Disintermediation, Semiotics & modality

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• Students are welcome to stop the recording at the 32-minute mark, when audio from the interview is audible.

Disintermediation

• What the Web allows: disintermediation in distribution of culture
  • Disintermediation is the elimination of intermediary between a message's source and audience
    • Traditional intermediaries: newspapers, radio & television station
  • Mediation in print and broadcast are limited by time, space, economic availability in form of transmission
    • Time: broadcast limited to real time
    • Space: print restricted to publication size
    • Economics: professional production, distribution is costly in print, film or broadcast
    • Each of the above require individuals beyond the text creator to edit, produce, manage
  • Online communication is disintermediated due to nature of technology
    • Not physically restrictive
    • Not as limited time-wise
    • Less costly to produce
    • Fewer individuals required for production
  • One tech-savvy individual may use technology to create, produce and distribute mass culture
  • Two examples from Feb. '09
    • Web community reacts to Michael Phelps' pot bust (CNN clip)
    • Web becomes a forum for Christian Bale's profane tirade, followed with creative reproductions online.
      • Individuals create remixes
    • Bill O'Reilly's tirade distributed online: O'Reilly video.

Semiotics

• Needed to move beyond simple representation
  • Motivated by the necessity to create larger understanding, humans create "significations," better known as signs
  • A sign can be anything that stands for anything but itself
  • Signs take the form of experienced sensations, whether sights (words, images), sounds, smells, acts or objects
  • Meaning is gathered through interpretation
  • The study and theory of these signs is known as semiotics
• Saussure (1974) conceived of a dyadic (two-part) model of the sign
  • A sign must have both a signifier and a signified
• The signifier = the form the sign takes
• The signified = the concept it represents
• The signifier/signified relationship is referred to as "signification" or sign
• Example: Signification
  • The word "open" represents unique signs when:
  • Finding an establishment with an "open" sign
    • Signifier = the word "open"
    • Signified concept = the shop is open for business
  • Or when seeing "open here" on a box
    • Signifier = the word "open"
    • Signified = the box is opened at indicated location
  • Needs combination of signifier/signified
    • Signifier + Signified = Signification
    • The word "open" has different meanings on different objects
    • On box top or storefront: meaning same; different signified concept

Modality

• The process of judging a sign's level of reality
  • Hodge & Kress: "the status, authority and reliability of a message ... to its value as truth or fact"
• Modality judgments made about a text by audience, which draws on knowledge of world and medium
  • Classifications: fact/fiction, live/recorded, past/present, near/far
• Dependant on medium, but reality varies with medium
  • Images (photos, video) is considered to have a greater modality (reality status) than writing
  • But reactions to visual forms can result in disassociation from the "real."

Examples

Youths who were asked to draw in the middle of the empty area between the children in the drawing reached for the pencil.

People identify the cartoon as a hand more quickly than the photograph.

• Both formal and content features to help determine reality/modality
  • Formal features
    • 3d/flat
    • Color/BW
    • Moving/still
    • Audible/silent
  • Content
    • Possible/impossible, Plausible/implausible, Familiar/unfamiliar
    • Current/distant in time (eg. futuristic, ancient)
    • Local/distant in space (eg. foreign)

Contact

Prof. Matt Blake
Tehama Hall 339
530-898-3608
mdblake (at) csuchico.edu