Jennie Moloney 6200: September 2011

I chose this font as it is messy and looks handwritten. It follows the laid back, colloquial feel of my magazine, as it seems as though it could have been quickly scribbled, making it feel more personal and on a level with the students.

I liked this font because it is scribbled and messy, which also follows the colloquial feel of the first font. It is a round, modern font which would appeal to the young, target audience.

I like how the letters are at different angles in this font, and how it is clear and bold, as it makes the words more eye catching. The tilted letters also give the magazine a more fun, energetic feel, making the magazine more exciting and inviting.

I could also combine two or more different fonts to get my desired effect, which is a laid-back, personal approach. I would like the word 'common' to be in a different font so that it stands out as looking particularly modern and relaxed.

Form & Style

The form of a media text is its shape and structure. It also involves 'micro' elements such as dialogue, sound effects, editing and, in the case of radio drama, ambience. The form of a text is almost always instantly recognisable to an audience, for example soap opera or historical drama. The style of a text is the way the text uses this form.

Convention

Conventions are the 'ingredients' of a particular form or genre, therefore they are what an audience expect to see. There are specific conventions in each industry. For example, period drama is a sub-genre with a range of necessary ingredients which are expected by the audience, e.g. old fashioned costumes, making conventions 'contractual' in nature.

Signification

Signification is the study of signs. Everything we see is a sign and carries a meaning. The basic meaning of the sign is that most people can recognise and agree on is known as the signifier. The more complex individual meaning that people give to signs are known as the signified.
Often signs and objects carry connotations, for example the skull and crossbones. It is a simple image, but has connotations of pirates, danger, poison, etc. Connotations however depend on the audience and how they are perceived. A young child might see this sign and immediately think of pirates although an adult's first perception of this image might be of danger. People construct their own meaning, which is a matter of taste. In media, meaning is polysemic, which means every signifier has the potential to be given meaning differently by every person who hears or sees it.

Representation

Representation is how a media text is displaying its own interpretation of something, for example, how the text presents 'reality' is always a 're'construction of a mediated world. It is important to deconstruct representations at the 'macro' level of a text. Soap operas, for example, are representations of real life, however, as they are for entertainment purposes they are often exaggerated and contain caricature style characters, situations and story lines which are extremely unlikely to happen on a day to day basis to people in reality.

Audiences

It is always important to consider 'target audiences' when analysing a media text or product. Many texts appeal to a range of secondary audiences and the way that different people respond to texts often challenges expectations. Target audiences of a magazine, for example, would be people who are subscribed the magazine or buy each issue every week/month, whereas secondary audiences are people who might buy the magazine occasionally because their attention is caught by the front cover if they see and story which interests them, or the magazine is featuring a band they like, etc.

Narrative & Genre

Certain genres and television programmes such as the news, are presented through a particular narrative structure. Fictional TV and film tends to operate on a simple structure of balance, conflict and attempts at resolution. Narrative describes the process of balancing what we actually see or hear and what we assume in addition. When a range of media texts share form and conventions and the audience for this type of text develop certain expectation, this is referred to as genre. Within a genre things tend to be more interesting. Genres shift over time, producers and audiences subvert and parody the conventions and hybrid fusions of genres develop.

Creativity

Creativity is a key 'performance descriptor' for media students. It is operated on two levels; the first, the ability to use digital technologies to make meaning so that the audience can respond easily to the text and second, the ability to engage and interest the audience. It is creative to imitate the conventions of a media form in a new configuration and this is a form of parody. Media products emerge as a result of hundreds of creative decisions.

Connecting the Micro to the Macro

The words 'micro' and 'macro' appear frequently in relation to textual analysis. The micro elements of a text are the technical and symbolic features which you will need to identify, recognise and describe the function of. Lighting, for example, has one range of meaning and editing has another, or speech in radio as separate to sound mixing. When these elements combine they add up to an overall representational 'world' that makes sense and is believable. This plausible macro sum of the micro parts is called 'verisimilitude.'

Multimodal Literacy

Media literacy is changing in the context of web 2.0 technologies. As the technology allows us to read and write and create in new ways, so the theories we need to understand these communication processes also have to adapt. We have to be careful about theorising simple producer - audience relations and creator - consumer patterns of behaviour, because it is possible that HTML, web navigation, 'wilkinomics' (Tapscott and Williams 2007) and the general 'wall-less' nature of the internet are actually changing the way we 'read' texts altogether.