Semiotic democracy is a phrase first coined by John Fiske, a media studies professor, in his seminal media studies book Television Culture (1987). [1] Fiske defined the term as the "delegation of the production of meanings and pleasures to [television's] viewers." [1] :236 Fiske discussed how rather than being passive couch potatoes that absorbed information in an unmediated way, viewers actually gave their own meanings to the shows they watched that often differed substantially from the meaning intended by the show's producer.
Subsequently, this term was appropriated by the technical and legal community in the context of any re-working of cultural imagery by someone who is not the original author. Examples include fan fiction and slash fiction.
Legal scholars are concerned that just as technology eases the process of cheaply making and distributing derivative works imbued with new cultural meanings available to wide public, copyright and right-to-publicity law is clamping down on and limiting these works, thus reducing their promulgation, and limiting semiotic democracy. [2]
Prof. Terry Fisher of Harvard Law School has written about semiotic democracy in the context of the crisis facing the entertainment industry and in terms of the ability of people to use the Internet in creative new ways. [3]
Communication is the act of conveying meanings from one entity or group to another through the use of mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic rules.
Semiotics is the study of sign process (semiosis), which is any form of activity, conduct, or any process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. A sign is anything that communicates a meaning, that is not the sign itself, to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory.
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex. While the term "slash" originally only referred to stories where male characters were involved in an explicit sexual relationship as a primary plot element, it is now used to refer to any fan story containing a pairing between same-sex characters. Many fans distinguish female-focused slash as a separate genre, commonly referred to as femslash.
Infotainment, also called soft news, is a type of media, usually television, that provides a combination of information and entertainment. The term is usually used disapprovingly against more serious hard news. Many existing, self-described infotainment websites and social media apps provide a variety of functions and services.
Henry Jenkins III is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He also has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education. Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder and co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has also served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks. In 2013, he was appointed to the board that selects the prestigious Peabody Award winners.
In semiotics, denotation is the surface or the literal meaning. The definition most likely to appear in a dictionary.
In semiotics, connotation arises when the denotative relationship between a signifier and its signified is inadequate to serve the needs of the community. A second level of meanings is termed connotative. These meanings are not objective representations of the thing, but new usages produced by the language group.
Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else. It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements. Signs are arranged in order to form semantic constructions and express relations.
Jack M. Balkin is an American legal scholar. He is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Balkin is the founder and director of the Yale Information Society Project (ISP), a research center whose mission is "to study the implications of the Internet, telecommunications, and the new information technologies for law and society." He also directs the Knight Law and Media Program and the Abrams Institute for Free Expression at Yale Law School.
John Fiske is a media scholar who has taught around the world. He was a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His areas of interest include cultural studies, popular culture, media semiotics and television studies. He is the author of eight books, including Power Plays, Power Works (1993), Understanding Popular Culture (1989), Reading the Popular (1989), and the influential Television Culture (1987). Fiske also acts as a media critic, examining how cultural meaning is created in American society, and how debates over issues such as race are handled in different media. In May 2008, Fiske received an Honorary Degree from the University of Antwerp.
Transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
Madonna Studies is the study of the work of American pop musician Madonna using an interdisciplinary approach incorporating cultural studies and media studies. A notable compendium of essays titled The Madonna Connection was published in 1992. Controversy over this field of study stemmed from discussions over the intellectual worth of pursuing academic inquiry into a pop musician, with some arguing the field was nothing more than pop cultural commentary.
Social semiotics is a branch of the field of semiotics which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain meaning-making as a social practice. Semiotics, as originally defined by Ferdinand de Saussure, is "the science of the life of signs in society". Social semiotics expands on Saussure's founding insights by exploring the implications of the fact that the "codes" of language and communication are formed by social processes. The crucial implication here is that meanings and semiotic systems are shaped by relations of power, and that as power shifts in society, our languages and other systems of socially accepted meanings can and do change.
Fan labor is the creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups. These activities can include creation of written works, visual or computer-assisted art, music, or applied arts and costuming.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to communication:
Fiction generally is a narrative form, in any medium, consisting of people, events, or places that are imaginary—in other words, not based strictly on history or fact. It also commonly refers, more narrowly, to written narratives in prose and often specifically novels. In film, it generally corresponds to narrative film in opposition to documentary.
Semiotics in popular music, or mesomusica, is different from semiotics in other musical forms, because pop music denotes a cultural object.. Popular music has many signs in itself because it has many components and uses, but it also appeals to the emotions of a generation. Music is the “logical expression” of feelings, a “symbolic form”. Music videos are an example of syntagm, which interacting signifiers form a meaningful whole. Music videos are also considered multimodal genres because one semiotic system is joined syntagmatically to another semiotic system, which results in a signified indexical meaning. The process of music correlated with visuals can be described in terms of two basic mechanisms: temporal synchronicity and cross-modal homology. Incorporating the two modalities, sound and image, we can interpret it as a unified syntagm. Music videos are known to be visually secondary signified in combination with the semantic content of the lyrics. Semiotics in music videos is different from a pragmatic analysis because we can uphold that semiotics searches for meaning by considering sign production and progress, while pragmatics searches for meaning by considering the intentions of semantics and the context it has evolved in.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to semiotics:
Aberrant decoding or aberrant reading is a concept used in fields such as communication and media studies, semiotics, and journalism about how messages can be interpreted differently from what was intended by their sender. The concept was proposed by Umberto Eco in an article published first in 1965 in Italian and in 1972 in English.
Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.
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