ABSTRACT
So far, in the second part of this book, I have already touched on a number of theoretical approaches to the study of interaction that could be said to deal, at least implicitly, with the making of meanings in social life. From the perspective of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, for instance, the significance of an expression or utterance depends to a large degree on its evolving contexts. For conversation analysts this includes, principally, its position within ordered sequences of talk-in-interaction, such as those typically found in telephone call openings. To take another example, Paddy Scannell’s phenomenological approach to broadcasting and its care-structures is generally designed to disclose ‘the output of radio and television in its meaningfulness’ (Scannell 1996: 148). My main focus in the current chapter, though, will be on issues of signification or meaning construction, as well as on related issues of taste and cultural value (which are more closely associated with and more explicitly addressed by a critical, cultural studies perspective on media and communications in modern society). I begin and end here by referring to the work of Roland Barthes (see especially Barthes 1973; 1984), starting with an account of his influential, but ultimately flawed, analysis of French popular cultural images in the 1950s and 1960s, and finishing with a discussion of some personal reflections that he offers much later on the medium of photography. In between these sections, my commentary charts a series of conceptual developments in ‘social-semiotic theory’ that serve to draw our attention to different dimensions of signification, textuality and social context.
