Week 9 ~ Cinema and television: Cultural literacy and the question of “What’s it for?”

—  'Film operates as a model “for” as well as a model “of” reality in a process that naturalizes film sound and images.' ~ CLIFFORD GEERTZ

Richard Hoggart, one of the founding fathers of Cultural Studies, once asked a question: “What is it for?” For him, the “what” in his question stands for cultural literacy. 

If I were him, I will say the definition of Culturally literacy.  It is the ability to comprehend and value the similarities and variations in the customs, values, and beliefs of one’s own culture the cultures of others.

Unfortunately, this is not at all the case.  His concern was not the definition or the theoretical basis of the two words. He was aware that we understood culture through our daily communication with people and institutions, especially through the potential mode of mediums which are in this case the cinema as well as television.  The actual issue here is with all the knowledge from television and movies that we derive from, what is it for? and the question what happen t0 cultural literacy, what are we going to do about it?

Since I have mentioned the definition of cultural literacy,  I will focus on what is cinema and television studies for.  Cinema or films are cultural artifacts developed by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is construed to be an emperial art form, a source of well-known entertainment and a powerful mode in education.  The visual elements of cinema give motion pictures a universal power of communication. Films, not all, have become popular global attractions by utilising dubbing or subtitles that interpret the dialogue into the language of the viewer.

Now is all about television.  This medium can be a powerful entertainment and education tool for us especially to children given the right programming. Nevertheless studies have proved that television can have a very negative influence. From few sources, some studies show television can shorten attention span, distort body image, work in conjunction with other factors to escalate obesity, create anxiety, and increase aggressive and anti-social behaviors if exposure is unmonitored and unlimited. Television violence, swear words, harsh language, and sexually explicit content as well as aggressive marketing are in this case prevalent. 

On representing culture, cinema and television should possess a great knowledge on cultural literacy. This two mediums give viewers knowledge of a specific culture by using the law that compromises this cultural literacy in order for us to see the culture in the mirror of its representation.

According to (Stigler, Gallimore and Hiebert, 2000). 'Understanding other cultures has two notable benefits: 1) it multiplies our access to practices, ideas, and people that can make positive contributions to our own society; and 2) it helps us understand ourselves more deeply. By understanding a range of alternatives, we become aware of our own implicit beliefs – beliefs so deeply imbedded that we routinely take them for granted' 

Reference:

Hartley, J. (1999). Knowledge, television and the “textual tradition”. Uses of Television (pp.55-­‐70). London and New York: Routledge.


Stigler, Gallimore and Hiebert, 2000.

Week 8 ~ Photography

All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth. ~Richard Avedon

Why do we consider photography as a form of cultural critique? Is every photograph able to do so?

Photographs are a powerful instrument to critique culture. 

Anthropologists have used photography to provide visual information about their subjects since the 1860s.   Historically, photography was considered to be a recording device for surface data, as opposed to in-depth data, which required to be unearthed by other methods.

In the past thirty years, an increasing number of social researchers in the United Kingdom have recognised that the visual is a growth point in the social sciences and cultural studies.   

Photographs were used as a form of cultural critique in the 1920s.    

For example, photographers El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko sought to inform understanding of social revolution in the early days of the Soviet Union using a photomontage approach. Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon, both are photojournalists, applied photo-reportage or photo-essays to communicate social situations (Gidal 1973). The Picture Post in England and Time, Life, and Fortune in the United States published the work of photojournalists such as: Margaret Bourke-White (the first female war correspondent), Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, and Robert Capa. 

Yet Becker was concerned that photography had come to be viewed like an art form, and sociology was treated like a science. He called for them to be reunited and to join hand to uncover different aspects of social life. Some sociologists took up the challenge, and visual research methods were increasingly used in various sociological studies (Ruby 1976, Becker 1978, Wagner 1979). 

Material culture is an aspect of visual studies. Paying attention to the images that are important in the daily lives of people open up conversations about values and aspirations. 

David Morgan (1999) in his argument mentioned that the meaning of an image is not merely the act of putting it on the wall, but also exists in its display and ongoing presence in the owner's life.

References:

Wright, T. (1999). Photography as a cultural critique. Photography handbook (pp. 135-­‐151). London
and New York: Routledge.

Wells,L. (1997). Thinking about photography. Photography: a critical introduction (pp. 24-­‐54) London: Routledge.

http://www.quotegarden.com/photography.html

Week 7 ~ Visual Narrative and the Media:

"a selection of events from the characters life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life." (McKee, Story, 1997, pg. 33).

Why is narrative important when shaping a visual image to the audience?

Production and story elements combine to convey a narrative to an audience. Here I will mention some aspects of narrative that must be considered when analysing a visual image.

I take a film narration to support my arguement. We as the viewer, allow ourselves as the audience to enter a film narrative through a device known as the 'suspension of disbelief'.

In storyline of film narration, the plot may be linear or non linear, it may include subplots which may run parallel to, comment on or intersect with the main narrative.

Opening introduces the narrative in film. The opening usually contains a lot of information which sets up the narrative and establishes time, place, location, mood and often the important characters in the narrative.

Whereas in closure, the said sequence finishes off the story, resolving the narrative possibilities established throughout the text, tying up loose ends and letting the audience to leave the narrative. There will often be an image which is similar to the opening images in order to close the cycle of the narrative.

In film narration there will be conflict. A narrative requires conflict and in film there is usually one main conflict and several minor conflicts. Conflicts are presented in the form of problems or issues. One way to view the development of conflict in a narrative text is to see it as:

equilibrium ---- problem ---- disequilibrium ---- resolution ---- new equilibrium

Then the cause and effect. A story element which makes the narrative to proceed. Whereas the climax is usually, but not always, the most suspenseful part of the story. Often smaller climaxes build to the major one.

Some aspects of film narrative such as setting, charaters and time are also important.

Hence narrative is important when shaping a visual image to the audience. 

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station

Narrative is important because it allows audience to look at not only the ways in which 'reality' is constructed within a story of visual image or text, but also the implications and effects of them being presented in that particular way.

References:

Huisman, R. (2005).Narrative concepts. In Fulton, H., Huisman, R., Murphet, J. and Dunn, A. (eds.), Narrative and Media (pp. 11-­‐27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Infanger, S. (2001). What is Narrative? Retrieved October 21, 2011. From http://www.class.udaho.edu/narrative/theory/what narrative.htm

Week 6 ~ The Ancient Art of Rhetoric and Persuasion

“Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk; we must act big.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt quotes (American 26th US President (1901-09), 1858-1919)

Question:

Explain and exemplify how an insurance sales person would sell insurance rhetorically and how he/she would hard sell the product.

Rhetorics is a form of persuasion. A persuasion must have a proposition and argument. In order an insurance sales person want to sell his product, it is good for him/her to sell it rhetorically. He/she has to have persuasion techniques in order to pursuade the clients and to make his/her insurance saleble.

Selling an insurance is just like selling advertisement. In this case, McQuarrie and Philips (2008), Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric.

a) Rhetoric in advertising more concerned with style than content.
b) Advertising rhetoric more interested in how to say something as much as what to say.
c) Advertising style is not new. Since antiquity, there are different rhetorical styles: rhyme, anaphora, antithesis or synthesis (p.5).
d) Advertising style consists of the medium, genre, strategies of production and creative imageries to show an argument.

Therefore from my personal view, these four aspects can be applied in selling insurance.

Selling insurance can be a very lucrative business. It will give a person the ability to work for himself, work from home or work from an office with a group. 

The insurance business allows easy access for those wanting to enter the field as well as many selections to advance through continuing training and licensing. In addition, being an insurances sales person can be a very lucrative and financially rewarding career once a person learns how to sell insurance.

Insurance allows many people to work for themselves and those sales person who are good at it make good money. Selling insurance affords them the ability to have their own business.

Professional insurance agents are viewed more as financial advisers than salesmen. They assist people hedge against risk exposure, just like a hedge fund financial adviser helps businesses hedge against risk buy selling commodity futures.

Speaking of which, many insurance agents also sell financial products like stock, bonds, commodities, annuities, retirement plans in addition to selling insurance policies.

Another benefit to selling insurance policies is that one can start part time. Even if one have a full time job, it can be started in the evenings scheduling appointments and meeting with people. Insurance is a better low risk way to get into the selling or get into the insurance business.

Selling insurance can be and has been the entry point for many successful business people. And again, learning how to sell insurance is something that is easy to do.

Therefore, there is no question of hard selling the product if the sales person understands the strategies and the objective of selling insurance.

Reference:

McQuarrie, E. F. and Philips, B. J. (eds.) (2007). Advertising rhetoric: An  introduction. Go figure! New

dimensions in advertising rhetoric (pp. 3-­‐18).New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc. Retrieved from Universiti

Brunei Darussalam Ebrary Website.

http://thinkexist.com/quotations/rhetoric/

Week 5 ~ Gestalt Effect and Schema Theories

“Knowledge is conceived as a continuous organization and rearrangement of information according to needs, purposes meanings” (Gestalt theorists)

Gestalt is a psychology term which means "unified whole". It refers to theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. The attempt of these theories are to describe how we tend to arrange visual elements into groups or unified wholes when particular principles are used. 

Out of many laws of Gestalt Theory, I have selected 3 laws, they are law of Proximity, Similarity and also Common Fate.

Law of Proximity

The concept underlying the concept of proximity is grouping. When we have a group of objects, we tend to look them as forming a group. Proximity occurs when elements are placed close together. They tend to be perceived as a group.

I take this example of proximity in Grouping Images

The 2002 Europe Music Awards site illustrates a different use of grouping. The MTV and Europe Music Awards logos form a separate group in the top left corner, whereas the logos of the sponsors form a group in the bottom right corner.


The white space as shown on left right figure helps form the two groups, as do the two blue triangles in the corners. Note that the triangles are not present in the "unoccupied" corners, hence they reinforce the notion of the two groups.

Look at the two organizational logos shown above are bigger and positioned top-left. Thereby increasing their importance in relation to the cluster of smaller logos to the bottom-right.The two clusters of logos not only form groups for design purposes, but also for semantic purposes.

Another example of law proximity will be Proximity in Icons. Here is another aspect of proximity is the propensity to perceive items organised on a line or curve to be related to each another.



In 2008 Web designer Stu Nicholls created a nifty (albeit non-traditional) circular menu.

As the circle that all eight icons sit on, and because of the light gray circles that compose the "background" of the menu, the icons are perceived to be part of a same group. It helps that the icons are thematically the same with similar colours, sizes, and styles.

Law of Similarity

The next law of Gestalt is the Law of Similarity.

Similarity occurs when objects look similar to one another. People often perceive them as a group or pattern.


The logo above (containing 11 distinct objects) appears as as single unit because all of the shapes have similarity.

Unity occurs because the triangular shapes at the bottom of the eagle symbol look similar to the shapes that form the sunburst.

We group things perceptually if they appear to be the same to one another. This is also the reason behind why so many designers prefer to apply blue, underlined links, or at least have all the links appear distinct and the same as each other.

Similar appearance equates to similar function. In the screenshot of the Opera browser’s old Preferences dialog window as shown below, the menu items are grouped by colour. The gray background of the first four menu items group them together, and also sets them apart from the other items. They are also highlighted by the icons that sit beside the first item in each group.



Common Fate

The third law is the Law of Common Fate.

The idea of "common fate" is not complicated, it is simple. We perceive materials or objects moving (or appearing to move) in similar direction as related to each other, more so than elements that are static or appear to be moving in opposite directions. Those related objects are sharing a "common fate."

The vehicles in the photo on the left form two "streams," the left "stream" moving from bottom to top of the image and the right "stream" moving from top to below.

Although this is an completely static image, movement is implied, and relationships immediately develop.

In our designs, elements that move with one another relate to one another, while elements that resist that common movement or move in a opposite direction, do not relate. This is a powerful, primal sensory cue among humans. Just think of the drivers’ reactions when a vehicle comes down the lane in the opposite direction from everyone else. Chaos and consternation ensue within moments.

Reference:

Wertheimer M (1944) Gestalt Theory

http://nicefun.net/learning-theory-of-gestalt-vt2659.html

Week 4 ~ Visual Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics: Structure, meaning and context.

'Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others." - David Crystal.

Why is pragmatics an important consideration when examining visual communications?

Pragmatics is the study of hidden meaning.  The study of its includes a lot of interpretations from speakers and listeners which depends on different circumstances.  It is also the study of the origin, common uses and communicative effects of signs.

Pragmatics allows the consumers like us to check how a meaning is beyond the words.  The words can be interpreted without ambiguity.  Well the extra meaning is always there.  This not because of the semantic aspects of the words themselves.  We do share contextual knowledge with the author or speaker of the text.  

Sometimes, illustrations are inserted to create the pragmatic meaning in various situations.  Human like to apply different wordings to build-up their identity, create a particular atmosphere when they have conversations or want to attract others' attention.

Consider a sign outside a department store in our area.  “Back To school Sale, Big Discount”.  A person without enquiring that there are not schools are for sale – that what is for sale are stationery used for students at school, such as bags, pencil cases, pens and etc..  Indeed Pragmatics is way of investigating how sense can be made of certain texts.  The text seems to either not complete or to have other meaning to what is really intended.

'Communication clearly depends on not only recognizing the meaning of words in an utterance, but recognizing what speakers mean by their utterances.  The study of what speakers mean, or "speaker meaning," is called pragmatics.' (Yule, 2010)

The pragmatic principles people abide by in one language are often different in another. Thus there has been a growing interest in how people in different languages observe a certain pragmatic principle. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies reported what is considered polite in one language is sometimes not polite in another. Contrastive pragmatics, however, is not confined to the study of a certain pragmatic principles. Cultural breakdowns, pragmatic failure, among other things, are also components of cross-cultural pragmatics. Westerners tend to speak directly which is different from Chinese culture, one used to speak indirectly.  It would be rude if one contravenes either one custom.  Based on the study of "invisible" meaning within the words which include verbal communication, advertisement, sentences and also signs appearing in the environment speakers and hearers must be able to familiar with lot of assumptions and expectations when they are trying to communicate with each other.  This can be seen in the following pictures below.

Can't sleep???

Fitness

Healthy Diet

Boring class

In the first two pictures above, we can see that if a person wants to sleep well, one requires to exercise and eat healthily. But in the picture on the left, we may have two interpretations which mean you may easily fall asleep in the a class because of the dullness. In other word, if you follow two suggestions in the pictures, you could sleep anytime and anywhere.

I agreed that pragmatics is an interesting aspect of studies in linguistics. It will be studied as long as there is human speech.

'Pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters' (Morris 1938, 6-7).

References:

• Griffiths,P. (2006). Studying meaning. Introduction to English semantics and pragmatics (pp. 1-­‐22). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 
• http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/bamhurst-et-al-mapping_visual_studies_in_com- journalofcom-54.pdf 
•  http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/viscomtheory.html  
•  http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html  
•  https://sites.google.com/site/2010introlangstudies2/marketing-docs

Week 3 ~ Semiotics Revisited

'while every code is a system, not every system is a code' - Stephen Heath  




What does “coded” meaning mean?  Well, from my reading, codes are the conventional construction of we are to translate the meanings of various techniques, this same goes with content.


Codes are maps of meaning, systems of ideas we as human being apply to interpret our own and others' behaviour.  In other word, codes are combination of semiotic systems, semiotics super systems, that imply perception and attitudes of how the social surroundings is ought to be. Therefore, codes links semiotic systems of meaning between values and social structure.


They also supply ways of making sense of the world that, to the extend that you and myself use the codes to guide our actions, in turn shape our attitudes.

For instance, a code, might be a certain set of ideas about what it means to be femininity.  A small girl in our neighbourhood, brought up in our local culture might not follow or want to be like the models in fashion advertisements.  Nevertheless, she is likely to learn a code of femininity which implies that a so called 'true' woman is thin and slim, girlish, trendy, focussed on others, passive and so on.

It same goes to this boy growing up in our Brunei culture, he might not directly imitate the cowboys of the west or detectives surrounding him in media narratives and advertisements.  But yet this images, myths and narratives from few mediums imply particular perception 'codes' about what it means to be a male. So this little boy might learn that 'true' men solve problems through physical prowess.  Men are emotionally inexpressive and regularly breach particular regulations like speed limits and etc..

Codes help to simplify phenomena in order to make it easier to communicate experiences (Gombrich 1982, 35).


Pierre Guiraud notes that 'the frame of a painting or the cover of a book highlights the nature of the code; the title of a work of art refers to the code adopted much more often than to the content of the message' (Guiraud 1975, 9).


References ~ 

• Arthur Asa Berger, Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics, 2nd edition, Sheffield Publishing    Company, 1999.
•  Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana University Press, 1976.
•  Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, University of California Press, 1977.
•   Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, Marion Boyars, 1978.
•   Martinec, R., & Salway, A. (2005).  A system for image - text relations in new (and old) media.   Visual Communication, 4 (4), 337 - 371. 
• Riley, H. (2004).  Perceptual modes, semiotics codes, social mores: a contribution towards a social semiotics of drawing.  Visual Communication, 3(3), 294 - 315.
•  http://www.jgould.net/mmw/downloads/semiotics.pdf
•  http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/aesthetics/bldef_semiotics.htm 
• http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem08.html