is true?
BBC Podcast ↗️

The Problem of Knowledge

If you’re interested in reading more about the relationship between truth’ and news’ this chapter introduces some important ideas and gives us hints on how we can navigate the information landscape’ safely (and with an increased degree of confidence!)

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Pictures and truth’ / falsehood’

Chapter 7 of Worth, S. (1981) Studying Visual Communication. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia PA.

This is created from a scan of the book, there’s no reference list but I’ll add the references below once I get round to checking them. Also, be aware, this is pretty hard going at times, but interesting if you put in the effort to follow the arguments. Good luck!

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Other stuff

If you’re not sure what I was rambling about when I mentioned the Citroen DS (as an object of semiotic analysis), have a look at this.

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