Media Theorists & Their Theories

Media Theorist

Semiotics - Roland Barthes

This is the idea that texts communicate their meanings through a process of signification and the signs in the texts can function at the level of denotation, which involves the 'literal' or common-sense meaning of the sign, and at the level of connotation, which involves the meanings associated with or suggested by the sign. Constructed meanings can come to seem self evident, achieving the status of myth through a process of naturalisation. 

Narratology - Tzvetan Todorov 

Todorov says that all narratives share a basic structure that involves a movement from one state of equilibrium to another. It is said that these two states of equilibrium are separated by a period of imbalance or disequilibrium. The idea that the way in which narratives are resolved can have particular ideological significance 

Genre Theory - Steve Neal

Neal argues that genres may be dominated by repetition but are also marked by difference, variation and change, he also says genres change, develop and vary, as they borrow from and overlap with one another. The idea that genres exist within specific economic, institutional and industrial contexts.

Structuralism - Claude Levi-Strauss

It is thought that texts can be understood through their underlying structure when analysed. Strauss also argues that the way in which binary oppositions are resolved can have particular ideological significance.

Postmodernism - Jean Baudrillard 

The idea that in postmodernism culture the boundaries between the 'real' world and the world of media have collapsed and that it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and simulation. It is also said that in a postmodernist age of simulacra we are immersed in a world of images which no longer refer to anything 'real'.. Also, the idea that media images have come to seem more 'real' than the reality they supposedly represent (hyper reality).