Meaning Ch. 5

Misinterpretations happen throughout people's everyday lives and it's a difficult problem in mass communication. People are always interpreting messages from the media without even knowing. Such as The Simpsons, The Brady Bunch, Lost, and Harry Potter. Some messages take more effort to understand than other messages. There are two domains of meaning is the world and the languages. A lot of things that have meaning come naturally to people like we understand what a classroom is. If it had a bed or stove in it, it would be weird and confusing. Meaning organizes our world. People make meanings. Representational is the best way to describe meaning. A representational word describes an object and a conceptual word describes a concept. Codes are a systematic organization or structure of signs each different from one another. Every society produces the codes of meaning and lives within it. People live their lives through codes. These codes are dependent on two systems made of different and differentiable elements. Without these codes we wouldn't be able to differentiate a man from a woman for example. A smiley face such as :-) signifies in a code in which it portrays a happy face. In order to be a signifier it has to be a code and different so it can be recognizable. Codes organize the world into categories differentiating the meanings of things. It is through communication where people create the real world that they live in. The different texts of the mass media and pop culture are key by creating the shared codes and meaning that explain the world that people live in.