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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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