Lecture 2:

Signs and Semiotics:

- The term "Semiotics" is a constructionists approach to reading media texts.
- The term was coined by thinker Saussare when he asked "How can we make meaning of arbitary signs such as "dog", "tree" and "cat".
-Structuralists tried to develop a formal or scientific set of rules, these theorists include Pierce, Barthes and Hall.

Saussare:
                  Signifier = the object itself
                  Signified = the assosiations we have with the form
                  Sign = Signifier + Signified

The 18 symbol has a red and white background with a white 18 on the inside.
The assosiations we have with this logo are: movies, sex, rape, adult content, swearing, drug use or gambling. 

Roland Bartes
Bartes came up with an extension of Saussares theory and he managed to broaden the application of the theory to image, music and text, across all forms of media.

Bartes made some rules to apply to his theory and these included:
Denotation - Literal description of the form
Connotation - Second level cultural convention assosiated with the form.

The creation of the 'myth' comes when the sign itself becomes the signifier.

Stuart Hall
Hall came up with yet another extensive and broader framework for decoding signs.
He used encoding and decoding to do this.