Media Studies

 
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|COMMUNICATION, CULTURAL AND MEDIA STUDIES                                                         |
|The Key Concepts                                                                                 |
|Third Edition                                                                                     |
|John Hartley                                                                                     |
|With additional material by                                                                       |
|Martin Montgomery, Elinor Rennie and Marc Brennan                                                 |
|LONDON AND NEW YORK                                                                               |
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a mismatch of meaning between sender (encoder) and receiver (decoder) of any message, from ancient art to contemporary media. Eco himself used the term in a 'semiotic inquiry into the television message', first published in 1965 in Italian, a pioneering attempt to apply semiotics to mass communication (Eco, 1972). He suggested that 'aberrant decoding' was an accident in pre-industrial societies, an exception to the expectation of speakers and artists that their own communities would normally 'get' what they were talking about. There were four classes of exception to this rule:
|       |• people who didn't know the language (what meanings did the Greeks, and then everyone till Jean-François Champollion, ascribe to   |
|       |Egyptian hieroglyphics?);                                                                                                           |

|       |• people from future generations (what meanings did medieval Christians ascribe to Greek and Roman art?);                           |

|       |• people from different belief systems (what meanings do...