#polysemic

Polysemic

[Adjective]

Definition: Capable of having multiple meanings.

ethnicity 

gender 

Ethnicity, age, gender, events, issues, regional and national identity

While listening to the radio

1. Do a new post for each area

2. Note down the case studies in as much detail as you can for each area

eg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG7kKYs-Wno

What is Polysemy? Well it simply means to derive a meaning from an image, such as if you look at an image of a knife some people may say murder or violence while others would associate the knife with cooking or kitchen utensils. Once you focus on one meaning this opens up a lot of sub meanings leading to infinite possibilities for interpretations of just one image. If we add text to the imagery we can usually cause the participant to limit their interpretation of the image which in turn start to limit the number of possibilities of sub-interpretations making it more likely that the participants will conclude the same or similar story from the image. Every image we view has different meanings based of our own personal experiences,culture and knowledge.   Barthes essay suggests that by adding text you can ‘fix’ the story of the image to make everyone come up with a similar or same story. The Rhetoric of the Image by Roland Barthes discusses polysemy and how it relates to advertisement. Barthes essay explains three main types of message that can be taken from an image.

The non-encoded iconic Clear meaning – Common understanding that everybody can see.

The coded iconic - Symbolic meaning – Understanding from viewing image in context with your own cultural knowledge.

The linguistic - Textual meaning. – Understanding of image after viewing image in relation to any included text.