CA250 Final Keywords

Balance of empathy

The differential care and attention to implicit humanity that a text (or collection of texts) pays its characters

Media franchising

The idea of media using products and advertising of products as a way of franchising to bring in money; using something already successful to expand (example: Batman extends into many media industries like video games, books, etc.)

Reregulation

The notion that all media policy rewrites rules rather than truly getting rid of them

Ascription

When identity is given to one, rather than selected

Market fragmentation

concept that all markets are diverse and over time, break into distinct groups of customers or fragments as markets grow (example: the original market for cars fragmented into those for richer and less rich people, then sports cars, off-road cars, family cars and so on)

Interface

connects 2 distinct components within a communication process (hardware, software; image of a camera, shutter closing across the screen to indication you have taken a pic)

Algorithms

create situations in which we're not encountering varied content, try and push us towards a lot of the same content

Cultural binaries

cultural concepts that have a lot going on just because they're attached to an opposite (example: when you say something about masculinity, you're also saying something about femininity by association)

Hegemony

developed by Antonio Gramsci, an ideology that has become normalized in a society, seen as natural "common sense" (example: patriarchy: idea that men should be in positions of power, and that women should be subordinate --men are normalized when they are in control, when women are in control it's marked as something different)

Narrowcasting

even though you're broadcasting to a lot of people, you're targeting a certain group

Intersectionality

everyone is comprised of multiple identities, it's impossible to depict anyone as just one part of their identity (example: can't just depict someone as purely black, there's more to them than that)

Ideological analysis

focuses on the values and social definitions embedded in media images

Fan

have long been presumed to be unquestioning, have become a convenience that we use to project ideas upon (movies also play on the idea of the crazed, fanatical fan), but they are also the best enabled to critique, as well as becoming a recent subject of study (when we see girls screaming at the sight of Justin Bieber, we ask "what is communicated by that?")

Cultural forum

how entertainment stimulates discussion (example: TV was important because it opened discussions, there are so many different shows that hold so many different viewpoints)

Globalization

how media has played a role in place and time in the span of the world and has shaped other aspects of life such as economics and politics

Cultural odor

how much something smells like the culture it comes from; i.e., when we encounter media, does it smell like it's from somewhere else, or is it "odorless?" (example: Pokemon, despite being Japanese, has no cultural odor -- its very popular in the US)

Uses and gratifications

idea that people engage in media for many reasons, including learning, telling certain emotions, escaping real life and conducting mood management

Time-space compression

idea that space is compressed b/c you can interact with someone thousands of miles away and time is compressed because you have quicker access to people and info; a change brought on by media

Technological agency

idea that technologies take a lot of actions on their own that impact our experiences with them

Essentialism

idea that there exists an innate essence or quality of a person that makes them who they are

Burden of representation

if there is only one member of a group represented (in a show or movie), they have to be perfect, as they represent their group (example: Kerry Washington as only black lead in 'Scandal')

Normalization

practice in media in which certain beliefs or practices become essentially expected and generalized so that anything other than that specific practice appears strange

Semiotic warfare

process by which subcultures and activist groups attempt to question the meaning of cultural signs and symbols (example: camel cigarette guy getting chemo)

Technological affordances

properties or characteristics of technology that make possible - or encourage - certain types of practices; recognizes human agency; new technologies and what tasks users can possibly perform with technologies at their disposal

Global piracy

- Consider media that moves around the world, we must also consider piracy more seriously than we have to date - Hollywood and the Recording Industry of America regularly announce huge sums that they claim to be losing due to piracy, and while one should always be skeptical of those sums (they regularly assume, in highly problematic fashion, that every single item of media that's been pirated would otherwise have been paid for, for instance), even more conservative figures gesture to how very much media moves through piracy

Myth of total originality

- Difficult to remain completely original - New media feeds off of previous media

Chilling effects

- In a legal context, it is the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights by the threat of legal sanction - The right that is most often described as being suppressed by it is the US constitutional right to free speech.

Ears and eyeballs for sale

- The idea that the audience's eyes and ears are what is being sold - That the commodity of viewers is what is being bought and sold

Textual Poaching

- The subversive appropriation of mass-media texts (or of characters within them) by fans for their own pleasure.

Hypodermic needle theory

- This theory suggests that media messages are "injected" directly into the brains of audiences - The message goes directly from the sender to the receiver in a linear way. It is premised on the assumption that all audience members are the same and will respond in the same way to the media - It also indicates that the audience is a passive receptacle for media messages

Incorporation

- the legal process used to form a corporate entity or company. A corporation is a separate legal entity from its owners. - In Marxist theory, the disputed notion that the dominant ideology in a capitalist society functions to incorporate the working class, thus maintaining social order and cohesion.

Encoding/decoding model

- the message that is put into a text by producers; their intended meaning - the message that is taken from a text by readers; how audiences make sense of the message - the combined model that understands that people perceive messages from media different than what they were intended for

Global village

- the world considered as a single community linked by telecommunications - People sometimes refer to the world as this when they want to emphasize that all the different parts of the world form one community linked together by electronic communications, especially the internet.

FinSyn

1970-1993, took away connection between the studio and the network — made it so that the network was only in the business of distribution

Genre

A category or type of literature (or of art, music, etc.) characterized by a particular form, style, or content.

Localism

A commitment to ensuring that media address the concerns and interests of the area surrounding the media's site of exhibition

Allusion

A reference to another work of literature, person, or event

Block booking

A system of selling multiple films to a theater as a unit. Was the prevailing practice among Hollywood's major studios from the turn of the 1930s until it was outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.

Mise-en-scène

All of the elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed: the settings and props, lighting, costumes and makeup, and figure behavior

Public sphere

An idealized intellectual space that emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment, where the public came together to discuss important issues relating to society, economics, and politics

Mediated citizenship

Globalization, migration, and the transnational flow of media culture have encouraged "disjunctures" in national identity

Medium is the message

Marshall McLuhan's idea, says that all media of the same medium does the same thing, because what you get out of it comes from the way you receive the information, not what the information actually is (i.e., doesn't matter if you were to watch family guy or a documentary on the earth, they're both TV shows and that's what's important)

Advertiser-friendly media

Media producers want to maintain good relationships with advertisers, so they will be careful to shape their content in a way that won't upset corporations, and they want their shows to be "advertiser-friendly" in many ways

Hypercommercialization

Media products produced by advertisers to encourage consumption and brand recognition

Ideology

a belief system, worldview, or lens through which society should organize itself -- tells us how power should be distributed in society

Brand

a name, term, symbol, design, or combination thereof that identifies a seller's products and differentiates them from competitors' products

Articulation

a representation that works syntagmatically, examples include the grouping of black + poor in film, contrarily the term "white trash" (the fact that we have to group those terms means that they don't usually go together)

Oligopoly

a state of limited competition which a market is shared by a small number of producers; concern of conglomeration

Panopticon

a system of control, theorized by Foucault, in which people know they can always be watched but can't see those watching them (example: Facebook/social media where we're technically being monitored but we don't know by who)

Spreadable media

a term that aims to replace "viral" media by arguing that someone always needs to decide to spread something — nothing truly spreads "virally," as there must always be some form of actual participation in mass popularity

Transitional objects

a. An object that acts as a placeholder for a person--Lioness' blanket it Charlie Brown i. The world is full of transitional objects because the the world is full of risk

Realism

an effect that occurs when our assumptions about what is 'realistic' intersect with the techniques that media makers use to portray the world

Formal analysis

analysis of the form or visual appearance of a work of art using the visual language of elements and principles

Paratexts

anything that surround or works in conjunction with a text that is seen as somehow secondary to and dependent upon that text (examples include book covers, title font/art)

Text

media content

Play

not just for kids, adults engage in play as well - it's where we test, experiment, etc; just because we have to live in a world with rules doesn't mean that we can't test a world without rules

Anomalies

oddities; things that don't fit the pattern; something out of the norm

Glocalization

one media company has all sorts of different outlets around the world that take a lot of central content, but also add some local taste (example: McDonalds with the Teriyaki Burger, MTV with different channels around the world) -- often happens with reality TV

Avowal

open acknowledgement; frank declaration; admission; confession

Identity

our sense of self; according to Erikson: the adolescent's task is to solidify a sense of self by testing and integrating various roles

Regulatory Values

refers to the process by which a range of specific, often legally binding, tools are applied to media systems and institutions to achieve established policy goals such as pluralism, diversity, competition, and freedom.

Third spaces

represents the fusion of the physical (first space) and the remote (second space) into a networked place that can be inhabited by multiple remote users simultaneously or asynchronously (third space)

Transmedia storytelling

strategy where media creators tell a story through systematically dispersing the content across multiple delivery channels (example: DC comics using comic books for background to films but all one story)

Myths

strong, pervasive (unwelcome influence), ideological messages about what the world is like

Standardization

the "you might also like" effect; algorithms sometimes try and push us towards a lot of the same content

Othering

the act of emphasizing the perceived weaknesses of marginalized groups as a way of stressing the alleged strength of those in positions of power; in the media, this often means framing those who are not like the presumed (white/straight/american/etc.) as foreign

Public interest

the concerns of the public as a whole

Personalization

the consumer-initiated practice of generating content on a marketer's website that is custom tailored to an individual's specific needs and preferences--suggested for you

Representation

the degree to which different groups are or aren't represented in the media and how they are presented

Hybridity

the fact that cultures are neither wholly isolated nor entirely distinct but instead constantly borrow from one another

Cultural imperialism

the fear that American media is going to come into another country's market and be more popular than local media; fear that the whole world will ultimately be 'Americanized', that US culture will take over other cultures

Digital divide

the gulf between those who have ready access to computers and the Internet, and those who do not

Psychographics

the idea of using demographic data to create profile groups (example: Netflix uses this to create new shows); Focuses on types of groups of people

Culture industries

the idea that culture is being created as a part of an industry; culture becoming commercialized/industrial

Scopophilia

the idea that it is pleasurable to look at things; pleasure in being looked at

Active audience

the idea that people are not simply passive recipients of media messages; they respond to content based on their personal backgrounds, interests, and interpersonal relationships

Technological determinism

the idea that technology is the primary driver of our society, assumes that by it's very existence, regardless of anything else, technology is what's shaping society, implies that new technology is just a slippery slope, and that humans have minimal to no agency when it comes to shaping our future

Participatory cultures

the idea that various peoples, societies, and cultures to interact with new media in a way that allows them both to add and take away information from this medium

Cycle of oppression

the never ending circle of unjust treatment to a cultural group; consisting of Stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, oppression, and internalized oppression

Mediated presence

the phenomenon of media creating presence, because you can be physically all alone, yet still feel connected to people; idea that media can give you social support, friendship, information, and really feel like people are right there with you

Convergence

the process by which different media platform interact and blend together (example: you can access magazines online)

Corrupt personalization

the process by which your attention is drawn to interests that are not your own. This is a little tricky because it is impossible to clearly define an "authentic" interest.; shared netflix accounts

Intertexts

the relationship between texts; can include allusion, homage, and reference, then remixes, mash-ups and parodies.

Sameness

the standardization of things/people due to not being exposed to new ideas

Semiotics

the study of signs and symbols; language works through signs, where each sign has a signifier (the word, visual, sound, or action we use to reference the concept) and a signifier (the concept that's being signified) (example: hands clapping means approval)

Cultural capital

the symbolic and interactional resources that people use to their advantage in various situations; other than money, people's resources and knowledge they learn from being rich

Long tail

the theory that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail; shift from more to less popular stuff

Paradigmatic connections

things that are related to one another because they are perceived to be similar in kind (example: jeans paradigmatically connected to shorts because with both of them, you put them on your legs)

Syntagmatic connections

things that may signify different/individual things by themselves, but when brought together, come to signify something in particular (example: shoes, pants and shirts are all their own individual things, but when you think of them together, they 'mean' an outfit)

Egocasting

thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one's personal taste; the narrow pursuit of one's own interests

Cross-promotion

two or more texts working together to advertise each other

Identity as project

we can also think about media as a resource for a general project of working out who we are; a site for identity exploration.

Horizontal integration

when a conglomerate owns 2 or more companies operating at the same stage--eg: 2 production companies

Vertical integration

when a conglomerate owns more than one stage of the supply chain; owning the production company and distribution company

Conglomeration

when companies buy each other up/dissolve into one another, negatives include: can lead to lack of diversity of viewpoints, laziness (no competition = no need to innovate), lack of coverage of local news

Monopolies of knowledge

when the ruling class possesses communication technologies and keeps them from the masses

Recombinance

when you innovate, you're taking two successful things and switching them around (innovate but don't): Sex & The City + ER = Grey's

Male gaze

when, in TV and film, the camera switches to a presumed first-person view of a male turning a woman into an object (i.e., scanning her body) and turning her into an object of scorn even when it revels in the depiction of her body

Market discrimination

who matters and who doesn't (for example, high paying jobs are more widely advertised to men, essentially continuing bad practices and stereotypes)

Stereotypes

widely held beliefs that people have certain characteristics because of their membership in a particular group; generalizations made about a group of people that serve to limit them