Meaning in the Age of Social Media

摘要

What we call "meaning" occurs when things get connected to one another through processes that render some of those things significant and some insignificant. We call "signs" some of the things thus connected. For decades, critical media studies' dominant theoretical approach to understanding the ways that signs and things connect to form meanings has been some version of Stuart Hall's Marxist-inspired "encoding/decoding" model, now atop the syllabi of communication courses everywhere. For Hall (2006), "meaning" is a double connection-a double articulation-not only a process whereby signs get linked to one another in syntagmatic chains that ultimately form media/ted discourses (what Hall calls "meaning structures") but also one in which those structures get attached to certain lived, material practices. The mode of this articulation defines how sign and thing relate to one another. For Hall, signs function principally to re-present a thing; they mediate by standing in for the thing and ushering it into discursive systems. How a sign does or does not re-present a thing is a potential source of confusion, even consternation, among actors working to make use of those symbolic resources. Critics thus work to demonstrate the ways media producers and audiences alike use signs in their struggles over the ways realities appear in discourse.