Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 39 - Roma 0669207671

Communication Sciences (Academic Year 2020/2021) - Public Institutions and Digital Media

Media Semiotics


Credits: 12
Content language:Italian
Course description

The course is aimed a supplying the methodological and interpretative tools of contemporary media products starting from a semiotic and semiological approach. More specifically, the course proposes an approach based on a semiotics of the media experience. The course main objective is to transmit analytical skills as regards the communication languages and strategies adopted in various media environments. A particular attention is devoted to the audiovisual media (cinema, television); in addition, it proposes various approaches to the book industry, to information, to advertising, to the Web, videogames and to environmental media (shops, thematic parks etc.). The methodologies of analysis are presented and implemented by applying a wide range of exemplary cases that are considered not simply as texts or clusters of signs, but as crossroads of complex media experiences affecting the perception, cognitive, emotional and practical level of the viewer/consumer’s experience.

Prerequisites

Even if no prerequisites and rigorous preliminary knowledge are requested, the course recalls and develops some of the issues already treated in the courses of General Semiotics and Literature and Transculturalism.

 

Objectives

The course is meant to achieve three objectives; the achievement of each one of these corresponds to 6 lessons of the course (see the “Contents” section):

 

  • Supplying the student with notions on the main theories, tools and methods of analysis of the semiotics of the media in its evolution from the Sixties to the present day
  • Supplying the student with analytical competences and a systematic methodology supported by a critical approach when dealing with audiovisual media products
  • Supplying the student with analytical competences and systematic methodology supported by a critical approach when dealing with multimedia products of vocal, graphical, hybrid, environmental type with a special attention on the mechanisms and expressive strategies of contemporary media

 

 

 

Program

The course will deal with the following issues:  
 

The semiotic field and the media semiotics

The media semiotics: emerging figures and themes (1)

The media semiotics: emerging figures and themes (2)

The theme of experience between human sciences and experimental sciences

The mediated experience and medial experience

The semiotics of medial experience

The sensory definition (“What do I feel?”)

The existential definition (“Where am I?”)

The narrative definition (What happens/what happens to me?” / 1                                                   

The narrative definition (What happens/what happens to me?” / 2

The relational definition (With whom do I relate)”) / 1

The relational definition (With whom do I relate)”) / 2

The vocal media

The graphical media: the Web page

The graphical media: the press and the comics strip

The audiovisual media: the advertising commercial

Hybrid media: the videogame

Environmental media

Book

 Beside the slides displayed during the videolessons, the exams are prepared studying the following texts:

1) Ruggero Eugeni, Semiotica dei media, Roma, Carocci, 2010;

2) Paolo Peverini, I media: strumenti di analisi semiotica, Roma, Carocci, 2012;

3) Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale, Brescia, La Scuola, 2015.

Exercises

All the envisaged exercises (self-assessment tests, analyses of institutional campaigns, discussion of case studies) will allow the student to apply the theoretical and practical tools analyzed during the lessons.

 

Professor/Tutor responsible for teaching
Dario Edoardo Viganò
Video professors
Prof. Ruggero Eugeni - Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milano - Italy)
List of lessons
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