Language-and-Media-Module-1.pdf

LANGUAGE AND MEDIA MODULE I Language and Media Lesson 1 - Language and Mediation Sites of Engagement Lesson 2 - Media Uses and Users Mediated Discourse Lesson 3 - Media, Modes and Materialities Interse...

LANGUAGE AND MEDIA MODULE I Language and Media Lesson 1 - Language and Mediation Sites of Engagement Lesson 2 - Media Uses and Users Mediated Discourse Lesson 3 - Media, Modes and Materialities Intersemiotic Relations Lesson 4 - Global Modes and Future Modes 1  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA INTRODUCTION Module 1 is focused on the basic concepts the related to language and media. In it, we will explore topics you might expect to encounter when you hear the word ‘language’, such as the kinds of words, grammatical structures, and text types you find in media communication and how they are affected by the kind of media people use. We will also be talking about forms of communication that you probably immediately associate with the word ‘media’, such as newspapers and magazines, films, television shows, and social media. At the same time, some of the things we will talk about might challenge your preconceived notions about what ‘language’ is and what ‘media’ is. Understanding the significance of this module, however, requires not just that we can understand what is happening around us physically and virtually, but that we are able to combine it with knowledge that we already have as well as with the ideas that are currently circulating in our society. In other words, understanding this module requires that we are able to figure out how the language in the message interacts with visual communication and with the kinds of expectations we bring to the message as a result of being members of our societies. OBJECTIVES At the end of this module, students are expected to: 1. understand the relationship between language and media and how each affects and functions when used together. 2. recognize and be familiar with the concepts that surround language and media 3. explain how language and media are used and misused in the present day 4. discuss the issues around language and media 2  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA Lesson 1 - Language and Mediation Sites of Engagement Language and Media Language is a communal phenomenon. Language is communal because all its users must share certain rules and codes—the basic codes we learn in order to speak that language and to share understandings about our external world. Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss Linguist, used the term langue to refer to this basic structure of language, the communal language system—or the grammar—that all of us use to generate sentences in our languages. He distinguished langue from what he called parole, or speech. Parole is the individual act of using language, that is, any instance in which an actual speaker or writer makes use of langue to produce a recognizable linguistic utterance. language is a system of “ A linguistic sign, according to Saussure, consists of a union of two elements: on the one hand, there is a form—an image, sound, or word—and on the other hand there is a concept in your mind to which that form refers. You could say that the form, what Saussure called the signifier, triggers in your head a corresponding concept, or signified. Both these elements are needed to produce a sign; in fact, it is this relationship between the signifier and the signified—the sign—that produces meaning. Media A medium is basically anything that comes between one entity and another and helps to facilitate communication or interaction (what Ruth Finnegan calls ‘interconnectedness’) between those two entities. Mediation The idea of mediation comes from Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who back in the 1920s argued that all interactions between people and between people and their environments are mediated through ‘ cultural tools’, which include both physical tools like hammers and telephones and mental tools like language and systems of counting. Everything we do, Vygotsky said, including thinking, is mediated by these tools, and the kinds of tools we have available. 3  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA Type of Media 1. Print media encompasses mass communication through printed material. It includes newspapers, magazines, booklets and brochures, house magazines, periodicals or newsletters, direct mailers, handbills or flyers, billboards, press releases, and books. 2. Electronic media is the kind of media which requires the user to utilize an electric connection to access it. It is also known as 'Broadcast Media'. It includes television, radio, and new-age media like the Internet, computers, telephones, etc. 3. New age Media are the mobile phones, computers, and the Internet. The Internet has opened up several new opportunities for mass communication which include email, websites, podcasts, e-forums, e-books, blogging, Internet TV and many others. The Internet has also started social networking sites which have redefined mass communication all together. Sites of Engagement Media as extensions of human beings All communication is mediated. It is impossible to directly transmit our thoughts or intentions to others without using some sort of medium. The most common medium through which humans communicate is the voice, but we can also communicate through facial expressions and gestures. These forms of communication depend on the human body, and so we call them embodied media. For centuries human beings got along quite well by simply using their voices and their bodies to communicate, but embodied media have lots of limitations. They can only be used to communicate with people near us, and they don’t allow us to store and preserve communications in a durable way. Affordances and constraints Affordances is the introduction of new media that often results in dramatic social, political, and economic changes, mostly because new media allow people to do things that they were not able to do before. The limitations that media impose on our actions are called constraints. Examples: 1. Writing, affords the preservation of communication, and the telephone and the radio afford the transmission of the human voice over long distances. But affordances are not a matter of media themselves, 4  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA but a matter of the way human beings interact with media. One way of thinking about this is the way embodied media (the human brain and voice and body) interact with disembodied media. 2. Print media, affords the communication of ideas to large numbers of people who are not physically present; but in order to use this medium, communicators have to give up the ability to communicate to people using their bodily gestures or their tone of voice. Media Biases 1. Older media such as stone and clay are time-biased, because they last for a long time but make it difficult to transmit messages across space 2. Print media using paper and broadcast media such as the telegraph and radio are space-biased, since they allow people to render messages in forms that are easily transmitted over long distances. Remediation and convergence The phenomenon of a new media form absorbing and refashioning older media forms is known as remediation. The “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. It is not a matter of new media replacing older media, but rather of transforming them, retaining some of their characteristics and improving on them. Example: Early conventions in portrait photography (and even more contemporary conventions in selfie photography) are derived from principles that were developed in painting in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the way personal computers are designed still mimics the older interface of the typewriter. Intermediacy and Hypermediacy Immediacy refers to the phenomena of media becoming so immersive that they almost become transparent, and people forget that their experience is mediated. Example: The evolution of media has been a quest for more and more immediacy: paintings create more immediacy than drawings; photos create more immediacy than paintings; cinema creates more immediacy than photos; and video games create more immediacy than movies. 5  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA Hypermediacy refers to the fact that media always call attention to themselves, often by reminding us of old media. Example: Computer operating systems are designed to remind us of the physical aspects of manipulating information associated with older office media: there are, for example, files, folders, a recycle bin, and the way we input information into word processing software mimics the way we used typewriters. Discussion: From 1-5, 5 being the highest, rate your level of engagement to one type of media and discuss how it affects your perspectives in life. Example: I would rate my level of engagement as 5 to new age media. Since I am a millennial, and I am always updated of the things that happen locally and globally because of that. I love listening to podcasts about life choices. Every time I decide, I would always refer first to what I have learned from the previous podcast I listened to. Lesson 2 - Media Uses and Users Mediated Discourse Functions of media Surveillance- The first function of media is to serve as the eyes and ears for those seeking information about the world. The internet, televisions, and newspapers are the main sources for finding out what’s going around you. Society relies on media for news and information about our daily lives, it reports the weather, current issues, the latest celebrity gossip and even start times for games. Correlation- Correlation addresses how the media presents facts that we use to move through the world. The information received through mass communication is not objective and without bias. People ironically state “it must be true if it’s on the internet.” However, we don’t think that in generations past people must have without a doubt stated it “has to be true” because it was on the radio. 6  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA Sensationalization- There is an old saying in the news industry “if it bleeds, it leads,” which highlights the idea of Sensationalization. It is when the media puts forward the most sensational messages to titillate consumers. Entertainment- Media outlets such as People Magazine, TMZ, and entertainment blogs such keep us up to date on the daily comings and goings of our favorite celebrities. We use technology to watch sports, go to the movies, play video games, watch YouTube videos, and listen to iPods on a daily basis. Most mass communication simultaneously entertains and informs. People often turn to media during our leisure time to provide an escape from boredom and relief from the predictability of our everyday lives. Transmission- Mass media is a vehicle to transmit cultural norms, values, rules, and habits. Consider how you learned about what’s fashionable in clothes or music. Mass media plays a significant role in the socialization process. We look for role models to display appropriate cultural norms, but all too often, not recognizing their inappropriate or stereotypical behavior. Mainstream society starts shopping, dressing, smelling, walking, and talking like the person in the music video, commercial, or movies. Mobilization- Mass communication functions to mobilize people during times of crisis. With instant access to media and information, we can collectively witness the same events taking place in real time somewhere else, thus mobilizing a large population of people around a particular event. Validation- Mass communication functions to validate the status and norms of particular individuals, movements, organizations, or products. The validation of particular people or groups serves to enforce social norms. The media validates particular cultural norms while diminishing differences and variations from those norms. A great deal of criticism focuses on how certain groups are promoted, and others marginalized by how they are portrayed in mass media. Mediated Discourse Mediated discourse includes virtually all discourse because the focus is upon finding a common basis in social interaction for analyzing the ways in which mediational means from languages to microphones, literacy to computers, news stories to telephone calls are appropriated by participants in social scenes in undertaking mediated action. Mediated action Mediated action is the site in which social and discursive practices are instantiated as actions of humans; at the same time, it is the site in which individual humans 7  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA act upon society and its discursive practices. Virtually all human actions are mediated. Except for reflex responses, it would be hard to argue that any human actions do not call upon language and prior social learning as mediational means. Communities of practice Any learning by definition entails change of identity. At a minimum, one moves from claiming the identity of novice towards claiming the identity of expert within a community of practice, from newcomer to old-timer. Participation in a community of practice entails learning as any actions fundamentally alter one’s position in relation to others within the community. Thus, all participation is learning and entails change of identity. Example: A tailor’s apprentice may be a novice within his employer’s shop and at the same time may be the captain of their city league football team in which his employer is a player. Thus, the two people may position themselves rather differently even within the same conversation depending on whether the topic is stitching or scoring goals. Discussion: Which among the functions of Media do you think is the most significant and why? Example: I would say that entertainment is the most significant function of media because it relieves my stress from all the academic tasks, and I enjoy seeing celebrities. 8  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA Lesson 3 - Media, Modes and Materialities Intersemiotic Relations Media and Mode Mode is a regularized organized set of resources for change, negotiation, differences in participation statuses, and claims, imputations, legitimations, and contestations of identity. Example: The radio enables communication through the modes of spoken language, sound, and music, but not image, movement, gaze, or even written language, while the medium of the photograph enables communication using the modes of image, color, layout, gesture, and gaze, among other things, but not the mode of sound. Modes have different potentials, so that they afford different kinds of possibilities of human expression and engagement with the world. Example: Writing and speech, operate based on a linear and temporal logic in which information is presented in sequence: to fully understand what the middle or end of a news article means, you usually need to have read the beginning. Images, however, operate according to a more spatial logic: the way elements are arranged in a picture has an important effect on where in the image viewers direct their attention and in what order, viewers of pictures are not constrained in the same way readers of texts are; they can let their eyes wander over the image in any way they wish. Intersemiotic Relations Semiotics is concerned with meaning; how representation, in the broad sense (language, images, objects) generates meanings or the processes by which we comprehend or attribute meaning. Semiotics is the study of signs and signifying practices. Semiotic Modes and their relations 1. Multimodal texts and artefacts combine the use of various semiotic modes such as language, images, gesture, typography, graphics, icons, or sound. Used 9  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA in this sense, mode corresponds closely to the more traditional semiotic notions of “code” or “sign system”. 2. Semiotic modes are transmitted via different perceptual modes (= sensory modes), namely visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory, and gustatory perception. Media and their Materialities The material features of media also affect the kind of social interactions people can have around messages. Example: Think of the difference between looking at photos in a photo album surrounded by family members and looking at photos on the Instagram app on your phone. While Instagram allows people to share their photos with a wider audience, the medium does not lend itself to people who are physically co-present looking at those photos together. We’re not saying this never happens, but there is something about the materiality of the mobile phone and the architecture of the Instagram app that results in more solitary and cursory viewing—we are more likely to flick quickly through Instagram images when we are waiting for the bus or having lunch. How materiality of media affects the way people communicate: 1. They determine where, when, and how people can use the medium, both to receive communications and to produce them. 2. They help to determine who can participate in the communication, for example, whether the communication is one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to- many. 3. They affect what messages can be conveyed by determining the range of different modes that can be used and how these modes can be combined. Discussion: What do you think made social media like Instagram very popular to young audience and how does this scenario affect their self-image? Example: Social media has become popular because it exposes what people are trying to reveal about themselves and about how they want to be portrayed 10  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA Lesson 4 - Global Modes and Future Modes Characteristics of Global Visual Language 1. Decontextualization By being decontextualized, represented participants become generic, a “typical example”, rather than connected with a particular location and a specific moment in time. 2. Attributes Attribute are unspecific, a wide range of settings can be signified by an image, allowing it to be used in different articles. 3. Timelessness Present visual language becomes a symbolic world with a fairly stable global vocabulary. 4. Meaning potential The texts themselves embody a meaning potential (Halliday, 1978), a set of possible meanings, and which of these meanings will be actualized depends on the context—on who ‘reads’, where, when, and for what reason. Characteristics of Future Modes 1. Tactile sensation (touch) The interactive cognate to tactile sensation is haptic communication, i.e. communication via touch. Recent years have seen a proliferation of haptic devices that have been flooding the mobile technologies market: touchscreen-operated tablets and smartphones have made interaction via mouse and keyboard largely redundant and incorporate mechanisms adapted to the fingers of the human hand: tapping, swiping, pinching, and stretching are complemented by gravity sensors that activate display changes depending on the angle at which the device is positioned in mainstream media, (Hill, 2012), turning pages, opening digital doors, and flaps via touch-screen while being read the story. 2. Olfaction and respiration (smell) Smell, or olfaction, is arguably the ‘most liminal of the senses’ (Fjellestad, 2001: 63). Marginalized by science, religion, and philosophy for centuries, it has in the past three decades seen a sharp increase in economic, media, and academic attention. 3. Gustation (taste) Probably the most challenging area for sensory communications and ‘one of the final frontiers of immersive media to be is mostly due to how taste is produced in the mouth: receptors on the tongue are stimulated chemically (by soluble substances 11  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA dissolved in saliva), thus producing specific gustatory sensations. Thus, an authentic mulsesensory environment involving gustation needs to take into account the complex inter-sensory relationships and physiochemical processes at play in real-life scenarios, and to ‘manipulate chemical substances accurately’ (Ranasinghe et al., 2014: 7). WORKSHEET Site an example how language and media are used and misused in the present day, you may refer to a news that you have recently watched or read. Discuss what you think is wrong with the use of language or media itself. Justify your answers with the use of some concepts from the modules. Criteria: Clarity of Content- 10 pts Justification and Discussion- 10 pts _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ 12  LANGUAGE AND MEDIA References: Books: Bednarek, M. & Caple, H. (2018). News Discourse. Bloomsbury Academic. Bondi, M., Cacchiani, S. & Mazzi, D. (eds) (2016). Discourse In and Through the Media: Recontextualizing and Reconceptualizing Expert Discourse. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Burridge, K.& Stebbins, T.N. (2020) For the Love of Language : An Introduction to Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Cotter, C. & Perrin, D. (2018). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media. NY: Routledge. Dovchin, S. (2018). Language, Media and Globalization in the Periphery: The Linguascapes of Popular Music in Mongolia. New York: Routledge. Giles, H. St. Clair. R. N. (eds) (2019). Recent Advances in Language, Communication, and Social Psychology. New York: Routledge. Jones, R. H., Jaworska, S. & Aslan E. (2021). Language and Media: A Resource for Students. New York: Routledge. Johnson, S. Ensslin, A. (eds.) (2018). Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies. Bloomsbury Academic. Montgomery, M. (2018). Language, Media and Culture: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge. Navas, E., Gallagher, O., & burrough, x. (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities. New York: Routledge. Online References: Bulger, M. & Davison, P. (2018). The Promises, Challenges and Futures of Media Literacy. The National Association for Media Literacy Education’s Journal of Media Literacy Education. Eristi, B., & Erdem, C. (2017). Development of a Media Literacy Skills Scale. Contemporary Educational Technology, 8(3), 249-267. https://doi.org/10.30935/cedtech/6199 Prepared by: Recommending Approval: Approved: MANILYN R. CACANINDIN LEILANI I. PAMO RAQUEL D. QUIAMBAO Instructor/Professor Program Chair Dean 13