MS10 Midterm

intertextual vs. extratextual

: Intratextually/ Zooey Deschanel—> quirky, cute, hipster in roles; Extratexually/ Johnny Depp—> professional weirdo

TV & multiple plotlines

A Plot": primary conflict (most screen time) usually with lead character; "B Plot" "C Plot": secondary conflicts ("subplots") usually with secondary characters

Mirror Views

A medium reflects society and its interests; mirrors major social change

values of encoding/decoding

All messages have more than 1 potential meaning; Producers cannot close off all decoding/ Must attempt to make meaning as clear as possible; experiences and ideological beliefs color our decodings/struggle with getting people's ideological agreement

Celebrity economics

Celebrity is an industrial function; encourage consumers to buy a new product by offering something familiar and appealing

two hybrid production logics

Combination of forms (ex. newspapers = commodities and ad supported); Economies of scope (selling a product across multiple revenue "windows" and logic)

four media production logics

Commodities~ paid in full by consumers/ One time sale~ consumers keep product; Turnstile media~ sell access to content/Consumer "pays admission the gate"/ Admission may only cover some of the costs; Ad-supported media~ "free" to consumer/Advertisers pay cost of media in exchange for access to consumers ("impressions"); Microtransactions~ lots of little payments/often manifests as free to use + optional "premium" options

Dominant ideology

Elites have the power to shape ideology through institutional control; Controls the messages of who gets to do what

critiques of the Frankfurt School

Elitist defense of high culture;Greater media choice today; Multiple motivations behind production; Doesn't account for~innovation, Failure, Subcultures

eight advertising persuasive strategies

Famous person testimonial, Plain Folks Pitch, Snob Appeal, Association principle, Bandwagon, Hidden Fear appeal, Irritation advertising, Shock Advertising

criticisms of encoding/decoding

Few perfectly dominant or oppositional readings; More about a continuum of dominance to oppositional; Works better for directly ideological texts over scripted ones; Less equipped to deal with media texts that have more ambiguities; Multiple motivations behind production/encoding; Collapses motivation into one single narrative

characteristics of consumer culture

Focus on accumulating consumer goods as an expression of identity and "free choice"; Products for a massive, anonymous audience; Encourages insatiable consumer desire; Tradition and heritage become "lifestyle" and experimenting with the "latest thing"; Represents status over function; appearance and taste becoming crucial ways of valuing yourself and others

pop culture analysis

How people use and interpret media; Concerned with meaning at consumption, not producer intentions; The meaning making process turns mass culture into popular culture

relevant fantasy (Fiske)

Ideological meaning behind a star text is more important than the product they produce; Less interested in the way their product appears, but how they appear; Interpreted for values and beliefs about the world

advantages of content convergence

Maintains their attention across media ; Collects two kinds of viewers~large + highly engaged loyal; By requiring viewers to use multiple media, they are exposed to even more ads

Incorporation

Mass culture scans popular culture for tastes/interests it can commodify

Hall's circuit model of communication

Meaning is shaped in multiple stages; Audience participates in meaning making; Each stage generates meaning and impacts the others; Producers cannot fully control meaning

cultural studies

Media changes society and society changes media; Avoid analyses that divorce media from industry; Not just study media texts but the contexts too (tech. Contexts and influence of promotion); Allows us to recognize industry, culture, and everyday life are interrelated

why study media?

Media saturates our everyday lives and rhythms; Media evolves over time/always in a state of growth; Media serves a commercial function and attempt to persuade us to spend money; Media influences and circulates information; Media prompts us to compare ourselves to media representation

Dystopian views

Passive and addictive; Exploitative and formulaic; Consumerist/ Exists solely as a mean to deliver us to advertising; directly harmful to individuals and society

Celebrity

Person who attracts attention to such a degree that their life and personality are of public interest; Only a celebrity if inspired to explore their private life; Both the workers and the product; cultural and economic products

popular culture & immediacy

Pop culture texts do not stand the test of time aka throwaways; Fiske argues that this is not a negative; popular culture is tied to immediate social conditions; Represent the public's current interests, immediate values and concerns

Excorporation

Popular culture scans mass culture for resources it can appropriate

criticisms of popular culture

Populist celebration~romanticizes resistance and ideological manipulation; Popular culture spreads repressive representations as well; Validates dominant/commercial interests; Audiences can be active, but that doesn't mean they're powerful

Hall's encoding

Producers encode meanings through their/ Frameworks of knowledge (ideological beliefs and beliefs about audience beliefs)/ Reaffirming audience beliefs and not rocking the boat; Relation to production~needs of industry economics; Producers are usually ideologically / economically linked to hegemonic elite

cultural studies & quality

Quality is determined by cultural judgment; Embarrassment occurs when social norms/taste hierarchies are disrupted

"Realism"

Realism is measured in plausibility (this could happen to you); represent the world and what it is like; All media representations impacted by commercial concerns, creator bias, the acts of recording and editing, etc...

four ways of constructing reality TV (Kraszewski)

Selecting participants~ certain people are chosen in order to represent certain character types; Overarching and mini narrative structures; Location~ decked out house or desert island; Editing~ Thousands of hours down to 22 minutes

Mirror Critiques

Selective process of production/can't help but reflect society; Ignores agenda setting function of media; Possibility that audiences might disagree or interpret it differently

mass media industrialization

Standardization~assembly line production; Pseudo-individualism~same product hidden by a veneer of difference; Social cement~ "Psychic adjustment" to the needs of capitalism (makes us emotionally obedient)

celebrity of audience-driven

Stars are the product of audience fascination; Celebrity is tied to the public/ site for analysis and interpretation on small and large scale

technological & content convergence

Technological~personalized content through a single machine; Content~similar content available through a variety of devices

"the medium is the message" (McLuhan)

The sensory experiences of new media powerful shape our thinking; The medium itself is more important than the content

Utopian views

There's something for everyone/choice to turn it off/Media genre form can effect positive change;Publicize corruption/injustice and act as informational and educational force

Cultural studies methods

Three Prong Approach to Media; Textual Analysis/ closely examine a text and make a convincing case about the text's themes, formulas, and meaning; Audience Studies/ meaning that the audience takes away from media; surveys, listening/viewing session; Political Economy/ relationship between media and economics/politics

Hall's decoding

Three decoding positions/ Dominant/hegemonic~ accepts preferred meaning/Media reflects dominant ideology; Oppositional/Counter-hegemonic~ rejects preferred meaning in favor of alternative one/ Disagree with the message; misunderstood the message; Negotiated~ partially accepts/understands preferred meaning

Utopian Critiques

Totalizing/Need space to interrogate the weaknesses of media forms; Tend to employ the "myth of progress"; Ignores commercial interests; Ignores production hierarchies/ restrictions that keep mass media only available to very few to create; is there really something for everyone?

Dystopian Critiques

Totalizing: is it all bad?; Collapses entire media and genre telling forms into one brushing stroke;Nostalgic/Denigrate the new and pedestal the old; Elitist/solely celebrating what they like; those who have access to higher education/higher forms; Dismissive of how consumption can be active/passive dupes

Ideology

Values and beliefs that people use to make sense of the world

narrative complexity & context for experimentation

a form of TV storytelling with its own formal attributes; Cumulative~combination of episodic closure and serial accumulation; Unconventional~new and intriguing narratives and storytelling (such as nonlinear storytelling and "enigmas")

popular culture as a process

a process, not a thing or category; something that we make and circulate (social activity); Assembled from mass culture resources; The circulation of meanings, values, and pleasures; creates new understandings, identities, experiences, and pleasure from mass culture

media literacy

all media are texts that can be read for meaning; Not only written word, but all media can be interpreted for meaning; Reading requires an active process of interpretation; never passive; representations that help construct our realities

domestication of technology

becoming so normalized we don't notice it as part of everyday life

Convergence

blurring of boundaries between distinct forms of media into new types of media networks and delivery systems

Narrators

can be specific individuals; Narrate inside own story; Anonymous voices outside the story/Describing the narrative from a god's eye view; The camera is a narrator visual media/ Orients and positions our perspective; right place at the right time

Celebrity and meaning making

celebrities are tied to public interests and can be analyzed for meaning

Episodic

circular closure: return to status quo; Programming becomes more engaging because audiences can identify with the same characters week to week

mass culture & what it provides

commodities produced for max profit by the culture industries; provides conformity and "dumbed down" escapist stimulation; Cookie cutter formulaic media that promotes conformity not individual growth; Artificial concerns and cheat people out of true happiness; No sense of collectivity

Identificatory practices

consume star's/character's product

definition of genre

content sharing the same conventions and codes; An attempt to manufacture success; Similar across the board to provide familiarity

Arc

crosses several episodes or seasons; Character journey that builds across episodes; storyline or character arcs

Identificatory fantasies

desire for star's/character's life

transmedia extensions

draws viewers from TV to other content platforms

digital divide

gap between those who have access to digital technologies and these who don't; Quality of access~familiarity with technologies and social interactions; In terms of convergence and entertainment media/creates 'participation gap'

genre as cultural category (Mittell)

genre is a cultural category formed from common discourses and understandings of definition, evaluation, and interpretation; understanding of genres change with how they're defined, interpreted, and evaluated; Because discourses change, genre categorizations change

"the operational aesthetic" (Mittell)

how the media makers orchestrate the plot, narrative, and story in this unconventional way to try to engage the audience through clues and hints; A form of narrative complexity focused on "narrative special effects"; Encourages long term engagement through disorientation and confusion

texts as polysemic

intended meaning set by producers shapes consumer meanings, but are not fully identical; Variable interpretations mean that texts are as sites of struggle; Different interests compete to promote different ideologies

technological determinism vs. SCOT vs. SST

machines change us/machines are the primary instigator of change; Social construction of technology~technology is a consequence of social factors; Social Shaping of Technology~the consequences of technology are a mix of machines changing us and being a consequence of social factors

industrial utility of genre

manage consumer interests/expectations through promotion; Attempt to make success predictable; rationalize the consumption process; Reducing the risk of the new; Production trend = if people like it, make more; Organizes production

Technical infrastructure

meaning is impacted by the meaning maker's access to technology, and their training in skills and styles

rationalizing the consumption process

methods to minimize risk and maximize profits/necessary to measure success; sales growth~ increase sales through economies of scope, international markets, overproduction (successes offset failures); Minimize expenses through economies of scale (the cost of making a product decreases with the number of units produced); Market share~ the % of a market held by a specific company; Tracks how well a company does compared to its competitors

false consciousness

mislead people not thinking that the route to contentment comes from consumption rather than upward mobility; De-skills, de-politicizes, and de-sensitizes overworked masses

Genre codes

modes of production external to the narrative (STYLE); What the texts look like and sound like; Visual Style/Length~sitcoms~30mins, legal drama~1hour; Visual style~lighting, camerawork; Editing~Stage-like editing approach, quick cuts, jump cuts breaking continuity; Animation/Animation-Style~cartoon, filmic/photorealistic representations; Audio Style~theme music, soundtrack, sound effects

convenience techs & what they allow more of

moving audiences from televisions to other media; Technologies that provide flexibility in what, how, when, where viewers consume media content; Facilitates greater control over the viewing experience; more formats, more contents, more viewing flexibility; result~ individualizing consumption experience

Serial

offers ongoing stories that change over time; Continual change of status quo; accumulation of detail and history

Counter hegemony

opposing ideology; counter-hegemony means that dominant ideologies must be constantly reaffirmed through the media; Ongoing process that needs to be continually maintained; Never complete because the counter is never removed

Audience

participant in the storytelling; Imagined audience~intended audience of consumers; Actual audience~includes "interlopers" not part of the imagined audience

genre mutation & recombinants

problem of generic repetition=risk of bored audience; genres mutate to add difference; deviate from generic codes and conventions; Recombinants~combines elements of 2+ established genres; provide predictability but also surprise; Shows how generic elements can be used, subverted, and combined

constructing "realism"

produced by codes and conventions; Apparent spontaneity, Handheld camera and loose compositions, Available lighting, Verbal spontaneity, Narrative spontaneity

Narratives

put our experiences into a narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end; Stories are structured into narratives to keep audiences engaged; manipulated to become more interesting; Crafted to add suspense with obstacles and complications

Hyperreality

reflect, augment and enhance reality; more interesting and engaging to keep audience; Constructed to feel real, to suit audience expectations

Cultural function

role in the circulation of meaning

Material function

role in the circulation of wealth

Anthology

self contained/closure brings new/final status quo; viewed as the most prestigious; borrowed narratives from cinema, theater, and literature

Beat

smallest mode of narrative (1-2 mins); Builds to plots but also contain drama and purpose

Characters

social, physical, and psychological characteristics assigned to them by the media makers; Characters are assigned traits that impact the story; Protagonists drive the story; Audiences are encouraged to identify with the characters especially the protagonist; Externally~ spatial attachment and achievement; Internally~ voiceover, POV, access to thoughts and feelings

Hegemony

social, political, and economic order is not only maintained by police/military, but also by the dominant ideology; process of maintaining power through the struggle of seeking ideological consensus; Dominant class doesn't rule, but leads through consensus

genre conventions

specific narrative elements (STORY); Part of the story itself; Setting~ where/when does a show take place/Character type/Conventional plot and narrative structure/Iconography/Emotional effect~ emotions it wants to elicit from viewers/Ideology~ usually promoting a dominant ideology

Episode

structured by culmination or theme; 3 or 4 acts ("curtains" before commercials)

star text & its four components

sum of everything that is affiliated with a celebrity; Body of work; Promotion (authorized and calculated image construction); Publicity (generated by the press; outside of direct control); Audience practices (discussion, fan art, etc...)

transmedia storytelling (Mikos)

the systematic planning of a story throughout different platforms; A kind of transmedia extension in all the media share the same 'textual universe'; particularly useful in serial TV

results of consumer culture

ultimate impact of consumer culture is dangerous and harmful; mediated experience becomes the center of our social life; Delusion of control that we are empowered by our choice Isolated from tradition and community, we become open to manipulation through media