Structuralism in the Study of Media and Culture
Number of pages:
6
ABSTRACT:
This is a 6 page paper discussing structuralism in the study of media and culture. Structuralism is based on the premise that “societies and sociological or cultural practices can be analyzed, along the lines of language, as signifying systems [and within] structuralism the subject is decentered, in other words the central focus on the individual in much social analysis is replaced by the focus on the structures, of which the individual is just another element”. Structuralist methods apply to various divisions within the social sciences such as the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the cultural critical of Roland Barthes, the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Structuralism plays a large part in the presentation and perception of the media as some critics believe that viewers can look beyond media reports by perceiving the signs throughout the text while other researchers, such as Barthes in his post-structural phase, believed that language was not transparent by in fact most communication was distorted and could not be presented otherwise. Structuralism overall, tends to assume that there is a structure or a “depth model” in which researchers can find the “truth” and in so doing are able to “stand outside language using the meta-languages of linguistic, sociological or philosophical analysis.
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