Semiotics
Roland Barthes
Mass Communication—Media and Culture
Cultural Studies
Theory Overview (7th Edition)
Abstracts appear in Appendix A of the text
The significant visual sign systems of a culture affirm the status quo by suggesting that the world as it is today is natural, inevitable, and eternal. Mythmakers do this by co-opting neutral denotative signs to become signifiers without historical grounding in second-order connotative semiotic systems. (Semiotic tradition).