Text and Media

Text is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. It is one of the signs of semiotics which understood as a discrete unit of meaning in semiotics. Text can be presented in several forms, written and spoken, verbal and non-verbal. Base on the variable usage and composition of text, it can be used to define "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity." Heinrich Plett pointed out that, as a linguistic sign, the text has an arbitrary nature and is based on social conventions.( Text Science and Text Analysis/ Stiinta textului si analiza de text, 1975 )In 1966, the Poststructuralist Julia Kristeva coined the term “Intertextuality” No text has its meaning alone; all texts have their meaning in relation to other texts. Intertextuality refers to far more than the 'influences' of writers on each other. For example, the word, “Chicken”, as a semiotic sign, may refer to bird chicks, chicken meat, or coward for some culture. The meaning of the text is defined the other text it is with, or the way it represented to the audience but att the same time, the signification of the text will also be affected by the acknowledgement of the audience, if the audience have never seen or heard of chicken, or knowing chicken and another verb, or do not know English language, the text “chicken” can be meaningless arrangement of alphabets to them.

"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived which contemporary semioticians refer to the creation and interpretation of media as 'encoding' and 'decoding' respectively. The use of these terms is of course intended to emphasize the importance of the semiotic codes involved, and thus to highlight social factors. The process of communicate via media is the process of encoding our own memory which we received from our sensory information into a medium or linguistic form which can be received by the audience via sensory system and decode the information according to the memory they had. For example, we know lemons, the sour taste of it, the physical appearance of it, the texture, and the texts which form the name of it, LEMON. so, when we want to transfer the message of it, triggering the related memory of the other people, we use media to present, such as, spoken language, "lemon", painting, the media will only works when both presenter and audience have the similar understanding of lemon. When the audience receive the message of "lemon", such as looking at the picture or painting of a lemon, if the person know "Lemon" in English, the word "Lemon" will come to his mind and if he tried the taste of lemon before, his brain will start to remind him of the sour taste and his mouth will start to secret saliva. In other hand, for a person who had never seen lemon, the media presented can be meaningless.