Comm Arts 250 #2
uses and gratifications
assumes that people are goal oriented in seeking media, people are actively seeking media to meet needs
gaming literacy
consider print literacy, decoding, analyzing, creating (writing), learning about games, functional games, critical literacies
cinematography
director of photography, use of color ex = Shindler's List, Moonrise Kingdom, Oz the Great and Powerful
modularity
discrete objects that can all be combined to make up something, ex: PowerPoint
reactive media activism
educate consumers, contact creators, legal action, influence public opinion
media and citizenship: politics
electoral political = government, legislation cultural politics = ideologies, world views, cultural practices, identity politics ex: House of Cards, Scandal
language as constructive
language is powerful and doing a lot, it makes some things available for us and others not
second level representation
language, translate thoughts/ideas into words
why is US media so dominant?
large local audience, competitive pricing, block booking, ability to absorb competition, support from the State Department
decoding signs
not natural, they're learned, arbitrary, multiple in meaning, meaning dependent on context
to-be-looked-at-ness
women performing for the viewer
negotiated reading
some accepted, some rejected
numerical representation
composed of digital codes (binary), distinguishes from analog
genre and expectations
composition, setting, horror genre vs. soap opera
Hall - THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION
1. Representation, meaning, and language 2. reflective, intentional, constructionist theories of representation 3. representation = production of meaning through language 4. mental representations and language (for constructing meaning) 5. signs 6. meaning in different cultures 7. traffic lights 8. Sassure - signified and signifier 9. semiotics
McLintock - THE SOFT-SOAPING EMPIRE
1. Victorian advertising and reinvention of racial difference 2. the Pear's campaign 3. fetishes in soap ads 4. the monkey, the mirror 5. domesticating empire
Lara Mulvey - three looks
1. camera records the event 2. audience watches the movie 3. characters look at each other -all together = the male gaze
Turner - THE ECONOMY OF CELEBRITY
1. celebrities are developed to make money 2. promotion and marketing of stars 3. celebrity industries
Dahlgren - MEDIATION DEMOCRACY
1. democracy 2. civil society 3. the public sphere as historical narrative 4. Habermas 5. media institutions, media representation, social structure, sociocultural interaction 6. subjectivity, identity, interaction
mise-en-scene
1. describes the way things are visually staged/placed on stage, way of thinking about different elements deliberately put there 2. setting, composition/framing/staging, cinematography, costume/makeup/hair, lighting
Busse & Gray - FAN CULTURES AND FAN COMMUNITIES
1. fans as reinterpreting and responding to media text 2. members of fandom 3. industry's discovery of fans 4. ideal research subjects 5. convergence and new media culture 6. fan communities
Bordwell & Thompson - FILM FORM
1. film art 2. form vs. content 3. expectations, guide to = prior experience 4. form and feeling, emotional response of viewer 5. form and meaning - explicit, implicit 6. personal taste vs. evaluative judgement 7. film formula 8. similarity and repetition, difference and variation 9. development
Manovich - THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY (MEDIA) LIFE
1. from mass consumption to mass cultural production 2. web 2.0 3. user-generated content 4. strategies and tactics 5. conversations through media
Thussu - MEDIA ON THE MOVE
1. global flow and contra-flow 2. increased Western cultural influences 3. dominant flows of americana 4. US domination global entertainment market 5. contra flows - anti hegemonic or pro americana
Appiah - COSMOPOLITAN CONTAMINATION
1. global villages 2. globalization 3. homogeneity 4. cultural imperialism
Jenkins & Green - SPREADABLE MEDIA
1. how audiences create value and meaning in a networked economy 2. web 2.0 3. digital revolution 4. spreadability 5. Susan Boyle 6. going viral 7. understanding appeal 8. ecology of media consumption 9. produser
THE NAMESAKE
1. identity 2. intersectionality
Fiske - IDEOLOGY AND MEANINGS
1. ideology 2. signs, ideology, meanings 3. signification 4. hegemony 5. resistances 6. semiotic analysis
Hall - POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION
1. immediate success as a concept 2. questions about the shape and tendency of contemporary culture 3. articulation - double meaning 4. ideology and social forces
Andrejevic - THE WORK OF BEING WATCHED
1. interactive media the exploitation of self-disclosure 2. DotComGuy 3. productive surveillance 4. rationalizing the work of watching 5. interactive surveillance in the digital age 6. digital enclosure 7. the example of TiVo
Squire - VIDEO GAME LITERACY
1. interactivity 2. ludology 3. games as performance 4. gaming literate 5. game communities 6. games as spaces for learning 7. social spaces 8. games in schools
Thompson & Bordwell - GRAVITY: THINKING INSIDE THE BOX
1. long takes, continuous shots 2. bouncing axis 3. the LED light box 4. complete digital environment 5. staging without a stage 6. no sound in space, contrasts, diegetic vs. non
Shilt - AM/FM ACTIVISM: TAKING NATIONAL MEDIA TOOLS TO A LOCAL LEVEL
1. media advocacy groups 2. GLAAD 3. types of defamation 4. the Dr Laura campaign 5. AM/FM activism - going back to the community
Jones - A CULTURAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF MEDIATED CITIZENSHIP
1. media's role in contemporary meanings of citizenship 2. communication 3. information acquisition 4. media are plural 5. mediums affect meanings 6. political engagement
Morley & Robbins - UNDER WESTERN EYES
1. media, empire, and otherness 2. otherness 3. western screen, western psyche
evolutionary stages of minorities in the media
1. non-recognition 2. ridicule 3. regulation 4. respect
Gray - FROM SPOILERS TO SPINOFFS
1. paratexts = texts that prepare us for other texts 2. what is a text? 3. synergy 4. intertexts 5. overflow, convergence
Ang - ON THE POLITICS OF EMPIRICAL AUDIENCE RESEARCH
1. politics of research 2. disappearing audience 3. academic convergence? 4. cultural studies 5. beyond methodology 6. interpretive ethnographic
CABIN IN THE WOODS
1. privacy 2. surveillance
Shohat & Stam - STEREOTYPING REALISM
1. realism 2. the burden of representation 3. racial politics of casting (whitewashing)
Bolter & Grusin - THE DOUBLE LOGIC OF REMEDIATION
1. remediation 2. visual technologies 3. double logic of remediation
Berger - WAYS OF SEEING
1. seeing comes before words 2. introduction of the camera 3. object and its value 4. authenticity, original works of art 5. reproduced image vs. original
Dyer - HEAVENLY BODIES
1. star phenomenon 2. stars made for profit 3. private vs. public self 4. the notion of the individual
cycle of oppression
1. stereotypes 2. prejudice 3. discrimination 4. oppression 5. internalized oppression
Grindstaff - TRASH, CLASS, AND CULTURAL HIERARCHY
1. talk shows makes stars and experts out of ordinary people 2. talk show manipulation 3. ethics and exploitation 4. desire for TV exposure 5. issue of realness and authenticity 6. trash, class, and distinction - white trash
semiotic examples
1. the American revolution car ad 2. PETA ad 3. Dove ad
Grossberg - IS THERE A FAN IN THE HOUSE?
1. the affective sensibility 2. popularity = matter of taste 3. characterizing certain types of people who become fans 4. affective investment
imagined community
Benedict Anderson, we don't know everyone who belongs to our community, but still feel a sense of connection to one another, ex: Olypmics
orientalism
East vs. West, the orient vs. the occident, othering, limited perspective of the outside, construction, fantasy
strategic essentialism
Gayatri Spivak, no one set of experiences that join a set of identities together, temporary solidarity that serves as a means to an end, don't feel necessarily even though you share identity
encoding/decoding
Hall, encoding = creating intended meaning, decoding = interpreting meaning from text, three possible readings = dominant, oppositional, negotiated
cultural odour
Iwabuchi, there horizontal and vertical flows are often affected by you have to assume the cultural trappings of the big media players, US pretty obvious about media presence
fans as poachers
Michel De Certeau, appropriating elements from cultural products for their own uses, take on authorial role, shift in traditional power relationship
burden of representation
Shohat and Stam, it matters more how minority groups are the represented because of these histories of underrepresentation, minority groups are the ones in danger of suffering from stereotypes, not the dominant ones ex: Walter White, Don Draper
counter-hegemony
against the dominant ideology, absorbing of counter-hegemonies, how the world has responded to shifting world view
stereotypes
all or nothing logic, repeated over and over (=normalization), they are believed, made by in-groups about out-groups, unequal impact, even "positive" stereotypes can still be harmful
polysemy
all texts are this because they have multiple meanings, never fixed and final
hypermediacy
always brought back into contact with the interface, very aware you are using a mediated object, ex: computer "desktop"
digital enclosures
an interactive realm where every action and transaction generates information, ex = browser keeping track of your activity
the point-of-view shot
any shot that presents the info from the pov in space where the characters eyes would be, objective/subjective
measuring audiences
audiences have always produced data, now measure with digital enclosures
web 2.0
audiences productive, play powerful role in creating and circulating content, engage with content in new ways, everyday people are coming together to produce and manipulate content
automation
automation that can be subject to manipulation, ex: artificial intelligence
paratexts
beside, or adjacent to the text, additional textual elements that frame a text, ex: book jacket, author name, reviews
inequality in casting
black/yellow/red/brown face
remediation
borrowing/repurposing from one medium and redoing it in another medium, represented in a new medium, ex: book into digital pdf
mobile camera and weightlessness
both actors and camera moving slowly/freely in space
white trash television
combines race and class in a particular formation, shows the way intersecting identities can shift value and meaning
aspects of form
components (organized into structures), structures (all to make effect for viewer), medium (materials, techniques, rules, possibilities), medium professionals
lighting
contrast, light/dark, shadows ex = Jessica Jones
genre
conventions and code that make the text very easy and recognizable, shape how we understand usage of some visual elements ex = film noir, horror, soap opera, musicals
mashup/remix culture
creating something new by taking styles/works and putting them into new contexts, ex: Hotline Bling
defining web 2.0
design (participatory, open, inviting), business model (users improve and validate the site, users produce content companies can sell ads), user (produser, user-generated content), ideology (framed as empowering, too optimistic?)
role of gossip
desire to always know about celebrity lives, myths of culture, humanize celebrity lives
celebrity as commodity
developed in order to make money, commercial/market value, ex: celebrity endorsement
denotation
dictionary, literal meaning
cultivation theory
difference in worldview of people in amounts of TV they watch, viewing television = constructs reality, dominant view viewed as more true, not always accurate ex: more likely to have sexist views
proactive media activism
employment, education, individual responses
normalizing surveillance
ex: reality TV shows, no escape from being watched, normal features, benefits of being watched
the arbitrariness of the sign
ex: traffic lights, each color has meaning because we create the meaning, language and social conventions are connections
celebrity
famous, well-known, well-recognized, accomplished/achieved something
fans and productivity
fan fiction/art/vids, cosplay, conventions, fanzines, who owns the text?
cultural citizenship
feeling of belonging, feeling like your identity is accepted, ex: My Asian Americana
formal analysis
focusses on formal aspects of the work, those aspects that are directly observable, and analysis of form
participatory culture
formation of audience communities that collaborate with people who share similar goals and interests to create their own media, disseminate news and ideas, blurring the line between producer and consumer; i.e. = education, social support, skill development, mobilization 1. Low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement 2. Support for creating and sharing one's creations 3. Informal mentorship 4. Members believe that their contributions matter 5. Members feel some degree of social connection with one another
resistant audiences
free labor - appeal to audiences - more ideas, culture jamming, adbusters, brandalism
how is web 2.0 used?
hanging out (social media for interaction and friendship, communication, friendship-driven), messing around (experimenting with friends), geeking out (trying to pick up more advanced skills, mashup video, podcast, collaborating, interest driven)
hetereonormativity
hetereosexuality is the assumed normal, coming out assumption
repressive state apparatuses
how hegemony is upheld through coercion, ex: government, police, military, prison
ideological state apparatuses
how hegemony is upheld through ideology over force, consent, ex: schools, churches, family, media, community orgs
ascribed identity
how others see you
costume/makeup and hair
how people are styled, clothes and makeup reflect who they are as a character ex = Walking Dead, Batman
avowed identity
how you see yourself
quantitative traditions
hypodermic needle theory, media effects, experimental settings, uses and gratifications,
mediation
immediacy, hypermediacy, remediation
dominant reading
in line with preferred reading
surveillance society
in this modern world with many cameras, cell phones cameras we don't know if we are being watched, feeling of consequences or somebody watching us
who creates celebrities?
industries, audiences, celebrities
the call for positive images
instead of seeing minorities as criminals, villians, horrible people, problems = reversal doesn't create equality
allusions
intertextuality, make references to other texts either implied or not, ex: Community
parody
intertextuality, work that imitates another work for humorous effect, ex: SNL Taco Town
articulate
joining part together to make a unity, where our identity comes, ex: christian + conservative
dismemberment
just one part of the body is focused on, dehumanizing
citizenship
legal citizenship (legal term, basic rights, government granted), what is a good citizen?
hypodermic needle theory
linear communication theory, passive audience, no individual difference, media messages are injected directly into audience's brain, ex: War of the Worlds broadcast
hypertext
linking, takes you to other pieces of texts, shifts to a whole new text behaving differently than analog
semiotic warfare
meanings are always changing, ex: British 80s punk
media effects
measure the effect that media can have on us without our realization, believe there is still an influence, not just one correlation between given and received messages, ex: violence and video games
social interaction
media needs to be taken up by people, media filtered by public sphere, opinion leaders
stickiness
media that grabs your attentions and holds it, ex: Serial
vertical media flow
media travels from powerful players to less powerful, US does more exporting than importing
immediacy
mediation, the erasure of the difference between the signifier and the signified, wipes away idea that its just an image, ex: photographs
visual power dynamics (binary power dynamics)
men vs. women, men act women appear, to be looked at ness, dismemberment, voyeurism, ex: us/them, white/black, self/other... too rigid, more categories than in binaries
first level representation
mental representations in head, how we imagine complex, abstract ideas
representation
mimesis, idea that one thing stands in for a lot of things, consequences of representing difference
understanding fandom
modern communities that can provide joy and pleasure for community members, active participants in constructing and circulating media, meaning and uses, fans as poachers, productivity, participatory culture, politics of fandom
long take
more real, more intimate, more immediate shot, more you are with the character, feeling what they're feeling in real time
Lev Manovich's Principles of New Media
numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, transcoding
soap advertisements
on its own, soap's function is to clean, in ads there are added meanings (race, colonialism)
variability
once something has been made digital it can be presented in a variety of ways, not fixed, adjustable, different versions, input from users or from automation are changing it
new media
online, digital, social media, immediate, instant gratification, more access, more recently invented, pushing boundaries of technology, general populace has more input, hard to define (time, new developments all the time, wide range)
4 main practices of media referenced play
onomastic allusion, closely imitative, hybrid/recontextualized (mashups), ambiguously referenced
agency
our freedom or ability to act on your own power, identity (biracial children)
culture jamming
our world is overcome by consumer culture and we should disrupt these practices, talking back to powerful corporations, ex: adbusters, brandalism
hype
paratext, intense promotion, utilizes synergy, agenda setting theory (media tells us what's important to think about), ex: Blair Witch Project
trailers
paratext, shape our judgement about a movie before we've even seen it
fans and social hierarchies
pathologizing fans reinforces social hierarchies, low vs. high culture, cultural capital
the active audience
people are actively making sense of the media in a bottom-up way, against hypo need and mass effect theories, in line with uses and gratifications, turn to people's experiences
contra/counterflows
people getting media from less powerful media, ex: anime
fears about media/media panics
people have always been worried about new media when it is first introduced, always respond to and accomodate new media forms
the public sphere - Jurgen Habermas
people to have important conversations about society, improve society by people working together, private sphere (domestic, homes) vs. government
re-articulation
possible to break those connections and replace them with something new?, articulation as context
the effects of "Gravity" (story and style)
precision, symmetrical structure, powerful story, powerful simplicity, physical/immersive experience, transcendence
panopticon
prison structure where prisoners can be seen at all times, but don't know if they are looking, relentless gaze, assuming and imagining gaze, behave differently if someone is watching?
convergence
process where different media forms and platforms are blending together, idea that we are getting media from many different sources, but also about the movement of consumers
intersectionality
recognizing multiple impacts of different axes of identity (race/gender/class/sexuality/etc...); looking at the intersections between different disenfranchised groups, Kimberle Crenshaw ex: whiteness and feminism ex: 2 Live Crew Incident
media institutions
regulations, industries, regulations help maintain public sphere by balance between commercial and public, media ownership
paradigm
replaceable words of the same group in a sentence, nouns/verbs/etc that can be replaced to change the meaning of the relationships
what is the language of games?
representational aspects of games, narrative, ludic aspect of games
fandoms as pathology
represented as "obsessed individuals", loners, socially inept, hysterical mob, weak victims of media, ex: SNL Star Trek video
experimental settings
researchers can rely on experimental approaches to measure effects, try to control the different conditions to pinpoint that it is media making the impact, limitations = artificial results, can't generalize to entire population
ethnographic traditions
researchers fully immerse themselves in the lifeworld of a community and observe people in their real lives, i.e. = interviews, diaries, focus groups, everyday lives ex: reading the romance
why does media travel?
revenue, ease of exportation/importation, cultural proximity, politics, fandom & buzz
semiotic analysis
role of language, connotative/denotative meaning, cultural meanings/myths, syntagm and paradigm
ludic aspects of games
rules, economics, narratives
setting
scenery, general space, backgrounds, on location vs. studio
mashups
sedimented practices and various added references, rules, and narratives
impact of language on thought
shows how language shapes reality, our own cultural lens
the sign
signified + signifier
politics of fandom
site of development and creativity, power structure gets redistributed, fandom as reactionary backlash
counterpublics
smaller communities also creating their own public spheres and counteract how they've been pushed out of the general sphere
social structures
so large and diverse voices, the public sphere maybe not for everyone, counterpublics, ex: black radio
thronged
somebody who can draw a crowd, being accessible to the people
power and looking
spectatorship, panopticon, scopohilia, visual power dynamics (binary power dynamics), the male gaze, othering
how can we understand celebrities through texts, and as texts?
star texts (carefully constructed, audiences never access real person), polysemic (multiple interpretations), contradictory
all-or-nothing logic
stereotypes, you think you know something about somebody because on one attribute
cultural capital
symbolic elements such as skills, tastes, posture, clothing, mannerisms, material belongings one acquires, major sources of social inequality, high culture, low media
voyeurism
taking pleasure from looking secretly without permission, hidden person has all the power
transmedia storytelling
telling a story across multiple delivery channels, extends the narrative (different from adaptation)
intertextuality
texts are always in conversation with other, recognizable textual things to create meaning, always gaining meaning from other texts you've consumed, forms (allusions, parody, mashup/remix), meaning goes both directions, meaning always changing
media refusal
the active and conscious rejection of a media technology by its potential users, addiction or elite judgment
qualitative
the active audience, ethnographic tradition, encoding/decoding, resistant audiences
mimesis
the idea that images mimic or imitate real life
spreadability
the widespread sharing of media based on decisions made by people, ex: Damn Daniel
cult of amateurs
the more people freely produce stuff the more junk we have, no gatekeepers, powerful currency of online popularity
scopohilia
the pleasure of looking, ex: zoo, the pleasure of being looked at, ex: social media
spectatorship
the practice of looking
syntagm
the relationships between sequential signifiers, a chain of words making up a completed sentence
subjective sounds
the sounds that we hear in helmets
semiology
the study of signs, Ferdinand de Saussure
hegemony
there are dominant ideologies cultivated/repeated to us, not just one ideal, competing ideologies
critiques of the public sphere
those kinds of spaces have been historically very privileged, what kind of communication counts
othering
us vs. them, you and your culture are at the center, other cultures are strange and inferior
science of signs
use visual shorthand to convey messages and understand them, shortcut/sign that means something, ex: emojis
types of defamation
vicious slander, negative stereotypes, casual prejudice, deference to homophobia, invisibility
new media literacy
we are now producers as well as consumers 1. play 2. performance 3. stimulation 4. appropriation 5.multitasking 6. distributed cognition 7. collective intelligence 8. judgment 9. transmedia navigation 10. networking 11. negotiation ex: Wikipedia
composition/framing/staging
what can you see in the frame? focused, balanced, where eye is drawn
media representations
what interests are represented? whose voices? how are things discussed?
connotation
what we interpret
transcoding
when info is stored in digital form it takes on characteristics of the computer, being shaped by the logical of new media, ex: auto tune
oppositional reading
when the reader actively resists intended reading
private vs. public selves
when you become interested in their private lives from public = celebrities, role of gossip
productive surveillance
workers being watched to stay on task, labor and who does the watching in terms of media, data on the audience (ex: Netflix)
the male gaze
working to maintain men's power over women, men control the direction of the film, women are looked at, men control women, audience identifies with the man
ideology
worldview, ideas that form a structure about how we form the world, societal views/norms ex: heteronormativity