Media Literacy, Visual Syntax, and Magazine Advertisements: Conceptualizing the Consumption of Reading by Media Literate Subjects

Abstract

AbstractA close reading of recent print ads reveals current trends or themes in the recombination of signs that attempt to keep one step ahead of a media-literate audience. The signs are not new, but the relationship between written text and visual representation is changing in reaction to the audience’s knowledge of how media is made. We offer a syntactic critique of how print advertisements work to create meaning for the media literate. This analysis reads texts for underlying cultural and ideological meanings and the anticipation of what subjects might already know about media creation. New conceptual tools are needed to chart these re-combinations of visual and textual signs and codes, specifically, sign paths, meaning momentum, conduits, and stylization.