Page 27 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

16 • Sport, Media and Society

and colours can represent nations or that a wave of a chequered flag in motor racing
means that the race has been won.

What is important is the realisation that all signifiers, even the most iconic or in-
dexical, can become conventionalised, and are given added meaning in the process.
Silverman (1983: 23) used the example of the kind of lighting used to accentuate the

female face in Hollywood films of the 1930s or 1940s: ‘The standardization of this
effect permits it to signify more than “look here” to suggest values such as “star”
and “ideal female beauty.” ’ As a result, we need to be schooled in systems of repre-
sentation before certain signifiers will reveal their iconicity to us. Road signs mean

nothing to the uninitiated, for example, and we have to learn that something that may
look like a man opening an umbrella is meant to stand for ‘road works taking place
ahead’.

Meaning, Myth and Ideology

The work of Roland Barthes (1915–1980) provides the bridge between the ideas
outlined so far and the semiotic analysis of media sport. In his essay ‘Myth Today’,
Barthes (1993) described a second-order signifying system which he referred to as
myth, a kind of message found not just in oral speech, but in a range of things such
as photography, cinema and sport. Mythology—part semiology and part ideology—is
the term he gave to the process of understanding these messages. In myth, two
semiological systems operate: language itself (which he broadened to include cin-
ema, written discourse and photography) and the metalanguage of myth.
Barthes illustrated the operation of myth using a photograph of a young black sol-

dier saluting the French flag on the cover of an issue of the French magazine Paris-

Match. Barthes described the photograph as an iconic sign at the first level, a picture
of a soldier saluting a flag. Barthes also found the image of the black soldier to have

a mythical significance, that of ‘harmony in the French empire’. He suggested that
the effectiveness of myth is that it does not need to be deciphered or interpreted to
be understood—for myth to have power, it must seem entirely natural, and if the
ideological message is evident, it ceases to work as myth.
There are two stages of meaning operating within Barthes’s magazine cover.
Firstly, there is the literal, descriptive meaning of the image, which we can call ‘de-

notation’. The viewer decodes the signifiers (soldier, arm raised, eyes uplifted) and

arrives at the denotative meaning: a black soldier is giving the French flag a salute.
The second level of meaning is the connotation of the image, meanings that the
image of the soldier evokes; that France is a great empire and this soldier is typical
of all her subjects in his zealous support of his so-called oppressors. Connotation re-
fers to the social meaning of an image. In this case, referring explicitly to a patriotic,
black soldier might have been deeply controversial. At the time that Barthes saw the