The Creation of Meaning

In considering semiotics and content analysis, content analysis only gives you the quantitative basis for the representations of things while semiotics show how meaning is created rather than what the meaning is. The structure of the meaning is deciphered by breaking down an advertisement, considering how objects and things work together to elicit a certain understanding. The audience, the combination of particular objects, and the absence of particular things work together in constructing a reality. In addition, culture and tradition are important to the context of an advertisement and breaking down meaning.

In my opinion semiotics are much more useful than content analysis in understanding how advertisements work. For instance taking into consideration an object in relation to the context of the setting. Perhaps content analysis looks at the number of revealing body images of women in advertisements. If the ad is for a swimsuit it is likely that a women is shown in minimal clothing, which could render it revealing. The quantitative aspect of content analysis doesn’t consider why the woman is wearing the bathing suit; maybe she is in a warm place, on the beach advertising a vacation spot, or, maybe she is in a car advertisement appealing to a male crowd. From content analysis we may never know. But these two different situations show how a woman in a bathing suit could elicit different ideals and without considering the semiotics, the content analysis becomes unrealistic. The combination of what is used in the ad to render a certain affect is essential to meaning; it’s silly to consider an advertisement without breaking it down and looking at how the parts sum up the whole.       

Semiotic Representations of Sexuality in Advertisements

The way that I best understand semiotics and the signifier-signified-sign model is described in Roland Barthes' book Mythologies.  It includes the example of a rose: the word 'rose' is the signifier, the actual object of a rose is the signified, and the word 'rose' representing the actual object is the sign.  According to Barthes, the myth is the second layer of the signifier-signified-sign model: the first sign (the rose) is now the signifier, passion is the signified, and the 'passionified' rose is the myth.  The myth ads meaning to something that is not directly exposed by looking at the physical aspects of the sign.  

A good example of semiotic representations of sexuality in advertisements can be seen in Asa Berger's analysis of a Fidji perfume advertisement from his book Ads Fads and Consumer Culture.  Berger brings up elements of the advertisement such as the woman's darker skin and hair, representing sexual passion, and the fact that she is presumably Polynesian, which makes her a representation of exoticism.  The use of the French language symbolizes sophistication and the stereotype that the French are sexy. (Berger, p. 156)

These are just a few of the examples of the semiotic analysis of the advertisement; clearly the use of semiology in advertisements can imply many different things about a product, even if they are not directly related to the actual product itself.  One ad that really stood out to me that used sexual signs and symbols to represent a product was the Fiat 500 Abarth ad that played tonight during the Super Bowl.  The advertisement uses a woman, who is a sexy Italian model that is clearly very enticing to the man in the ad, to represent a car.  The woman had darker skin and hair, just as the woman in the Fidji ad, and was speaking in Italian, which is a romance language, which could represent exoticism as well as sex appeal.  The slogan at the end is 'You'll never forget the first time you see one' and is meant to be talking about the car, but it could clearly also be attached to the man seeing the Italian model for the first time.

the flaws of content analysis

Content analysis has proven to be helpful in quantifying the disparities found in the representations of race, gender, sexuality, etc.; however, as Gill and Van Zoonen has acknowledged, it is also flawed. As Gill states, "The major problems with this is its failure to pick up on differences and on how things are changing. At its worst, content analysis may be accused of only telling us what we know already." (Gill, 45). Content analysis offers us the quantifying ability, but it lacks the ability to offer us much about the content and what it represents.
In class we have talked about the tv show, "Whitney" before and the latest episode proves extremely pertinent to our class. If one was to do a content analysis of this show, they would find that it is rather progressive in the diversity of the actors. There are 3 women, 1 being the main character, and there are 3 men, 1 who is of Indian decent. Although the content analysis shows that this series is a good representation of equality of the sexes, this particular episode has a sexist undertone. The characters of Roxanne and Mark get into a fight after Mark calls Roxanne "mannish". During a game night with friends Mark believes that he and Roxanne are only successful, after declaring that only men were good at games because women weren't decisive enough, because Roxanne had man qualities even though she was a woman. This is a rather sexist and misogynistic statement, and proves that even though the content analysis demonstrated the equality between the sexes in representation, it has sexist aspects that do not show up after performing content analysis. I was unable to find a clip of the most pertinent part of the show, but I have attached a link to the episode if people want to check it out, whitney.

We'll Get the Data, You Do the Explaining

Gill and van Zoonen both to a really good job at explaining how content analysis is used as an objective tool for looking at media. Gill specifically, says that content analysis is often used as a way to make an argument about various media representations more persuasive, in some cases give reason to start having a conversation about media representation. I liked this approach a lot because I think content analysis is very helpfully in being able to see all the ways media represents gender, or race, or class in an easy to digest format. Take for example the data on page 71 in van Zoonen. Even without background as to what this data was looking to find, its very obvious that the two columns labeled women and men are displaying very different representations. Firstly, the men’s column is much longer than the women’s column, offering more choices in profession with more even numbers of how many media men do those tasks. The women on the other hand have far less professions and have a very clear front-runner with more than half the percentage in one occupation. Even with very little context by reading this information you can immediately start a conversation about why this data is the way it is. You might also be able to say, with almost certainty, that there is something problematic about what this data reflects. This content analysis doesn’t explore why the data is the way that it is, or how media executed these various representations; it just presents the data in an objective manner and requires someone else to figure out the significance of it.

The follies of content analysis

This weeks readings were about the basics of content analysis, and I think the readings did a good job of talking about the promises and pitfalls of this research method. However, I would like to expand on the problem of a lack of deeper meaning/the use of stereotypes.

            As Gill and Van Zoonen point out, content analysis depends on the researchers ability to classify media images according to stereotypes. I think this is problematic for three reasons. First, by using cultural stereotypes, such as the dumb blonde, to categorize media representations,the research does little to upset the stereotype. Additionally, because much of this analysis uses the theory that the media is--or should be--a reflection of society, the use of these stereotypes in research seems, at least to me, to be perpetuating the stereotypes.

            My second major issue with content analysis is that in using stereotypes, content analysis ignores the multiple meanings each media image could have in different contexts and focuses just on the simple, dominant meaning. This is similar to the example used in class of how a cartoon by The Onion is considerably less offensive when one knows it was created by a satirical newspaper. Using content analysis, one could conclude that some ironic media representations are “bad” when, in fact, due to their irony, they have may have been “good.”

            Finally, while I understand the desire to obtain hard, quantitative data, I believe that content analysis is not generally useful (in the sense that it gives us a deeper understanding of the text being analyzed) due to its tendency to see images as having only one meaning. If post-modernism has taught us anything, I think it is that meaning is not singular and fixed but multiple and fluid, and the fact that content analysis ignores this makes me doubt its validity and utility as a research method.

Women: Powerful or Pathetic?

          Upon examining content analysis, this quantitative form of collecting data has been particularly useful in regulating how men and women are portrayed within the media and to document the narrow and restrictive range of stereotypes used to depict both sexes. Content analysis constructs a coding scheme to decide how to analyze a specific text and allow the researcher to effectively compare multiple texts to one another. This form of research was employed within the YouTube video sensation, “The Bechdel Test.” Within the clip (shown during class), the main woman narrating the video explains that though it may appear women are gaining more equal roles in television shows and films, they are still either underrepresented or represented as passive, dependent, and/or over sexualized objects. She is analyzing the content of popular media texts and grading based upon how they measure to her coding scheme. She states that the text must (1) have at least two women in it, who (2) talk to each other about (3) something besides a man. She concludes that allow the media has begun to include more women in general, females are still being demeaned based upon how their characters are portrayed.

        This video is an accurate depiction of content analysis theory because the narrator has studied texts based upon her coding system and drawn conclusions from the data collected. It appears male characters are still overrepresented and are often portrayed in a diverse array of roles and with various characteristics. In comparison, women are shown in a variety of roles and behaviors in the media, yet the trend of underrepresentation of female major and minor characters still persists. 

Below, I have attached a comic strip I found that can be viewed as another example of “The Bechdel Test.” These two women are depicted as having not seen each other in a significant amount of time, but within minutes, they turn the conversation to their love lives.

and The GLAAD Media Award goes to...

Well this blog post is going to be harder to write than others. I found what we had to read today positively boring. I get that doing an analysis of our current media maybe every 5-10 years is important. We need to see if we as a society have made any significant moves toward positively representing our culture.

I just found that the two readings we had to read today were telling me things I already know about our media. Women are usually taking care of things at home or working second hand, while men are doing what they have always been doing, working big name jobs and being the head of a household. This may be the problem with doing content analysis of media. They really aren’t telling people anything new. This issue was brought up in both Gill and van Zoonen’s readings. It sort of brings up a question of “So what?” (van Zoonen, 74)

While I was bored with the readings, they did make me think. Why are we looking for the negatives so often? Why don’t we try and applaud media when they do something right? We can talk about shows like Modern Family, Glee, South of Nowhere and companies who advertise for a majority of different social groups like Bud Light, Trojan, Lacoste and Target. I’m not saying anyone should give up on fighting to prove that the media does a pretty horrible job at representing our society in a positive way. However I think that if we make a big deal about the changes that are happening in the media then maybe future media will follow suite by making even bigger changes. I mean this is all hypothetical but I’m just putting my two cents in.   

None of These Women are Me

Content analysis in the media may not be the perfect method for evaluating media based on feminist standards; however, dissecting each medium and quantifying its representation can still send flares up for an anti-feminist/anti-woman situation, even if the methodology does not involve the qualification of such media. The example that is always debated is “Mad Men;” is this show inherently anti-feminist because it portrays the very honest reality of women in the 60s? Or is it a form of feminist critique, because we can watch the show now and start a dialogue on how unfair the system was and remember why we reformed in the first place? This is where numbers (aka content analysis) leave us desiring more. Gill brings up this satisfaction amongst critics that are looking for a more context-sensitive approach where the meanings of representations of women can be questioned instead of only analyzing the manifestation of these representations.

Van Zoonen reminds us that this method is really the only viable way of producing concrete, reproducible, and uniform data for research. This type of study can also create a timeline of sorts to frame the transformations of female representations in the media. For instance, if we time travel to “I Love Lucy,” Lucy is a heroine for many, but represents an overtly feminine, ideal housewife who always ends up getting herself into trouble (maybe not the best role model, but who is to say). This female protagonist was essential for the time, but now our image of women is either like the powerful (yet still phallocentric) ladies of “Sex and the City” or the ditzy, laughable divas of “The Real Housewives” (again, maybe not the best role models). Content analysis would certainly show this shift, but what does the shift say about our state of society? If a person from the future read a content analysis report of our generation, there may be more women represented and even more types of women; but without context and subjectivity, what would they think about all of our make-up ads, skeletore models and promiscuous leading ladies?

My aunt does not allow her 4-year-old son to watch live television, but only rented DVDS (like Curious George), because she is so tormented by the ads that run on television, even during children’s programs! Van Zoonen says “a culture communicates with itself by a means of its total mass media output with television being the prime mass medium,” but what are we really communicating: vanity and destructive sexuality or progressiveness (73)?

Exception to Content Analysis

As I read about content analysis in van Zoonen’s book, I was very interested in the content analysis data about advertising. A study that specifically struck me was Dominick and Raunch’s in 1972 concerning the roles women play in New York commercials. I had never realized that in commercials women are usually only represented in advertisements for cosmetic, household, and parental products, while men are usually represented as more high-end product buyers like cars and jewelry. After watching the clip in class the other day about products that are usually seen as feminine aimed towards men, like “murse” and “mewlewry,” I thought it was odd that jewelry commercials are usually aimed towards men.

Recently today the movie How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days came up in conversation and as I read tonight I was reminded of Ben Barry’s diamond advertising angle “Frost Yourself.” This advertising campaign was different than usual because it was aimed toward women and encouraging them to buy jewelry for themselves. Even the commercial Ben’s company later filmed featured a well-off woman urging other women to treat themselves to jewelry and that they did not need men to buy it for them.

This is a completely contradictory example to Dominick and Raunch’s study, but it is still relevant today in advertising. The reason Ben Barry’s campaign was so well liked, was because it was a new idea, appealing to women to buy themselves diamond jewelry instead of relying on men to buy it for them. It seems that advertising has not changed considerably in the past 40 years. While men are probably seen in more advertisements for food and drinks in today’s commercials, I bet if someone did a content analysis on gender roles in advertising today, the roles women and men play would still be similar to the data Dominick and Raunch found.

Content Analysis: still a valuable tool?

            Gill defines content analysis as “a quantitative technique which measures certain aspects of a media text” (Gill, 43).  With a similar definition, van Zoonen defines content analysis as “research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest of content of communication” (van Zoonen, 69).  A conclusion that content analysis produces is that the violence depicted on television and other types of media does not reflect the low amount of violence in reality.  Another conclusion produced from content analysis, but through a feminist study, is that television does not accurately depict the number of women in the world.  These quantitative studies often focus on the lack of women representing the contribution that women make to the work force.  Content analysis has been extremely valuable in identifying stereotypes in the media.  Its availability to women outside of feminist scholars has allowed other women to conduct content analysis and to critique media representations with smaller groups and other activist. 

            Although content analysis has the ability to reach a wide audience of users and has proven to be a value tool in identifying the lack of women in the media, it is currently being critiqued.  Gill explains that scholars are questions how the media should reflect society, but instead it is producing a sculpted version of reality.  Scholars are also questioning the meaning of content analysis.  Along with the meaning of a single image, scholars are lastly questioning the levels of meaning.  Scholars believe that the symbols that women depict are not being evaluated.  Content analysis has been extremely successful in providing evidence in many past studies; however, I believe that conclusions drawn from content analysis need to be further analyzed to seek the meaning behind representations. 

Critique of Content Analysis

     The section from Gill discusses the positive aspects of using content analysis. A major point within this piece is the idea that this method produces quantitative results that can give a definite answer to a problem or question regarding media outlets. From this style of research, we obtain statistics that can be used as a persuasive method for media headquarters. For example, Gill writes "Why do women constitute 30 percent of the people on television when they make up 52 percent of the population?" (Gill p. 44). Americans seem to be more persuaded by definite statistics and numbers which is what makes this so effective. 

     van Zoonen mentions the method of content analysis slightly differently. Although this method is affective in certain situation, van Zoonen argues that feminists shy away from content analysis because it simply proves a point that has already been made and it assumes that the statistics alone will produce some meaning for the numbers. For example, all that a content analysis would reveal in a feminist study is that there is a discrepancy between men and women in positive roles on television, which we already know. The problem is that this style of study doesn't give any depth to the argument, just a statement that is pretty obvious to the target audience. I agree with these statements because I have some experience with the use of content analysis and have noticed the problem with basing an argument primarily on statistics. I feel that to make a positive argument for a woman's movement, one must give some reasoning for the oppression in order to make strives toward fixing the problem.

Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder?

In a May, 2000 edition of Newsweek  a 16-year-old girl was quoted as saying, "I took this picture [out of the magazine] because it shows the stick-thin and perfect bodies in the magazines that teens read. I think this is part of where the pressure to have the perfect body comes from. I was thinking about a girl I knew that had an eating disorder. I think they should put a few more 'realistic' bodies in the magazines to show teens that not everyone is skinny." Adolescence is an extremely hard time for anyone as uncertainty and self-doubt arise from many physical, emotional, and psychological changes. As these feelings fester, one’s sense of confidence drops at a constant rate. With that being said, strategies for fitting in and improving physical attractiveness become even more important to adolescents.

White adolescent girls are the most avid consumers of magazines, with three fourths of those between the ages of 12 and 14 reading at least one magazine on a regular basis (Klein, 1993). Remembering my days spent reading magazines such as Seventeen and Teen People, the content is highly based off of appearance and beauty. Although there were always the articles dealing with conquering anorexia or bulimia, maintaining a positive body image, and a stressing independence and uniqueness, it was very clear that most of the models in the advertisements were thin and beautiful. Based on this, one must conclude that the main message of the advertisements is that in today's society, acceptance depends upon fitting into this narrow conception of pretty. The content of advertisements in magazines targeted to young women send an array of implicit and explicit messages concerning physical appearances.

In both van Zoonen and Gill, the idea of content analysis is under much discussion. Content analysis counts the frequency of various occurrences and this raw data is translated into percentages and various other statistics. While it can be argued content analysis suggests that sexism resides in single images that can be counted instead of seeing sexism as a culture wide issue, there are still benefits of this research. I found an article that performs a content analysis on the top five selling teen magazines. Of those were Seventeen, Teen Vogue, Girl's Life, American Cheerleader, and M Magazine. 

As expected, those represented in the magazines represent girls that are flirty, carefree, tan, and beautiful. With so much content pushing such similar images, girls will inevitably internalize the idea that beauty means echoing and replicating what they see in the media. If this continues, what will this mean for the future of individuality and confidence?