Page 243 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

TEXTUAL SYSTEM

TEXTUAL SYSTEM

A content industry plus a readership (or audience) and a cultural form,
sustained in complex mutual relationship across a number of
appropriate media, over an extended historical time. The paradigm
example of a textual system is journalism. Hartley claims that
journalism, as the sense-making practice of modernity, is the most
important textual system of that period (Hartley, 1996: 31–35). Drama
is also a textual system, and its survival into modernity suggests the
limits of the truth-seeking rationality of modernism.
The most important textual feature of journalism is that it counts as
true. The most important component of its system is the creation of
readerships and publics that count as coterminous with the entire
nation or society, and the connection of those readers to other
systems, for instance politics, economics, social control and the
semiosphere. The most important textual feature of drama is that it
is imaginary – not true. Drama’s system includes the audience,
production and exhibition venues, including both ‘live’ (theatrical)
and media (cinema and TV) outlets. Also included are the technology,
institutions and practices required to sustain drama – ‘Hollywood’, for
example.
Study of a textual system must be interdisciplinary, both textually
(using semiotics, content and genre analysis, ideology, pleasure) and
socially (using quantitative, generalising methods, ethnography, policy
analysis, history, etc.), in order to connect the minutiae of
communication with the structures, institutions, economics and
history so communicated (see aberrant decoding).

TEXTUALITY

The empirical trace left by semiosis. That is, any object from which
communicative text can be recovered. Textuality is a condition of
contemporary life.

TRANSITIVITY

Transitivity is a way of describing the relationship between participants
and processes in the construction of clauses – basically, ‘who (or what)
does what to whom (or what)’. Transitivity relations and the roles of
participants depend crucially upon the kind of process encoded by the

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