Off the cuff from Subau

Off the cuff

 

Since newspapers are one of the media, it has to be understood as a means that is supposed to mediate between audience and reality. This act of mediation, which we call representation, is never uninfluenced. Human cultural and social sciences are constructed with the production and consumption of meanings with the modes and media of representation -- such as newspapers -- in which they are articulated (Brooker 192). Different forms of media facilitate this job. Technology is only a facilitator. What gives meanings to different representational signs is the conventions, agreed upon sets of significations.

 

Large corpuses of media representation today indicate a trend that show that the modes of representation are going increasingly visual. In fact, modern life takes place onscreen (Mirzoeff 2002). However, a series of problematic implications are connected with the modes of representation.

 

It is generally informed that the visual representation does not merely reflect another or prior reality but instead functions to construct and mediate potential meanings. How do media representations communicate something that was or is already there? Is there reality prior to representation, which when "re-presented" could be less original or less real? If not, how meanings or representations are communicated and understood? Critics like Roland Barthes say that signs do not "mean" by themselves, it is the conventions of the society that interpret them. But in course of time, whether this visual culture is changing or it is static is the question. How meaning is being constructed along the dynamics of visual culture, if it is changing? This research has made an attempt to investigate the dynamics of such visual culture in the field of print media and representation.

 

Visual culture, to borrow Nicholas Mirzoeffs definition, is perhaps "best understood as a tactic for studying the functions of a world addressed through pictures, images, and visualizations, gestures, rather than through texts and words" (Mirzoeff, 2002)[i]. Most of our experience of the media, particularly the postmodern media machinery, is a hybrid of texts, images, and sounds, rather than pure states of any one mode of them. Therefore, the visual is always "contaminated" by the non-visual elements such as ideologies, texts, discourses, beliefs, subjective perspectives, intertextual presuppositions, prior experience and "visual competence" etc.

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[i] Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "What is Visual Culture," from The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. 2002