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Textual analysis ideas
Textual analysis paper
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Greg Philio argues that textual analysis is not enough when researching media, on its own textual analysis fails to tell us how the text was produced as well as how it was consumed and interpreted. Philio examines this idea by stating that we fail to know the origins of the media such as where they came from and how they relate to different social interests. It also lacks the possible accounts chosen and the diversity within them as well as the impacts of external factors such as the journalists understanding and what the text actually means to different audiences (Philo, 2007). Philio continues further to state that there are more issues with a text only analysis, the accuracy of representations, the significance the text has on the audience and how it changes in diverse social interests. Philio argues that analysis should explore the accuracy of the text, is it right or wrong? Is it politically significant? A discourse analysis for instance fails to address this point which Philio uses as an example. In order to …show more content…
Fursich argues that textual analysis does consider context and audiences as long as it’s not conducted in a simplistic way, being a valuable tool of research. In this critique three arguments are addressed, a textual analyst can create different meanings of a text that somebody else would not find , allowing you to create or discover features that the audience would not discover, even potentially the producers due to the analyst’s level of skill within this area. You are also able to spot connections with historic discourses which you could not collect from audience research as audiences would have been too young to know what was going on. This results in texts being the only source we have left to portray historic events. Therefore, Fursich is arguing against Philio’s critique disagreeing with the idea that textual analysis is not enough to make judgments on social meaning and
In his editorial "Words Triumph Over Images," Curtis Wilkie blames today’s media for being “reckless” and “a mutant reality show”. He believes that television and radio are “unfiltered”, which causes the quality of journalism for newspapers to be unmatched. Yet, it is unfair to label all media that is not print as lesser because the quality of any media relies on the viewers and the individual journalists, and in drastic situations like a hurricane, reporters may have many road blocks. Any of these aspects can affect the quality of journalism, which invalidates Curtis Wilkie’s claim.
The mass media has an essential role in today’s society as a channel of valuable information. Lots of people rely on media as the epicenter of information and as the yardstick on which they form their decisions and opinions (Agner, 1999). Any selection of messages in the mass media would have a profound impact on the entire society, this is according to Cultural selection theory. In the short story “Gray Noise”, Rojo uses this story to express his annoyance toward technology, but more specifically his most effective critic is on how society has overpowered valuable news with “dramaturgically crafted news” (Vettehen) and competition while desensitizing their viewers. Since competition has also stiffened up in are of mass media as the attention of readers, TV-viewers and listeners are fought for by every journalist. For this reason, every news media has turned to other strategies such as scandal-mongering and entertainment as tools of making a profit since a large audience is assured of such news even if they are not correct. Rojo’s views on critics of technology are widely shared among many people including the authors of the following studies, “Research Note: Sensationalism in Dutch Current Affairs Programmes by Paul Hendriks Vettehen
To the members of the support group Naïve People who are Addicted to Mass media and Believe Anything They Hear or Read Anonymous my purpose of being here today is to help you better understand how to analyze the mass media you come across. Mass media is the news, newspapers, magazines, the radio, and the television. The way I’m going to analyze it, is by rhetorical analysis. Rhetoric is how effective the writer is in persuading the reader by using speech and compositional techniques. In order for you to be able to become more apprehensive when reading information, I will be analyzing the ad for Vitaminwater featuring Kobe Bryant. Vitaminwater was introduced in 1996. It is a mineral water that is given out by Energy Brands. Like many sports drinks they use famous athletes to speak for them and promote them. Vitaminwater’s ad with Kobe Bryant is successful because it persuades people to buy their product because it’s, “The Most Valuable Power.”
In the second chapter of Lies My Teacher Told Me Lowen argues that electronic media has decisively and irriversibly changed the character of our environment. He believes that we are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by televison not by the printed word. Loewen describes how discourse in America is now different from what it once was. Loewwen says discourse was once logical, serious, and rational and now under the governance of television it is shriveled and absurd. In addition, he writes about the definitions of truth and the sources in which the definitions come from. Loewen shows how the bias of a medium is unseen throughout a culture and he gives three examples of truth telling.
Literary journalistic discourse is “perhaps the most intertextual of all texts, referring to other texts” in terms of transforming prior historical stories and restructuring conventional literary and journalistic genres and discourses in an attempt to generate a new one, that is, literary journalism (Mills 65-66). Thus, the journalistic discourse cannot be but dialogic and intertextual because its raw material is a news story that can be manipulated, adapted, and adopted by the literary journalist in order to compete other versions of the story. It “assimilates a variety of discourses” that “always to some extent question and relativize each other’s authority” (Waugh 6). Literary journalists, thus, are actively engaged in interpreting and scrutinizing
Hartley, John (2002), Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts, London, Routledge, pp. 19-21.
The notion of the author has often been disputed when it comes to critical literary studies. The argument centers around one basic question: Should the author be considered when looking at a text? There are numerous reasons given as to why the author is important or why the ...
One of the greatest exports of American culture is American media. American media is one of the most widely distributed and consumed cultural forms from the United States. This means that not only do Americans consume large quantities of their own media, but many other countries in the world consume American media, too. People in other countries will not interpret or understand the media in precisely the same ways that Americans will and do, nonetheless, many aspects of American culture and American reality are communicated to numerous viewers as part of the content in the media. The media is an important tool in the discussion of race, class, and gender in America. It takes a savvy viewer to discriminate between and understand what media accurately represents reality, what media does not, or which aspects of experience are fictionalized, and which elements ...
Ott, B. L, & Mack, R. L. (2010). Critical media studies: An introduction. Malden, MA: Wiley-
The “hermeneutic activity –the practice of close reading” (373) is what Love evaluates next. The practice of close reading became the framework of hermeneutics in the early 20th century and has been the foundation of text evaluation since then, no matter what different literary approaches and cultural changes were present, since “the richness of texts continues to serve as a carrier for an allegedly superannuated humanism”(373). Her own assertion regarding the interpretation of texts can be interpreted in sev...
When we interpret a text, we bring our own hopes, fears, joys and beliefs to the forefront, despite our claims of intellectual objectivity, and what is at stake is not just an evaluation of the work itself, but often an evaluation of our political, social, psychological and emotional identities. What we see or read into a text can become a kind of experiment, a literary depiction of the way we see, or would like to see, and interpret ourselves and our world. Often, in the course of interpreting, we feel compelled to name and label both writer and text in order to talk about them in ways that make sense to us, and in order to pinpoint them in relation to ourselves. When we label anything, we attempt to control or own it; we assign values or a set of rules to that person or object. What is lost in that process...
O’Shaughnessy, M., Stadler, J. (2009)Media and Society: An introduction. Dominant Ideology and Hegemony. London: Oxford.
Althusser (1971) explains that, as an ideological state apparatus, media doesn’t use pressure as a way to bind society together under one dominant ideology, but instead uses the will of the people to make them accept the dominant ideology. However, media is also used as a way for people to challenge the dominant ideology. Newspapers, for example, will have articles that openly criticise and oppose the dominant ideology for what it is, whilst at the same time providing perspectives and opinions on different ideologies (such as feminism) that society can believe in. Although these alternate ideological perspectives exist, they are usually overlooked and only ever reach small audiences. Ideology can also help us understand the media because of the way in which it distributes ideology.
How media literacy is defined is important for it exerts influence on the framing of the debate, the research agenda and policy initiatives (Livingstone, 2004). However, its concept has always been controversial (Luke, 1989). The definition of media literacy first appear in the 1992 National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy, which described it as: “The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages” (Rubin, 1998, p.3). Based on this definition, many researchers are putting efforts to redefine it from different aspects. Some definitions of the last decade involved the understanding of how media functioned in society (Messaris, 1998). Others pointed out that media literacy instead depended on the understanding of the technological, political, economic constraints affecting the transmission of mediated messages (Lewis and Jhally, 1998). According to Tyner (1998, p17), definitions range from the tautological (computer literacy is the ability to use computers) to the hugely idealistic: “The term literacy is shorthand for cultural ideals as eclectic as economic development, personal fulfillment, and individual moral fortitude”. One of the definition that is more related to daily practice puts emphasis on critical thinking and the ability to distinguish media content form social reality, as Potter (2001, pp4-5) put it: “Media literacy is a perspective that we actively use when exposing ourselves to the media in order to interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter.” While popular US textbooks on media literacy have an interesting description, which says, “we build our perspectives from knowledge structures; to build our knowledge structures, we need tools and raw materials-the...
Journalism: a profession under pressure? Journal of Media Business Studies, 6, 37-59. Scannell, P. (1995). The 'Secondary'. Social aspects of media history, Unit 9 of the MA in Mass. Communications (By Distance Learning).