Media Language

Every medium has its own 'language' that it uses to communicate meaning.

We call these 'languages' because they use familiar codes and conventions that can be understood.
Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules. Each form of communication whether newspapers, TV game shows or horror movies - has its own creative language: scary music heightens fear, close ups intimacy etc.

Understanding the grammer, syntax and metaphor system of media language, especially the language of sounds and visuals which can reach beyond our deepest emotional core, it can increase our appreciation and enjoyment of media experiences as well as helps us to be less susceptible to manipulation.

Semiotics
According to philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1931) "we think in only signs".
Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest meaning.
"Nothing is a sign unless we interpreted as a sign".
Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as 'signifying' something - referring to or standing for something other than itself. We interpret things as signs largely by relating them to familiar systems of conventions.

Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1974) offered a 'dyadic' of two-part model of the sign. He defined this as been a signifier.

Icon/Iconic: a mode which the signifier is seen as resembling or imitating the signifies - being similar in some of its qualities.

Index/Indexical: a mode in which the signifier is not arbitrary but is  not directly connected in someway to the signified - this link can be observed or informed.

Symbol/Symbolic: a mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional.

In semiotics, denotation, connotation are terms describing the relationship between the signifier and its signified and an analytic distinction is made between two types of signifieds a denotive and a connotative meaning includes both denotation and connotation.

Roland Barthes (1967), Saussures model of sign focus on denotation at the expense of connotation and it was left to subsequent theorists to offer an account of this important dimension of meaning.

Barthes argued that in photography connotation can be (analytically) distinguished from denotation.

John Fiske (1982) states denotation is what is photographed, and connotation is how it is photographed.

Related to connotation is what Roland Barthes (1977) refers to as myth, which were the dominant ideologies of our time. The first and second orders of signification called denotation and connotation combine to produce ideology which has been decribed as a third order of signification by Fiske and Hartley (1982).

Evaluating media language is an evaluation of all the micro elements and how they have created meaning to inform us about genre, narrative, representation/ideology, targeting of audiences (through micro elements).

Therefore requires us to use semiotic terminology to explain our encoding of elements and codes and conventions within our texts.