Finding Cultural Text | My Assignment Tutor

Finding Cultural Text  Student ID: 30731488 Student Name: Afseen Shahed This was much better work, Afseen. Some advice to develop. Overall, I can see that you have read carefully, and really tried to translate your reading into understanding.  Evidently, that process takes time. In this instance, I think you would have gotten a little further by paying closer attention to McQuail and Deuaze. To me, the meme example (which is good) is about the way that ‘cultural texts’ are products of co-creation between media and audiences. I would say the example of memes is an excellent example of how cultural texts encourage audiences to participate in the production of meaning-and this is a clearly point than the one that you focus on, which is about the production of culture in real-time. I don’t think you quite ever explain why that is important or what it means. To establish the nature of memes as intertextula, it would have been useful to look for scholarly work on memes themselves-what they are, how they work-so don’t forget to use CMMC database, going forward. But definitely moving in the right direction. Executive Summary The aim of this report is to discuss cultural text and its elements. Bernie Sanders is going to be used as an example for this analysis. It has been summarized that cultural texts are generated by many media such as images, videos, etc. The Cultural approach helps to understand the meaning of the cultural text and find the difference between actual meaning and social meaning of the text. It has been concluded that these texts play an important role and highly affect the culture and society. Introduction Cultural texts are the actions and behavior which reveals the meaning of culture. A cultural text is a combination of signified, signs and mechanism which relates to metonymy. A text could be in any form such as a paragraph, story, sentence, and collection of stories. The Cultural text shows the sign system, symbols, and storytelling tools which help to shape and contribute to society’s culture. This report will explain the idea of a cultural text and apply the idea to explain a particular Media Object by taking the example of Bernie Sanders for this analysis.  Cultural Text Approaches To understand the concept it is important to know about the text. Text is said to be a critical version of communication and media studies. It could be in any form such as video, audio, images, etc. (McQuail and Deuze, 2020). An image with text is just not a picture it contains cultural information. It could also be understood by the cultural layer of understanding. It could be a collection of signs in a video clip, photograph or painting, film, and television show (McQuail and Deuze, 2020). These texts are sometimes put together in various combinations or rearranged with different meanings. The cultural text approach is used to analyze the meaning of Cultural text by various approaches. The text is generated by real-time incidents and these texts are misunderstood by media communication (engaging communities, 2021). The cultural text approach helps to identify the meaning of that text. The Cultural text can depict any meaning of various real-time incidents and it helps in understanding about the message conveyed by the text. The cultural text approach helps to identify the text. There are many approaches used by many people for detecting the text and its meaning. Rather than analyzing the actual text itself but it analyses it in a contextual manner. The text written on the meme is not what it directly says as it’s related to the contextual text. The text represents reality and it can be observed by real-time incidents. The approach helps in analyzing the culture (Bremner and Costley, 2018).  Culture Intertextuality  Intertextuality is said to be the process of shaping a text’s actual meaning with other text. The term Intertextuality indicates all the text whether they are spoken or written, whether they are informal or formal, and whether they are mundane or artistic (Bullo, 2017). It is said to be the phenomenon that is used to understand the meaning of online content and mass media (McQuail and Deuze, 2020). The term is derived from literary studies which indicate the text which includes video and audio.  Intertextuality is all about what a text says within history and society. They don’t have their own meaning. The meaning is a rearrangement of many elements with the pre-existing social meaning (maclean et al. 2018). The meaning from this text is outsider and insider both. The insider shows the reader’s view and outside shows the society’s influence. It is the idea of any text and work that has been molded and affected by various elements of texts which have already been encountered before it. It deals with textual reality. They have no unified meaning and harmony of their own but they are linked with shared and traditional methods (Deng et al. 2021).  On 25, March 2016, an American politician was giving a speech at a campaign event in Portland (usatoday, 2021). A bird Oregon landed near the politician while he was giving the speech on stage. The bird landed on the stage where the politician was giving the speech and then the bird perched on the podium. After that incident, this news was spread on the media with the hashtag #BirdieScanders began trending on various social platforms such as Twitter. People created many photos and memes of that incident. The news got trended on social media and news was posted on various news and YouTube channels (usatoday, 2021). YouTube channels got millions of views to that post. It was assumed by many people that the incident is a symbol. Bernie sander said about the incident that the dove is asking for peace in this world and no more war. The bird was uninvited but added an official campaign image. People tag the bird with the tagline “together” on the image. The image received more than 40,000 retweets and many likes.  Figure 1: Instagram Meme (Source: usatoday, 2016) The inclusion of the bird campaign message explains the astute understanding of marketing and branding. This shows the purposeful reproduction of the event into the digital landscape. This scenario depicts the meme can be generated from a single and sudden moment in time. The Birdie meme is the best example of the meme which shows real-time intentional politician incorporation which started from real and ended into the digital world. The meme targeted real-life events, concepts, and persons.  Later another photo got viral on the internet of the United States where Bernie Sander is wearing woolly mittens and helped the people with $1.8 million.  Figure 2: Bernie Sander mitten, Meme (Source: cnbc, 2021) The photo got viral and got popular in only one day on social media platforms. It is the most endearing and enduring post of Bernie Sander from Joe Biden’s inauguration (cnbc, 2021). The meme has got so much popularity from the people and many people photoshopped this photo on social media. In this post, Sanders don oversized mittens and wearing a practical brown coat. He was sitting and showing the socially distanced with a folding chair and crossed arms and legs. The meme has been so much popularized that it raised 1.8 million dollars which they donated to charities (cnbc, 2021). The cultural text plays a very important role in explaining the real-time scenarios. The photograph went to many alterations and edition versions where the politician was placed in various historical and popular photographs. It leads to many other platforms also such as Scene from Star Trek, Batman, and Wayne’s World and in many tourist guy memes.  Merchandise has also been manufactured using that photo. These things include stickers, plates, T-shirts and wine glasses sold to raise money for charity.  The above meme scenarios show that the meme is generated by various real time incidents and convey a contextual meaning. These cultural texts affect society in various ways. These texts generate a layer of understanding. In this scenario, various groups who are different in nationality, race, age, and sexual orientation understand these texts in different ways (Salleh and bauer, 2018). The text depends upon the audiences, these texts have different meaning to different people and it highly operates culturally.  The politician helped the people bypass the COVID-19 relief bill which helped by various unemployment benefits. It has provided people with healthcare, rental assistance, Postal services, broadband, nutrition, small businesses, child care, and various funding for distributing the vaccines. In these pandemic situations, he is working with Senator Josh Hawley to provide direct payments to needy families and people. He helped many people to recover safely from the pandemic situation.  Conclusion It has been concluded that the cultural text expresses the real-time scenarios via text. Moreover, the cultural text displayed by people via various media with text is not judged realistically, cultural approaches show the actual social meaning of the cultural text, while many people just follow the text without getting knowledge of whether it is right or wrong. Many texts explain the incorrect side of a situation and it is interpreted as being correct by the people. In many cases, the text is correct and encouraging, in the case of Bernie Sanders, the message was delivered in a positive manner. Despite the mitten meme having helped many disadvantaged people due to its social media popularity,  even helping the people suffering as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although these cultural texts have linked many political activities with the public through social media, many political leaders lose their popularity as a result of  memes which only feature a small amount of text. The text affects society as a whole because people get influenced by cultural texts and social media. Every text mirrors the cultural context and is based on opinions and knowledge of the world. Some of the text is made in response to music albums, books, events, etc. the textual approach is always cultural and contextual. In conclusion intertextuality helps in understanding the meaning of the cultural text in question. It shows the actual meaning of the text and the social meaning of the text. One cannot bring shared context and personal context to bear in interpretation and reading. These cultural texts are recognized by people in different ways as the meaning of these texts is considered positively by some people and is considered negatively by some. These are differ by different groups such as nationality, race, gender, etc. and can be crucial to a person’s understanding. References: Bremner, S. and Costley, T., 2018. Bringing reality to the classroom: Exercises in intertextuality. English for Specific Purposes, 52, pp.1-12.  Bullo, S., 2017. Investigating intertextuality and interdiscursivity in evaluation: the case of conceptual blending. Language and Cognition, 9(4), pp.709-727. Cnbc, 2021. ‘It’s just Bernie being Bernie’ — How a photo of Sanders wearing mittens at Inauguration Day went viral. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/23/bernie-sanders-inauguration-meme-heres-the-story-behind-the-photo.html [Accessed on: 6 May 2021  Deng, L., Laghari, T. and Gao, X., 2021. A genre-based exploration of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in advertorial discourse. English for Specific Purposes, 62, pp.30-42. engagingcommunities,2021.Examining Culture as Text. Available at: http://www.engagingcommunities.org/proposing-the-ethnographic-research-project/3a-examining-culture-as-text/#:~:text=Cultural%20texts%20are%20those%20objects,it%20doesn’t%20stop%20there. [Accessed on: 6 May 2021]    Maclean, M., Harvey, C., Sillince, J.A. and Golant, B.D., 2018. Intertextuality, rhetorical history and the uses of the past in organizational transition. Organization Studies, 39(12), pp.1733-1755.  McQuail, D. and Deuze, M., 2020. McQuail’s media and mass communication theory (pp. 420-429).SAGE.   Salleh, S.M. and Bauer, T.A., 2018. Meaning making: Examining Malay adolescents’ media text decoding process in constructing cultural identity. Jurnal Komunikasi: Malaysian Journal of Communication, 34(4).  Usatoday, 2021. Crowd goes wild after a small bird lands on Bernie Sanders’ podium. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/03/26/watch-small-bird-lands-bernie-sanders-podium/82289730/ [Accessed on: 6 May 2021]