Critical Media Studies

Appropriation

Changing meanings into new ones by either transforming dominant meanings into resistive ones or transforming resistive meanings into dominant ones, e.g. Ice-T being appropriated into the role of a cop despite his early track, "Cop Killer."

Contact Zone

Co-presence of people in assymetrical social relations. Basically, this means a space where people interact with one another but in ways that empower some more than others. Usually, the notion of contact zones refers to spaces in which different cultural groups interact in unequal power relations.

Hypermasculinity

Form of masculinity that favors high risk-taking, physical power, independence, and leadership

Use Value

Functional value of a thing in our lives, e.g., the example of water having high use value, oxygen having high use value but low exchange value.

Risk

Highly volatile and unpredictable ways in which audiences use cultural commodities

Feminism, second wave

Second-wave feminism is credited as beginning with Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique. The book focused on the subtly debilitating experience of being a suburban housewife - a bird trapped in a gilded cage. Second-wave feminism had the goal of teaching women the ways in which their lives were oppressed by patriarchy and led to the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Second-wave feminism had expressly political projects such as fighting for wage equality, dismantling patriarchy, gaining reproductive rights and control over women's own bodies, etc.

Ang Reading

1. Audiences actively construct meaning. They are not passively influenced as the mass audience or market view assumes. 2. Audiences construct meaning within cultural and social contexts, not simply as individuals. 3. Audiences integrate media into their everyday lives based on cultural rituals, conflict, and power.

Hoerl Reading

1. Commercial media create sites of memory that shape current understandings of past events for contemporary ideological purposes. 2. Counter-memories are limited in popular culture because the commercial imperatives of the news organizations favor dominant perspectives and to the extent they were there as reviews, these were not attended to as broadly and as meaningfully as the film itself.

Westerfelhaus Reading

1. Gay visibility in the "media mainstream" is conditional - welcome only as long as they maintain the heterosexist social order. 2. The ritual of rebellion is a strategy masked as a tactic. It normalizes the social order while appearing to challenge it.

Lull Reading

1. Gramsci's theory of hegemony shifted our understanding of the way power works by connecting power with ideology 2. Hegemony works through an "inter-articulating, mutually reinforcing process of ideological influence." This means the values and beliefs expressed in media are also shared across multiple institutions and contexts. 3. Effective hegemonies work because dominant beliefs become taken as "common sense."

Kellner (Media Culture) Reading

1. Media culture is our everyday culture. Media have become so prevalent in American life that it cannot be disentangled from our practices and belief system, affecting directly or indirectly all of our cultural beliefs and practices. 2. Media culture does not directly "affect" us, but it provides cultural materials that we use to make sense of the world. This notion of cultural materials is highly important because it means that we are neither programmed by media nor are we completely empowered to believe whatever we want. Media provide the raw materials. 3. Research on media is useful primarily as an "optic" on our social/cultural context.

Hesmondhalgh Reading

1. Media matter because they shape our "inner, private lives" 2. Media are not propaganda systems and are not ideologically straightforward. Instead, media messages are complex, ambivalent, and contested. 3. Loose control of symbol creators, tight control of distribution 4. Know Box 0.2: Summary of distinctive features of the cultural industries - it addresses problems faced by the industries and their responses (fantastic stuff)

Cultural pedagogy

Learning about culture that happens outside formal institutions of learning. This is often referred to as alternative pedagogy.

Feminism, first wave

Led by early pioneers for women's equality, first wave feminism focused on establishing women's right to vote. Resistance to the women's right to vote was based on the belief that women are irrational and childlike, and therefore incapable of making informed voting choices. It was also accompanied by the belief that women are morally purer and more innocent than men and that their authority and nurturing is most useful as the moral authority and nurturers in the household.

"Culture" (with a capital C):

Lull defines this as the normative collective beliefs and symbols that provide a sense of belonging, stability, and identity

Valorization

Making a belief, idea, person, thing, etc. valorous or worthy of praise.

Constructionist approach to representation

Meaning is given to representation by social actors.

Politics of representation

Mediated representations are created to advance dominant social groups' political goals

Cultural hybridity

Mixing of cultures at the juncture of multiple cultural spaces. This might include a Jamaican American household, whose home life is an ethnically Jamaican space but whose public life is a US space as a racialized subject. It might also refer to a former colonized people who live in their indigenous culture but while under the former control and lingering influence of the colonizing nation's culture.

Secondary Market

Non-traditional revenue streams outside direct sales and advertiser support. Secondary markets include the sale of merchandise, the syndication of a television show abroad, revenue from redistributing the content on a service like Netflix, etc.

Individualization

Not the same as individualism or individual self-interest but rather the liberation from cultural structures such that people are better able to take control of who they are, who they want to be, and what they believe, acknowledging the cultural constraints and spaces in which they live.

Collective Memory

Our shared memories of an event that have been shaped by dominant social actors for contemporary purposes

Reflexivity

Self-introspection and knowing that allows people to understand how their beliefs are ideologically constructed, how their experiences inform how they believe, etc. It refers to a kind of self-knowing that is not narcissistic or self-flattering but that understands the ways culture, experiences, and relationships shape who they are. Without reflexivity, there is little interrogation of the impact of dominant culture, there is little possibility for cultural resistance, there is little motivation for cultural change, etc.

Interpretive community

Shared meanings by members of a cultural group

Diaspora

Scattered peoples connected to a sense of a common homeland through communication. In its original formulation, diaspora referred specifically to groups scattered from their homelands because of serious tragedy, e.g., African Americans (slavery) and Jews (Holocaust).

Hall Reading

1. Nothing is understood as it exists in reality but is constructed in our minds as we perceive it to be through the filter of our personal and cultural standpoint. 2. Representations' meanings are constructed by social actors to be able to communicate in ways that produce shared understanding. 3. Representations are not neutrally produced nor naturally produced but are created through culture by groups with more power to influence meaning.

Indexical sign

Signs that arbitrarily evoke the referent. For example, the word "hund" obviously refers to what we call "dogs" in English. The sign that is used to mean "dog" is arbitrary, hence the wide variation of words in different languages for the same mental concept. As an aside, hund is the word from which hound is derived.

Iconic sign

Signs that clearly evoke the referent, e.g., a photograph

Homosocial

Simply stated, it refers to socializing with people of the same sex. It implies a desire to remove the other sex from social situations or organizations (e.g., men's lodges, Augusta golf club, men's poker night, etc.).

Textual encoding/audience decoding

Textual encoding refers to the ways in which meanings are inserted into media texts through casting choices, genre conventions, story and moral, etc. Audience decoding refers to the ways in which we interpret and make sense of the encoded meanings.

Western/The West

The West refers to a set of ideological beliefs originating in European and European-originated nations

Referent

The actual object, place, or person for which a sign represents. In semiotics, we never interpret referents directly but always through a cultural filter.

Hit-to-release ratio

The amount that must be sold in order to offset costs and other losses

Intersectionality

The assertion that we are not reducible to just our class, race, gender, sexual identity, religion, etc., but that the way we experience our social life is through our multiple identities - the "intersection" of these multiple axes of social identity

Commodification

The conversion of a thing or concept into a sellable good, e.g., beauty is commodified as referring to a sense of style gained through the buying of particular brands of clothes, to the purchasing of a gym membership, to the buying of cosmetics, and so on.

Cultural Industries

The group of businesses involved in the creation of products that more directly shape culture through its amplification of particular cultural groups, messages, and beliefs for popular consumption.

Frankfurt School

The intellectual birthplace of political economy perspectives. It is often associated with the belief that media industries create mass culture that favors elites. Less importantly, the Frankfurt School believes that art is impossible in mass media because its commercial imperatives do not allow for content that challenges dominant notions but rather panders to the popular, relying on familiar formulas and easy to digest content.

Globalization

The mass movement of capital, people, and ideas across the world. There has always been globalization, but it is unprecedented in scope today. Cultural imperialism is one form of globalization that is often discussed.

Transnational

The movement of people, cultures, ideas, and capital across borders.

Signifying practice

The practice that produces meaning by ascribing signs to referents and meanings to signs

Intentional approach to representation

The producer of representation creates his/her own unique meanings.

Text analysis (textual analysis):

The study of "texts." Texts refer to any human-produced object that carries meaning - books, films, TV shows, Internet webpages.

Political economy

The study of economic institutions' interrelationship with political institutions (and other important social institutions).

Audience reception

The study of media users' interpretations of media.

Semiotics

The study of signs - signs refer to the arbitrary meanings we give to objects, persons, and concepts in our culture, e.g., the heart as a sign for love, the beautiful, thin white woman as a sign of a damsel in distress worthy of rescue, tree as a sign for nature, red as a sign for passion, etc

Code

The system of representation in a culture that gives meaning to the arbitrary words we use to represent referents or abstract concepts and which gives meaning to the relationships between those arbitrary words. Codes connect our two systems of representation: mental concepts & language.

Digital Divide

The unequal access to the Internet and digital technologies. The notion of the divide asserts that the haves will be able to have even greater advantages because of the access to the information available on the Internet and because they will be able to gain the skills necessary for a technological workforce.

Mass Audience

The view of audiences as a singular large group, consisting of a wide range of people, who passively view media, who are easily influenced, and who are largely ignorant of media meanings.

Feminism, third wave

Third-wave feminism incorporated postmodern notions that there are multiple subjectivities to argue that not all women's concerns are the same. It rebelled against what was perceived as second-wave feminism's racial-centricism and class-centricism, noting that for some women, their lives are not ones in gilded cages or placed on a pedestal as a "princess." Third-wave feminism emphasized the point that women occupy multiple identities and the ways that those multiple identities intersect shape the oppressions they experience. Third-wave feminism gained moral and intellectual weight behind African American feminist scholars like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins. Recently, third-wave feminism has been co-opted by some women and corporations to what is sometimes derided as "lipstick feminism" in which advocates argue that women are empowered to act in whatever ways they choose, including wearing make-up, enjoying women's fashion, and conforming to traditional gender roles if they want (in spite of the earlier critiques of second-wave feminists).

Heteronormativity

This concept refers to the practices, institutions, and discourses that privilege heterosexual relationships, sex, and viewpoints as normal and socially preferable

Subject position/subjectivity

This does not simply mean bias. It refers to our way of knowing the world that is formed through our individual and social identities. Subjectivity values diversity because multiple ways of knowing the world should lead to greater knowledge and range of perspective.

Global North

This does not simply refer to nations north of the Equator but rather more abstractly to nations, mostly from Northern Europe and North America, which have conquered and colonized other nations militarily, which have exploited them economically, and which have maintained global political dominance. This term is used in contrast to the Global South, which geographically generally refers to Latin America, Africa, and South & Southeast Asia, which all suffered from colonial exploitation.

Asian/American

This is Laura Kang's term to refer to Asians and Asian Americans. The slashed-term is meant to indicate that in popular culture, there are rarely differences made between Asians (abroad) and Asian Americans. The two are conflated despite Asians and Asian Americans' vastly different life experiences and cultural knowledge

Symbolic annihilation

This is a term first coined by Gaye Tuchman to refer to the near invisibility of a group of people in media. The choice to exclude means intentionally leaving out (annihilating) representations (symbols).

European American

This is a verbal construction of White to avoid the use of color terms for race and to point to our common identity as American and our common heritage as being outside this continent.

Mass Society

This is a view of a homogenized society who has lost real individuality but believe in an illusion of individualism

Ideological domination

This is the assertion of a set of ideological beliefs that become accepted as normal or commonsensical, which advantages and disadvantages different social groups

Media/cultural studies

This is the notion that media is such an interwoven part of everyday culture that it cannot be separated in the study of culture.

Privilege (verb)

This means to make advantageous/beneficial. Privileging wealthy characters on TV means to make wealthy characters' lives and values seem normal or preferable.

Simulacrum

This refers to a copy (simulation) of reality that becomes in the minds of many more real than the real thing (the original).

Subject (noun)

This refers to a person as a unique, empowered individual. The opposite is an object, which is where the term objectified comes from, meaning a person who is transformed for the pleasure/interests of someone else.

Whiteness

This refers to a set of ideological beliefs that advantage White persons. Whiteness acts as an advantage because of its paradoxical ability to be anything and its ability to be nothing at all.

Mass Culture

This refers to a view of culture as standardized and mass produced for mass consumption.

Culture industry

This refers to a view of mass media as industrial producers of culture. The implications are that culture is now standardized & devoid of art and/or dissenting views that support modern capitalism.

Popular memory

This refers to commercial media's work in shaping collective memory about past historical events. It recognizes that much of what we believe, whether intellectually or simply emotionally, comes from what we see in popular constructions - news and entertainment.

Cinematic amnesia

This refers to film's ability to erase or change history for contemporary ideological purposes. It reimagines the past to more favorably project to the future.

Global capitalist system

This refers to globally interconnected markets. There is also the implied meaning that the global system is controlled by a handful of powerful corporations and governmental bodies like the World Trade Organization.

Contestation

This refers to the argument that ideologies do not just get programmed into us but that we as members of a culture fight over which values and beliefs we want to take hold. This is to also make the point that cultures are never static but are always about a give and take as different cultural forces fight over meanings.

Technological determinism

This refers to the belief that changes in technology will result in specific changes. This is largely contested in communication studies, asserting that it is not the technology that results in any change but rather the ways the technology is made sense of within a particular sociocultural context.

Otherness

This refers to the cultural designation of marginalized social groups as different. This difference is not a celebrated one but rather one that makes a group more trivial, feared, and/or strange.

Mask of multiculturalism

This refers to the employment of multiracial casting to hide racially problematic representations. By having the veneer of multiracial representational tolerance and equality, it mutes critiques that the representations and messages of the film are problematic.

Border Zone

This refers to the experience of living on the peripheries of culture, which creates for the person a sense of liminality. It also is a space for the most cultural hybridity and change.

Normativity

This refers to the favoring of particular beliefs and values to appear "normal," preferable, or commonsensical.

Intertextuality (n)/intertextual (adj):

This refers to the idea that when we view a text, we interpret it not in a vacuum as it is but in relationship to other texts that are related to it. For example, actors often complain that they are viewed as their most memorable role rather than the characters they try to play.

Polysemy

This refers to the multiple meanings possible in a text. No media text has a singular meaning that can be interpreted but rather has opportunities for different readings that are made based on the intersection of your individual and social identities.

Indigenization

This refers to the transformation of dominant transnational culture, usually from the West/US, into meanings that make sense to the local population, essentially dismantling its original ideological intentions into ones that fit (and do not change) the local culture. It can also be understood as an appropriation of the dominant global culture into the local one.

Conceptual map

This refers to the way we understand the world around us - objects, people, emotions, symbols, etc. - and the relationships we see between them.

Media culture

This refers to the ways in which media have shaped many (if not all) aspects of everyday cultural life by providing the stories, values, morals, myths, etc. that shape how we interact with the world and define ourselves.

Privilege (noun)

This refers to unearned advantages. For example, being born into a wealthy family, being White, being straight, being male, etc.

Dr. Oh Reading

1. Whiteness is defined as centered between the binary opposite poles of Blackness and Yellowness in much of contemporary popular culture. 2. Positioning Whiteness between the poles of Blackness and Yellowness delimit the range of what Whiteness is but still provide it more space than either Blackness or Yellowness. 3. The inclusion of Blackness and Yellowness together provides opportunities to challenge Whiteness and current understandings of racial hierarchy.

Saul Reading

1. YouTube provides a space for adolescents to self-author their experiences in ways that allow for wider cultural reach than has previously been possible.

Schema

This term can be understood similarly to mental representations as used in the Hall reading on the work of representation. These mental concepts are thought to be connected in networks to other related mental concepts.

Anglophone

This term refers simply to English speakers

Subaltern

This term refers to non-dominant (or marginalized) groups. This would include LGBT members, the poor, the politically radical, people of color, religious minorities, etc.

Communication

Though popularly understood as simply transmitting messages, this term refers to the negotiation of shared meaning

Queer

Though used for many decades as a derogatory slur, the term has been appropriated by the LGBTIQQ community as a way to label non-normative sexual identities, essentially non-heterosexual identities.

Sign

Words, sounds, and images that carry meaning.

Niche marketing

appealing to a small subsection of the overall market, e.g., Men's Health

Narrowcasting

broadcasting to a small subsection of the overall market in efforts to gain a desirable market segment for advertisers. Narrowcasting is most obvious in the cable industry where we have specialized channels like History, ESPN, or HGTV

Labor theory of value

exchange value is created by "...the labor that goes into it"

Production of social meaning

function of communicating to an audience through the creation of texts

Surplus Value

left over value after subtracting the labor and material costs from the exchange value. In cases where money is left over, this would be called profit. The difference between these seeming synonyms is that profit only assumes that money is left over.

House Organs

media that are subsidized by large institutions to provide their content for free.

Liminality

paradoxical experience of being a part of and apart from society

Commodities

products that are "...made primarily to be sold in the market"

Internalization

"By buying and partnering other companies abroad, corporations can sell massive amounts of extra copies of a product they have already paid to produce"

New ethnicities

"Hybrid identities" created by second, third, and other multiple-generation persons of color in which they formulate their identities in a space that is different from their parents' or ancestral ethnic identities and different from the cultural identity of the home culture. It is a space that is shaped by but different from either, forming a new space and new identity. This emphasizes that the identity is not just percentages of the ethnic and the home cultural identities but rather a new identity.

Strategy

"Practices employed by those who occupy the sociocultural center and are used by them to maintain their position of sanctioned power and taken-for-granted privilege"

Tactics

"Practices used by those on the cultural/political/social margins whose lack of power and privilege allows them only temporary and limited incursions into those spheres under dominant control"

Post-feminism

"Presumption that the legitimate goals of feminism have been achieved..." such that "...continuing problems faced by women are attributed to poor choices on the part of individual women.... The dismissal of further feminist demands is based on an assumption that the legitimate rights and privileges that women deserve are protected by the established order"

Ritual of rebellion

"Temporary license to violate selected sociocultural rules". Rituals of rebellion protect social stability through the carefully delimited and controlled forms of permissible resistance.

Symbolic creativity

"The manipulation of symbols for the purposes of entertainment, information and perhaps even enlightenment"

Multimedia integration

"They buy into other related areas of cultural industry production to ensure cross-promotion"

Counter-memory

"Ways of remembering and forgetting based on local, immediate and personal experiences. These forms of remembrance feature the perspectives of groups typically excluded from traditional histories, thus providing new lenses for understanding how marginalized groups have experienced social relations in their lives"

Money

"abstract measure against which we measure the exchange value of different commodities"

Culture

"culture as 'the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored'"

Exchange Value

value of a thing in the marketplace; this is synonymous with price.

Marginality

A state of being placed on the outside of "normal" cultural beliefs, practices, and identities

Race

A system of human classification developed during colonialism and justified by the pseudo-science of eugenics. Race collapsed the cultural differences of the many ethnic groups in the world in order to rationalize the colonial project and has become one of the major ways in which we identify difference.

Language

A system of representation that produces a shared vocabulary and grammar for interpreting and constructing meaning. It is our way of understanding one another and necessary for the foundation of societies.

Bourgeois

A term by French philosophers that refers to economic and social elites.

Synergy

A term used to provide an economic rationale for widespread consolidation, it refers primarily to the ability to cross-promote across a media company's various platforms.

Parker & Song Reading

1. Web forums became material to form new ethnicities and what it means to be both ethnically and racially different. 2. Web forums mobilized support against racialized representations and symbolic annihilation.

Blackness

A set of ideological beliefs and practices that attempt to define authenticity for African Americans. Attempts to define Blackness are commonplace in popular culture and even among African Americans themselves.

Pickard Reading

1. Policy has important cultural consequences, and telecommunications policy shapes the structure and subsequently the content of our media texts. 2. "Our current era is witnessing the further consolidation of a unified communications system along neoliberal lines" 3. Global communication policy advances the goals of powerful nation-states and transnational corporations over societies and rights to control data and media flowing across borders. 4. Neoliberal logics have powerfully transformed the parameters of debate to be about technical issues and financing rather than national sovereignty and questions of direct social importance.

McRobbie Reading

1. Post-feminism undermines feminist gains while appearing to be a well-informed response to feminism (argues that feminism is no longer necessary). 2. Post-feminism has a double entanglement: advancement of neo-conservative values about gender while also promoting liberalized views of sexuality and domestic choice. 3. Media represent the "...new female subject" as someone who does not voice criticism in order to count as modern and sophisticated and instead emphasizes sexual meanings based on a woman's choices, participation, and pleasure. Being a feminist gets represented as outdated and old-fashioned. 4. Women are taught to individualize such that they create their own meanings without much concern for larger social structures (she points to the use of life planners, etc.). 5. Post-feminist texts "regulate" women into hegemony by using the language of personal choice to earn consent.

Kellner Reading

1. Studying media requires understanding the ways and reasons media are produced, what messages are sent & the cultural/social context within which it's sent, and the ways we make sense of media. 2. Critical media studies is centered on empowering disadvantaged social groups.

Hebidge Reading

1. Subcultures form in response to wider social contexts. They are no more authentic or inauthentic than other cultural group formations. 2."Rather the different styles and the ideologies which structure and determine them represent negotiated responses to a contradictory mythology of class" 3.The punk and teddy boy subcultures are visual embodiments of their response to their class crisis - increased joblessness, less hope, etc.

Adorno & Horkeheimer Reading

1. The products of media are standardized to be uniform in intention, message, and content. 2. Owners of media only produce texts that fit with their beliefs about consumers and industry. 3. Distinctions in the products of the culture industry are not meaningful differences but are to capture the entire market through segmentation of product by demographic type. 4. Media blur reality such that our understanding of the world dissolves into a blend of mediated and experienced reality. 5. Adorno & Horkheimer make a powerful distinction between "art" and "stylized barbarity." Art refers not to that which is aesthetically beautiful or skillful but rather that which is truthful. 6. Pseudo-individuality is created through the culture industries where we start to resemble each other more and more in belief, style, and desire, but where we believe that we have greater individuality today.

Lull (push & pull) reading

1. There is a push and pull of culture in which we are "pushed" by the implicit components of our lives that shape who we are (e.g., language, foods, cultural codes), and but we also "pull" as active cultural agents that make our own meanings and that personalize cultural experience. 2. The push of culture "...organizes life and offers certain stabilizing influences and other benefits..." but "...it also limits freedom, opportunities, and well-being" (p. 48). 3. Opportunities to sculpt and use cultural resources in personal ways are increasing, particularly in the West. 4. Increasing media options (including from abroad) can undermine a civil society. 5. Individuation is a way to be liberated from structural binds and the repression of Culture, but it also comes with risks in breaking down civil attachments. Either way, it is encouraged by Western modernity both in the West and as its influence moves abroad. 6. People don't function outside of Culture, but they are not fully determined by Culture, either. 7. Globalization increases individuation because it expands the possibility of choices beyond what is locally available to what is globally accessible.

Peters Reading

1. Thesis: "...the quest for 'valuable' demographics privileges viewers with access to race, class, and male privilege, and leads to whitewashed images of middle-class, primarily gender normative, gays and lesbians" 2. The more media conglomerates consolidate and control privatized, neoliberal markets, the more influence they have in shaping our identities. 3. Gay visibility is limited on-screen to what is constructed as texts that will draw desirable audiences, relying on privileged gay subjectivities - White, affluent, gay men - who act primarily as sidekicks or comic attraction for straight characters. 4. Gaining some representational equity means groups have to "...buy their way into the power structure" by demonstrating that they will be potentially active consumers for the goods advertised. Representational equality in capitalist media systems are not predicated on the social good but the economically advantageous.

Grossberg Reading

1. U.S. mass media are industries that are driven by its profit motivation and the logics that determine how revenue is generated. 2. The commercial orientation of media have limited the range and quality of media texts possible. 3. Advertiser desire for particular market segments leads to the underrepresentation of some demographic groups, e.g., non-White, elderly, poor, etc. 4. One important difference with media and other industries is that media have a more complicated avenue to generate profits because they do not only rely on selling a product to a viewer but often selling the viewer to advertisers. 5. "That is precisely what the media are: a distribution system for culture, for communication, and for information"

Hatfield Reading

1. We are socialized into gender roles through performance - the ways we act our gender in our everyday lives

Articulation

: the ways in which we situate ourselves into ideology through discourse. In the same sense, by saying media articulate us, it is to say that media texts are situating us into particular ideological belief systems. For example, if you like the Disney princess movies, especially pre-Beauty and the Beast, the shows would be situating girls into the role of beautiful, thin, White damsel in distress, who is unable to save herself from evil (often feminine - Cruela de Vil, Ursula, the evil witch in Snow White) forces around her, and it would be situating boys into the role of masculine, gentlemen heroes, saving the princess because of the obligations of "true love" usually premised on his initial physical attraction (love at first sight romanticism).

New Man

A feminized masculinity constructed as someone being sensitive, sharing, domesticated, weak, highly refined, and so on. He is represented by characters such as Frasier Crane on Cheers and Frasier.

Ethnography

A form of analysis pioneered in anthropology in which a researcher lives with and among a cultural group to understand the values, beliefs, traditions, rituals, practices, etc. of a culture. It is marked by its deep understanding and immersion.

Hegemonic masculinity

A form of masculinity that is modeled after traditional notions of "Western masculinity." It advocates for being self-made, fiercely independent, a provider and protector of the family (the weak), channeled savage strength and instincts, sexual dominance, honorable, a source of strength, and straightforward and honest. It constructs femininity as its opposite and derides and often punishes feminized masculinities for being wimps and sissies - hence, the violence against gay men and the bullying of the art kids, band nerds, and other school wimps.

Artifact

A good or item created by people

Ethnic Group

A group of people who are connected by a shared set of cultural symbols and cultural markers. The major distinction between an ethnic group and a racial group is that ethnic groups define for themselves how their traditions, values, and other aspects of culture are constituted. It is a subjectified identity, whereas race is an imposed (objectified) identity. Race also does not have clearly shared cultural markers that would unite the entire racial group.

Modernity

A historical period in the industrialized West in which science, objectivity (the lack of subjectivity), and rational thinking was considered the ideal of human thinking and society. As a philosophical movement, it devalued tradition, subjectivity, and religion

Postmodernism

A philosophical counter to modernism that values subjectivity (see below), that asserts that truth is multiple and perspectival and not singular and objectively knowable, and that values tradition and emotional experience in addition to rationality, e.g., think Captain Kirk as preferable to Spock or Captain Picard as preferable to Data for Star Trek fans in my class.

Multiculturalism

A progressive anti-racist challenge that unites against racial domination. In a postmodern sense, it promotes the idea that there should be multiple truths, worldviews, and realities. In popular culture, it has come to mean simply respecting others' differences and valuing the place of different cultures in a cosmopolitan society. It is not precise to use multicultural as a more palatable synonym for multiracial.

Yellowness

A set of ideological beliefs and practices that attempt to define authenticity for Asian Americans.

Profit

Amount "...left over after one subtracts the cost of producing the product from the price one sells it for"

Neoliberal

An economic/philosophical point of view that advocates for the opening of international markets, the easy movement of capital, goods, and labor (labor & capital flexibility), and the privatization of public activities, e.g., plans to privatize Social Security.

Structuration theory

Belief that "...society's structural influences and the individualizing power of human agency should not be thought of only as opposing forces..." but as mutually constituted.

Vertical Integration

Controlling the production, distribution, and exhibition of goods. In the example of the film industry, studios primarily produce the films, and they also are the main distributors of films. Because they control distribution, it is very difficult for non-studio affiliated independent movies and foreign films to make it to the movie theater. The movie theater itself is the primary site of exhibition. In the TV industry, historically, independent producers like Bad Robot or Dick Wolf Productions created programs that were leased to the networks (such as NBC), who distributed it to the local TV affiliate. The local affiliate distributed it to our homes, and the content is exhibited on our TVs.

Ideology

Core beliefs that are often hidden under layers of beliefs that are networked and linked together.

Symbol Creators

Creative talent or artists, e.g., writers, directors, showrunners, actors

Habitus

Cultural power is internalized in the ways we act, feel, and think on an everyday and mundane basis. All our little actions - choice of clothes, hair style, greetings, vocal tone, etc. - continually reinforce our identities. Consider how hard it is to act like the other gender in a way that would fool others and that seems authentic. Habitus can be thought of as the "habits" of mind and action that shape who we are, acknowledging that these habits are formed through culture and that culture is shaped through differences in social power.

Economy of Scale

Decreasing costs for each additional product produced. Media, more than other companies, benefit greatly from economies of scale.

Reflexive racialization

Development of an oppositional social perspective through the shared experiences of racism and cultural marginalization

Strategic rhetoric of heteronormativity

Discourses that naturalize heterosexuality throughout culture.

Heterosexism

Discrimination against individuals with non-heterosexual sexual identities. This refers to acts of bullying at an interpersonal level, defense of marriage laws at the institutional level, etc.

Hegemony

Domination through consent. This refers primarily to the ways in which ideologies are internalized by everyone even if they primarily favor only one or a few social identity groups because they are seen as commonsense, e.g., the belief that it's better to be attractive.

Culture as contested terrain

If culture refers to the beliefs and values of a group of people, then culture as a contested terrain means that the worldview we share is one that is fought over. Terrain here refers to a metaphor in which we walk through and live in a cultural environment. Just as roads or natural obstacles shape (but do not force) which routes you take, culture shapes which meanings you make.

Conspicuous consumption

Immodest purchasing for the purposes of demonstrating one's wealth or identity

Neo-imperialism

Imperialism refers to a system of global military control for the purposes of expanding influence or territory. Neo-imperialism refers to de facto control and influence gained by having nations join international organizations like the IMF, WTO, etc. for the purposes of gaining access to more markets and increasing the money and power of large transnational corporations.

Signifier

In semiotics, it refers to the meaning given to the referent.

Arbitrariness

In the case of signs, this refers to there being no natural relationship between the sign and the referent. As Hall points out, the notion that green means go is an arbitrary relationship. Years ago, if others had chosen orange as go and purple as stop, this would seem just as natural to us now as the green/red meanings of go and stop.

Genre

Industrial categories for cultural products that are useful in marketing texts by offering a promise of the types of pleasure that can be derived from its use

Horizontal Integration

Owning media companies across various platforms rather than in different parts of the supply chain. For example, movie theaters and studios are related vertically because it's all within the same industry category of movies. Owning magazines, newspapers, TV production studios, radio stations, etc. constitutes horizontal integration. In addition to the benefits of differentiation in reducing risk, the additional benefit in the media industries is cross-promotion, often dubbed synergy. For example, Time Warner has the rights to the non-British distribution of Harry Potter, it also created a theme park, produced movies, influenced Time and Entertainment Weekly, its magazine holdings, to have favorable stories, aired trailers on its TV network, the WB and CW, and joined in partnership with Electronic Arts to create a video game. The goal was to maximize interest in a successful holding - Harry Potter - and to promote it across its different media platforms.

Representation

Process of producing meaning through language (also means visual language such as symbols, framing a shot, etc.) rather than a mere reflection of reality, which acts as a system of meaning exchange within a culture.

Cooptation

Refers to the taking of a resistive belief, text, or idea and transforming it into a watered-down version for popular consumption, removing its resistive potential.

Reflective approach to representation

Representation mirrors truth/reality (it is mimetic - imitative of).

Identity tourism

White masquerading as minorities online