Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information by Kathleen Tyner

Semiotics is a one of the mass communication theories that attempts to deconstruct the elements in the frame in order to explore the symbolic nature of the media and popular culture.

Masterman credits three areas of theory development in paradigm for media teaching: Semiotics, Ideology, and audience response to media texts. With Mythologies, Ronald Barthes first applied semiotics to media texts. According to Masterman, semiotics established the first principle of media education: the principle of transparency. In other words, media are not invisible conduits for information, but shape content in specific, representational ways: they are not "window of world", but carefully manufactured products. "Media do not present reality, they represent it".

Semiotics allowed a wider range of cultural products to be viewed and read as texts, opening them up to critical analysis.