Title: Women's best beautiful will never be good enough: a rethoric and Semiotic analysis of four advertisements for beauty products.Because of the medias central role in peoples lives in the modern society we today live in, they have become a reference in peoples processes of making sence of their subsistences and environments. Commercial companies also want to present an as good image as possible of them towards the recipients through their marketing. Both parts can lead to a distorted picture of the real och everyday and norms and ideals easily form, for example about the correct way a woman should act and be, as the media affect which references should be made available for society.The purpose of this thesis is to examine how four advertisements for beauty products produce ideals and norms of beauty as well as construct and reconstruct femininity through the ways women are represented. The study will also contain the question about how rethoric and semiotic tools are used to strengthen the messages and sell the products. The following questions will be answered within this study:How is femininity being represented in the advertisements?How can the advertisements contribute to the creation of ideals and norms of beauty? How do the companies use rethoric and semiotic tools in the four advertisements to sell their products and/or strengthen their brands?The study will be executed with a qualitative rethoric and Semiotic analysis and the theories applied to it are Mediatization theory, Envisionment theory as well as a theory about gender and femininity.   The foremost results of this study has been that women are represented as constantly striving towards a better beauty to be able to also feel better about themselves, gain better self-esteem and to have more fulfilled and successful lives.

In this study we examine four Swedish newspapers? visual coverage of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings in 2010 and 2011 ? commonly known as the ?Arab Spring Revolution?, the ?Jasmine revolution? and in Sweden also the ?Women?s revolution? ? focusing on three main perspectives: news values and framing, postcolonialism, and gender.By means of a comprehensive content analysis and an in-depth Semiotic analysis, the purpose of this study is to investigate how Swedish written media frames the revolution and its initiators and partakers through news photographs, headlines, lead paragraphs and photograph bylines, and to determine whether or not it reproduces earlier trends of media coverage and framing of non-Westerners and non-Western societies.The purpose of the extensive content analysis is to attain data for empirical research of the visual portrayal of the uprisings? first twelve weeks in Sweden?s four largest newspapers Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet and Expressen. The analysis reveals that episodic framing is regularly used in all four newspapers, and that media demonizes Tunisians and Egyptians by constructing them as a brutal, uncivilized and threatening group which almost exclusively consists of men, and whose members are neither quoted nor named. It also shows that women are symbolically annihilated by media and that the very few women who do occur are gender stereotyped in accordance with established media conventions and postcolonial tradition, with the interesting exception of women being quoted to a larger extent than men. The analysis furthermore confirms the low occurrence of female journalists in Swedish foreign reporting, as well as demonstrates that the gender of the journalists does not influence what types of stories are written or how they are framed.The variable frequencies obtained from the content analysis provide indicators which are subsequently explored in the Semiotic analysis of four news photographs.

A picture says more than thousand words - an analysis of GQ Magazine´s cover images and ninth grade student´s views of them is an essay in media and communication studies covering 15 hp. This essay examines how men and women are depicted on the cover of GQ Magazine and how ninth grade students perceive these images. Our research questions are: How is gender presented in cover images? How do the students interpret these images? What possible differencies or similarities are there? Our theoretical framework is based on gender theory. Methods used are a survey conducted at Tegs Central school and a Semiotic analysis of the cover images.

This survey's main purpose is to highlight how the two Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter writes and describes four different school shootings. We wanted to find out if there is a general pattern of how school shootings are reported by the media. Two of the shootings occured in USA, Columbine and Virginia Tech, and two in Finland, Kauhajoki and Jokela. The analysis aims at three areas: the whole event, the perpetrator and the victim. We have used a qualitative content analysis with a semiotic model to examine the articles in the survey. The theories in the study is based upon views on social constructionism, media logic, stereotypization, representation, morale panic/media panic and media events.

Men?s magazines is a form of media that has been present and popular among men for decades and even centuries. In the beginning of 1990 the popularity for men?s magazines boosted as the new ideal man was presented. The new lad represented a new masculinity that was more honest about its ideals and point of views.

The goal in doing this study has been studying public interpretations of media content in the commercials that this study uses. The analysis was based on two TV commercials for feminine hygiene products. Initially, they seemed to differ from each other, but soon the question whether or not they in fact did convey the same underlying message was raised. The theoretical premises on which the study was founded on are the gender perspective in advertising and the social construction of gender. To reveal the hidden signs appearing in these commercials and to find out their meanings, we used the method of Semiotic analysis.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how media has followed the Parken Zoo incident and analyse how media convey the issue about the Parken Zoo incident. The different results have been compared. To answer the purpose of the study three issues has been formulated:  how do the different media relate to the ideal of objectivity? Who come across and get to speak in the different media? What differences and similarities are in the media?   The theories that have been used in this study are mainly McCombs theory of agenda setting, Strömbäck?s theory of framing and theory of media logic, Kovach & Rosenstiel theories of journalism and Manning?s theory of objectivity. The methods that have been used are a combination of a quantitative content analysis and a qualitative Semiotic analysis.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine how the public library communicates with young users through the library web sites. Four Swedish public library web pages for children are analysed. In the analysis the web pages are treated as a combination of semiotic resources that, communicating as a whole, hold a meaning potential. In order to identify the underlying meaning of the whole I have applied the tools of Kress' & van Leeuwen's visual social semiotics to the chosen web pages.The information value, the framing and the salience of each composition is examined and analysed, as is the size of frame, the perspective and the vertical angle of a selection of images from each web page. The results of the Semiotic analysis are then discussed and related to Jochumsen et al:s four space-model and the notion of ?child perspective? and ?empowerment?.The results show that the child perspective is strongest on the web pages that represent the performative space as dominating and that empowerment is mainly represented as ?doing?, ?participating? and the ?free choice?.

The purpose of this thesis was to examine if users of digital music games may acquire skills from the games that may be of use in learning to play a real instrument, that is a non-digitally simulated instrument like an acoustic piano. We have used Gee?s theory regarding a possible interconnection between different semiotic domains, and how this connection may enable a transfer of skills between related domains. In this thesis we examine possible skill transfer between the domains ?digital games? and ?non-digital instruments?. To examine our question formulation we chose to conduct a pilot study from which we collected both quantitative and qualitative data.

The purpose of this thesis was to examine if users of digital music games may acquire skills from the games that may be of use in learning to play a real instrument, that is a non-digitally simulated instrument like an acoustic piano. We have used Gee?s theory regarding a possible interconnection between different semiotic domains, and how this connection may enable a transfer of skills between related domains. In this thesis we examine possible skill transfer between the domains ?digital games? and ?non-digital instruments?. To examine our question formulation we chose to conduct a pilot study from which we collected both quantitative and qualitative data.

Pictures are often used when marketing a tourist destination. Photographs of a place, a destination, are used to convince customers and stimulate daydreaming in order to turn a potential customer into a real customer. For some people the photographic representations of a place is the only one they experience. With this in mind, it is reasonable to question how representations of places and geographical imaginations are being (re)produced when marketing a destination by using photographs. This paper aims to study how representations of place and people are used when marketing a tourist destination via travel commercial.

The essay is an effort to examine and define three examples of liminal dance performances through an aesthetic, hermeneutic and Semiotic analysis. The examples are three dance or liminal performances, made by three different choreographers and performed at ?Moderna Dansteatern? and ?Dansens Hus? in Stockholm during September and October 2005. In the effort to determine the liminal and cross-over in the performances, the analysis focus on aspects such as: the character of the work, choreography, the use of scenery, stage light, requisites, conception of place and interior room, the use of costume and mask, the use of different media as text, pictures, film, and music or not using any these, and the interaction with the audience. The analysis depends on a historical background and the use of literature in the subject.

My intention with this essay has been to examine how men?s tears are portrayed in three chosen films and what their crying does to their masculinity. In my analysis I have used the concept of hegemonic masculinity. I have worked from the assumption that in our culture men?s crying is problematic in some sense.

The essay is an effort to examine and define three examples of liminal dance performances through an aesthetic, hermeneutic and Semiotic analysis. The examples are three dance or liminal performances, made by three different choreographers and performed at ?Moderna Dansteatern? and ?Dansens Hus? in Stockholm during September and October 2005. In the effort to determine the liminal and cross-over in the performances, the analysis focus on aspects such as: the character of the work, choreography, the use of scenery, stage light, requisites, conception of place and interior room, the use of costume and mask, the use of different media as text, pictures, film, and music or not using any these, and the interaction with the audience. The analysis depends on a historical background and the use of literature in the subject.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the representation of race, social class and gender in the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V. Postcolonial theory, including terms such as cultural hegemony, whiteness and Michel Foucaults definition of power, has served as the basis for the analysis. The postcolonial theory has been combined with class theory and gender theory for an intersectional analysis. Semiotic analysis has been used as the method in the thesis, and a total of nine story missions ? three for each protagonist in the game ? have constituted the material.