Revolving Media of Today and Tomorrow

looking into the issues

Identifying and bringing fundamental media issues to talk. This blog shall be your one-stop for media technology issues discussion!

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Culture, Language and Visual Communication

The world is made up of people of different cultural backgrounds, ethnicity and personality. For each respective culture, they grasp a different belief and thus, forming their own language to distinct themselves as well as to build a common communication tool among their fellow peers of the same belief. Language serves to express and connects people but the realities are that there are more beyond interpreting meanings with just language. One relates a certain form of text or image with their living culture and knowledge through what is known as social-semiotics (Halliday & Hasan 1985)

In 2005, Burger King (BK) was filed lawsuit by the Muslim Council of Britain and was forced to recall its ice-cream cones when a Muslim man was offended by the design on the lid of the dessert. As reported by Innes in Scotsman News (2005), the design on the lid of the cone which resembled the Arabic inscription for Allah was claimed to threaten a "jihad" (holy war) and the fast food chain was also forced to spend thousands of pounds redesigning the lid. Burger King was unaware during the designing of the wrapper as they perceive the design as a "chocolate spinning cone" where as in accordance to the culture and belief of the Muslims, the design depicts the word 'Allah' in Arabian characters when it is viewed side-ways.


Burger King's dessert lid logo which resembles th inscription of Allah in Arabian
(source: http://www.jasoncoleman.com/Media/Images/Junk/allah.jpg)

This significantly portrays that different cultural backgrounds and knowledge are deeply interrelated with the interpretation of meaning. Individuals use a range of representational modes and have available a range of means of meaning-making (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006). The design on the lid of Burger King's ice-cream cone is interpreted (by the company) as merely a 'chocolate swirl' but in the Muslim's culture, the logo is taken as an humiliation of their God.

Image and text compliments one another but both are definitely not dependent on one another in order for a message to get across as image alone provides space for imagination and flexibility in meaning-making process where as text works as a control and straight-forward transmission of meaning (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006). But by integrating both or more of the elements, a more accurate meaning will be proposed.

Higher possibility that Muslims find the design offensive is due to inadequate description of the logo design. As described by Barthes (1977) as anchorage, collaborating image (BK's logo) and text (description of the logo) can form a more definite and precise restatement of an image to direct the readers to the chosen meaning. With this, chances of readers going astray from the initial intended meaning would be lessen, thus reducing misunderstandings.

To eradicate this sort of offensive materials from occurring in the market again, a proper planning of proposal of the initial design should be done. A planning proposal offers solutions to a problem or suggestions for improvement (Lannon 2000) and through proposal, companies are able to identify the potential issues that might occur while giving ample time to alter the plans to accomodatenew thoughts or better organisation of material (Putnis & Peterlin 1996)

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References:

Barthes, R 1977, 'Rhetoric of the image', Image-music-text, Fontana, London.

Halliday, MAK & Hasan, R 1985,
Language, context and text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective, Deakin University, Victoria.

Innes, J 2005, "Burger King recalls 'sacrilegious' desserts", Scotsman.com News, viewed 25 October 2007, <http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=195129200>


Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 2006, 'Chapter 1: The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication' in Reading images: the grammar of visual design, 2nd edn, Routledge, London.

Lannon, JM 2000, Technical communication, Longman, New York.

Putnis, P & Peterlin, R 1996, 'Chapter 8: Writing in an academic context', Professional communication: principles and application, Prentice Hall, Sydney, pp. 265-303.