Pour une séméiologie des médias

Abstract

In this text François Jost revisits his works about television, which he has published for 20 years, and wonders about their relation with the semiology. At first he shows that a semiology of medias has to cut with the metzian tradition of the semiology of cinema, and he wonders then about which changes «medias» make to texts.If there is no unified semiotics of media there, the pragmatic approach of television imposes not to deal with texts, but to take into account directly genres and their three interpretants: the real world, the fictitious world and the «ludic» world. He return to TV communication as such and shows that the notions of «pact» and «contract» are not adapted at all to its study, preferring the concepts of «ontological» promise and «pragmatical promise».Dreading the autarky of which the semiology is sometimes a victim, he asserts finally that the media theorist’s duty is to articulate their meaning to the society in which they grow. It is not enough to show how meaning occurs, it is also necessary to question about its why. It is the aim of a séméiologie of the media more attentive to the symptoms than to the signs.

Keywords

• media
• television
• genres