Book excerpt: Media semiotics is a valuable method of focusing on the hidden meanings within media texts. This book offers students an in-depth guide to help them investigate and understand the media using semiotic theory. It assumes little previous knowledge of the field, avoiding jargon and explaining the issues step by step. The two basic features of the methods used are the historical study of media and their genre and the analysis of the meaning structures that such genres encode. Semiotic analysis is sometimes seen as complicated and difficult to understand; Marcel Danesi shows that on the contrary it can be readily understood and can greatly enrich students' understanding of media texts, from print media right through to the internet.