Blog Task: Semiotics

The image to the right is a diegesis taken from The Sun at the time of the Falkland War. It employs en element of social constructivism in terms of the reader forming their identity from the view of perceived society, as well as some heavy othering.

The images of the ships when shown with captions become indexical as they could simply be iconic images of ships without the captions- and of course to further deconstruct this, the images are only copies or signifiers of the real thing anyway. The addition of captions however infers a link, and the reader works out that they signify something.

The images alone would also be synchronic, but when placed with text and a 'story', they become diachronic as the viewer imagines a narrative and can, without knowing the actual scene, work out what the before and after scenes would be.

The language is geared towards a certain audience; one assumes a right wing conservative sect. In a denotational sense, 'Argies' could be seen as simply an abbreviation of Argentinian, but of course there is a connotation of the other, the enemy. It can be seen as an almost racist slur, while 'our lads' implies the idea that we have some sort of personal relationship to them, as if they're our sons. There is a heavy implication that we are the superior, and they are the evil power. The caption labelled 'crippled' states this rather obviously by using the word 'super'.

The headline itself is not a 'real' word, and is rarely used in the actual situation- its almost a word that is ever used when trying to add a bit of humour to a cat and mouse situation.

The 'Battle For The Islands' image tries to reference back to wartime posters in the typography and layout used. There is a wartime connotation that many of that generation would remember.

A convention of The Sun, demonstrated perfectly in this article, is the typography and how it is more than just text. 'GOTCHA' is written in uppercase, bold and condensed- it has impact to it. As typography is an indexical representation of a voice, this implies a confident, superior, loud voice- exactly the sort of voice you would imagine a proud person (or in this case, the UK) saying with conviction to a lesser enemy, in this case Argentina.

'Union Boycotts War' paints the unions as not just against the war, but against our pride and Britain due to the diegetic nature of the page.

Everything on this front page relates to the Falkland War except for the footer. As the article itself is so positive, I would not be hesitant to argue that the reader would feel particularly optimistic after reading the article then see that they could win £50,000 on Bingo, and be more likely to look at page 20 than if they were to had read a depressing article.