This weeks Lectorial focused on texts and the analysis of these texts. This only really started making sense to me once we found out about project brief 4. An analysis of ‘conceptual ideas central to media’, and obviously text being important to these conceptual ideas. This project is a lot to wrap my brain around, especially as its week 8.

Text is a difficult one to define but made more sense by Alan Mckee as text being “the material trace[s] that are left of the practice of sense making the only empirical evidence we have of how other people make sense of the world’.

We spoke of signs and signifiers and how media, whether we like it or not, is all around us. How we respond to these signs is up to our understanding of it. As a media practitioners its important that we have an understanding of semiotic analysis and how we can form meaning of signs and signifiers around us. ‘Semiotics’ within media enables us to register meanings and patterns in relation to texts.

This week I thought of the relevance of text and how it can adapt and change for its readers, and how certain audiences read different texts. One of the slides read “the question is how texts…establish relations with their readers as well as representations of whatever their subject matter might be” (John Hartley 1999, p493). So basically one’s understanding of certain texts can’t be either right or wrong, it’s just how one makes sense of something and their interpretation of it.