Self-Reference in the Media

1. The semiotic paradox of self-reference in the media Self-reference has been much discussed as a characteristic of postmodernism. The arts and the media have become increasingly self-referential. Instead of showing or representing the world as seen or experienced by the mediators of art, the press, advertising, or the movies, the artists, journalists, advertising agents, and film directors are referring more and more to what has been seen previously in the arts or to what the media themselves have more recently reported. The digitalization of pictures and films, which has liberated the media from the bonds of factual reference to a world which they used to depict, has contributed to an increase of self-reference, since such pictures originate no longer in a world which leaves its documentary traces on the negatives of films, but are the result of an artificial construction in a studio. The forms and means of self-reference, or self-reflexivity, in the media advertising, film, and computer games are the topic of a research project about which the present paper gives a brief account. Its theoretical background is semiotics, the study of sign processes. Signs, according to their standard definition, are a means of referring to something else. Alloreference (or simply reference as such), that is, reference to something else is their essence. If reference is characteristic of signs, it should be even more so of the media. After all, the concept of “media” implies mediation, and mediation is a process of semiosis, the action of signs. The media represent events or ideas and thus mediate between the mediators and their audiences, so that selfreference, in this process, appears to be a semiotic paradox, for how can self-referential signs mediate if they refer to nothing but to themselves?