Page 240 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

the combination of signs within this arrangement is imperative to an
understanding of howmeaning is constructed.

See also: Narrative, Paradigm, Semiotics, Sign

SYNCHRONIC

One of a pair of terms – the other is diachronic – taken from the
work of Saussure. They refer in this context to two different, but not
mutually exclusive, ways of conducting semiotic/linguistic analysis.
Synchronic analysis concentrates on the state of language (langue)at
one moment. Diachronic analysis concentrates on the changes in a
given language over time.
Saussure was strongly convinced of the need for synchronic
analysis – the attempt to take language as a structured whole and
understand its internal relations. Synchronic analysis is essentially
abstract since it is empirically impossible to stop a language (much less
langue) in its tracks and observe its state. But abstraction was just what
Saussure favoured, since his argument was that people had become so
bogged down in the empirical fact of particular languages and their
word-stores (philology) that there was no developed theory of
language-in-general from which to make sense of the empirical data.
Synchronic analysis has become the norm in much semiotic work,
where the emphasis has been on isolating the elements (signs) and their
internal relationships within an abstract system (codes) of many
different sign systems. Saussure predicted that synchronic analysis
would eventually lead to a more theoretically adequate diachronic
analysis, or even to a combination of the two, which he dubbed
panchronic. This may be the situation nowdeveloping in semiotics,
where more attention is being paid to the historical development of
particular media and institutionalised discourses than was hitherto the
case.
See also: Diachronic, Discourse, Langue, Paradigm, Parole, Sign,
Signification, Syntagm

TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

The doctrine that social change is determined by technological
invention. For instance, Marshall McLuhan (1964) thought that
modernity was caused by the invention of printing. Technological

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