Blog Post #3

Before starting this class, I never really analyzed the media I consumed. I watched something on Netflix, and I wanted to be entertained out of the show/film I chose. When looking at advertisements, I looked at what they were trying to sell; I didn’t think about how they position everything to convey their message. After learning about Semiotics the past couple of weeks I now try to analyze the inner workings of the media I consume. In shows, I am more understanding of how the syntagmatic analysis is formed, and I notice how influential symbolism could be. I started to pay attention more to the foreshadowed clues and I try to make sense of it by the end. In regards to advertisements, signifiers and symbolism have a huge influence on the message they create. It’s not just about the product, it’s about the audience they are targeting, and the message they illustrate. Knowing about how semiotics affects the media brings a whole new level of “entertainment” I’ve never experienced before. In the last class we were introduced to Marxism and that’s whole other level of analysis within the media. When we watched Freaks and Geeks I was already focused on determining what semiotic techniques I can gather, but using Marxism to determine the hierarchical status of characters was interesting. It gave me a greater appreciation of the characters and observing how they act around different types of people. Now that I know and understand semiotics and Marxism, it is hard to go back to the way it was. I can’t just watch something for pure entertainment; I have to analyze and figure out why the media is the way it is.