Cultural Analysis of a Gossip Girl Ad

Gossip Girl is an American teen drama set in New York Upper East Side and tells the story of privileged upper class young adults, as they battle sex, drugs, alcohol, relationships and betrayal. Narrated by an infamous incognito, who blogs the lives and drama of Manhattans elite.

The series was wrote in a series of novels by Cecily von Ziegesar and produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. The show begins with the sentence "Gossip Girl here, your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite," and is primarily focused on the lifestyles of the upper class private school teenagers. However for Dan and Jenny Humphries, although having some economic capital from their fathers short success as a rock star. They attend the same school as the elite, but live over the bridge in a loft in Manhattan. The bridge represents the class divide between the Upper East Side and Brooklyn. The show symbolizes Jenny’s struggle to become involved in high-class society and Dan’s love story with Serena even though he resents everything elitist.

My chosen methodology for analysis is semiology, Rose (2001) argues semiology confronts the problem of how images make meanings directly. It is not simply descriptive, as compositional interpretation does not appear to be, nor does it rely on quantitative estimations of significance, as content analysis at some level has to. Instead, semiology offers a wide range of analytical tools for depicting an image apart and tracing how it works in relation to broader systems of meaning. A semiological analysis entails the implementation of highly refined set of concepts, which construct detailed accounts of the particular ways the meanings of an image are produced through that image.

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