CMN 140 Exam 1 Study Guide
When does the adaptation stage begin?
When a medium begins to redefine its position in the media marketplace.
When is the peak stage reached?
When the medium commands the most attention from the public and generates the most revenue compared to other media.
How does the lack of experience contribute to children's' lack of maturity? Make sure you understand the connection between the lack of experience and development of knowledge structures.
With experience comes maturity. Thus, children's lack of maturity comes from their lack of experience.
How are children protected from negative TV content?
"Family hour," v-chip, censoring swear words, limiting sexual references.
What are the seven skills of Media Literacy? Provide definitions and examples.
-Analysis: Breaking down a message into meaningful elements -Evaluation: Judging the value of an element; the judgment is made by comparing a message element to some standard -Grouping: Determining which elements are alike in some way, determining how a group of elements is different from other groups of elements -Induction: Inferring a pattern across a small set of elements, then generalizing the pattern to all elements in the set -Deduction: Using general principles to explain particulars -Synthesis: Assembling elements into a new structure -Abstracting: Creating a brief, clear, and accurate description capturing the essence of a message in a smaller number of words than the message itself
What indicates the decline stage?
A loss of audience acceptance and therefore a loss in revenues
What is automaticity? What does it mean is to put minds in "automatic pilot?"
A mental state where our minds operate without any conscious effort from us. Automatic pilot is where our minds automatically filter out almost all message options.
What does the term niche audience mean?How did this notion change how media programmers construct media messages?
A relatively small audience that is defined by a shared interest or need. Media programmers send specialized messages to appeal to different kinds of people out in their channels hoping to attract as many of those targeted people as possible. They then rent that audience's attention to advertisers.
When constructing meaning we rely on Knowledge structures. In this respect: what is a frame?
A set of experiences we use to interpret media messages; frames are composed of our beliefs, preferences, emotions, etc.
What is denoted meaning?
A standard meaning for symbols that is shared by all people; these are the dictionary-type meanings we memorize for words and symbols when we are in elementary school.
What is long tail marketing?
A strategy of identifying smaller niche audiences that have been ignored by other media companies; the "long tail" refers to the extreme ends on the bell curve and ignoring the fat middle where the majority is represented.
What are the stages in the Development of Media Literacy?
Acquiring fundamentals, Language acquisition, Narrative acquisition, Developing skepticism, Intensive development, Experiential exploring, Critical appreciation, and Social responsibility
There are advantages and disadvantages of automatic processing. What are they?
Advantages: Efficiency; when the filtering software is running automatically, it is making thousands of decisions for us without requiring us to expend any effort. Disadvantages: -When we rely exclusively on our automatic routines, we get into a rut and miss out on paying attention to many messages that might be highly useful to us; we never know what we are missing. -Over the long run, we start to experience message fatigue when we feel overwhelmed by too many media messages.
How are media industries attracting audiences?
Appealing to existing needs and interests Cross-media promotion: Advertising your media message in another medium to attract people in that medium to try exposing themselves to your message Cross-vehicle promotion: Advertising your media message in another vehicle to attract people in that medium to try exposing themselves to your message
How does moral development influence how children process media?
As people age, they become more capable of engaging in more sophisticated moral thinking, but if they are not motivated to progress, they will stage at a lower level of development.
How does emotional development influence how children watch television, especially advertising?
As we gain greater experience with emotions, we are able to make finer discriminations. As people mature emotionally, they are better able to read emotions in themselves and others through empathy and self-awareness. Since the nature of ads is focused on manipulating emotions, it can make them susceptible to its effects.
What are the four exposure states? Define and provide examples.
Automatic: The experience of being exposed to a media message without being aware of it Attentional: The experience of being aware of a media message and actively processing its information while being exposed to the message Transported: The experience of being exposed to a media message and being swept away by it into a different place and time such that you lose sense of your current point in time Self-reflexive: The experience of being exposed to a media message with a high degree of awareness of the media message and high degree of awareness of standing apart from the message while analyzing it
How are children protected from unfair advertising practices?
Children TV channels limit how much total advertisement time there is per hour, and they must have at least 5 seconds in between the program and the ads.
Why treat children as a special audience?
Children have not lived long enough to have enough real-world experience to protect them from media messages. Children have not matured enough to be able to process enough elements in particular kinds of media messages in order to protect themselves from potentially
Parents generally use one of four kinds of treatments to aid children. What are they?How useful are these treatments?
Co-viewing: involves parents and children watching TV together Active mediation: consists of conversations that parents or other adults have with children about TV Positive mediation: pointing out the good things in TV messages as well as encouraging kids to emulate those good things Negative mediation: pointing out the bad behaviors of characters and being critical of what is portrayed
What are the three aspects of maturity discussed in the book?
Cognitive development: The maturation of the human mind throughout childhood and throughout life; as the mind matures, it increases its abilities for perception and reasoning. Emotional development: The maturation of one's abilities to recognize and understand the emotions in oneself and in others as well as the ability to control one's emotional reactions Moral development: The maturation of one's ability to reason about the ethical value of the motives and consequences of the decisions of others and oneself
Who are the players of the media game of economics? Make sure you know them all. What do they bring to the game and what do they want?
Consumers: Resources include money, time, and attention. They want to exchange money and time for entertainment and information. Advertisers: money. They negotiate an exchange of their money for time and space in the media in order to expose their ads to their target audiences. Media companies: Money, messages, and audiences. They try to get the best writers, journalists, actors, etc. under contract to them, keep personnel costs low, and get their messages in front of particular types of consumers. Employees of media companies: Time, skills, and talent. They want to increase the pay and benefits they receive for each hour worked.
What strategies do consumers usually use in the game?
Default strategy: When audience members do not think about their media exposures and do not make active decisions as they negotiate their resources of time and money; instead, they continue with their automatic habits that follow a goal of maintaining a minimal level of uninterrupted satisfaction.
What are the three forms of emotional abilities that adolescents vary on? How do they affect media information processing?
Emotional intelligence: The ability to understand and control one's emotions Tolerance for ambiguity: The willingness to follow situations into unfamiliar territory that go beyond our preconceptions and take us out of our comfort zone Nonimpulsiveness: The willingness to avoid rushing into decisions for the sake of efficiency and instead analyzing messages carefully to ensure greater accuracy
What are the four forms of natural cognitive abilities that adolescents vary on? How do they affect media information processing?
Field independency: A natural ability to distinguish between the signal and the noise in any message where the noise is the chaos of symbols and images, while the signal is the information that emerges from the chaos Crystalline intelligence: The ability to memorize facts as well as the facility to absorb the images, definitions, opinions, and agendas of others Fluid intelligence: The ability to be creative, makes leaps of insight, and perceive things in a fresh and novel manner Conceptual differentiation: The ability to classify objects into a large number of mutually exclusive categories
What are the three information processing tasks we engage in to process media messages? For each task make sure you can identify its nature, goal, and focus.
Filtering messages: Task- To make decisions about which messages to filter out (ignore) and which to filter in (pay attention to). Goal- To attend to only those messages that have some kind of usefulness for the person and ignore all other messages. Focus- Messages in the environment Meaning matching: Task- To use basic competencies to recognize referents and locate previously learned definitions for each. Goal- To access previously learned meanings efficiently. Focus- Referents in messages Meaning construction: Task- To use skills in order to move beyond meaning matching and to construct meaning for oneself in order to personalize and get more out of a message. Goal- To interpret messages from more than one perspective as a means of identifying the range of meaning options, then choose one or synthesize across several. Focus- One's own knowledge structures
How can you get better at making decisions about filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction?
Filtering: Change your filtering habits if your needs can be better met in new ways Meaning matching: Clear faulty memorized meanings out of your memory Meaning construction: Work on transforming raw material of information into knowledge that helps you achieve your own goals
What are different strategies in identifying niches? Make sure you can name all forms of segmentation and you understand what these processes entail.
Geographic segmentation: The oldest form of segmentation. Identifying a niche audience by where they live and shop. Demographic segmentation: Identifying a niche audience by their enduring characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, etc. Social class segmentation: Identifying a niche audience by the level of their social class such as lower, middle, and upper class. Geodemographic segmentation: Identifying a niche audience by a combination of where they live and their demographic characteristics. Psychographic segmentation: Identifying a niche audience by their psychological and lifestyle characteristics.
Can you explain why would these factors be contributing to information problem? Consider production, cost, technological advances etc... Justify your responses. Pay attention to examples provided in the book and during lecture. These should aid you with answering this question.
Half of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today and producing information. Technological advancements like social media make it very easy to share information.
What are the characteristics of the game?
Importance of Valuing Resources Well, Indirect as Well as Direct Support, Complex Interdependency Among Players, Digital Convergence, Nature of Competition, and Advertising as the Engine
What is Information composed of? What is the difference between factual and social information?
Information is composed of facts. Factual information is composed of discrete bits of information, such as names, dates, titles, definitions of terms, formulas, lists, etc. Social information is composed of accepted beliefs that cannot be verified by authorities in the same way that factual information can be; it is composed of lessons that people infer from observing social interactions and that are inferred from the patterns of actions and consequences we observe.
What is the difference between Information and Knowledge?
Information: The essential ingredient in knowledge structures; it is piece-meal and transitory, resides in the message, gives something to the person to interpret, and is composed of facts. Knowledge: It is structured, organized, and of more enduring significance than information, resides in a person's mind, reflects that which the person has already interpreted, and requires structure to provide context and thereby exhibit raw meaning.
What is VALS typology? How was it developed? Who are the major users of VALS?
It is a categorization of different audience types based on their values and helps companies predict what products or services certain people will want. It was developed by Arnold Mitchell after montioring social, economic, and political trends during the 1960s and 1970s. He constructed an 85-page measurement instrument that asked questions ranging from people's sexual habits to what brand of margarine they use. 1635 people filled out the questionnaire. Major corporations such as AT&T, Avon, Coke, General Motors, P&G, RJ Reynolds, Tupperware, and Timex.
What are some additional indicators that the industry is at its peak? Which industries are at their peak?
It is the dominant medium, and it is the most important medium to the greatest number of people. Cable TV and satellite TV
What does the term technological convergence refer to? Consider analog vs digital coding. What are the two major advantages of tech convergence?
It refers to how innovations about storing and transmitting information have brought about changes to the mass media industries. Digital code is standard and can be read by any medium while analog code is different for each medium. The digital code can be compressed so that all the music on an album could be put on a CD, which is much smaller than the old vinyl disks.
What do we mean when we say that media is conditioning audiences? Why is conditioning needed? What are the benefits of conditioning for media industries? What psychological mechanism is exploited to achieve conditioning? How does YouTube employ conditioning?
Keeping your current audience interested in your content/programs. It is needed because businesses need to keep their audiences in order to stay alive. Businesses must rely on repeated exposures in order to recoup their initial investment and eventually make a profit. Automatic routines are exploited. YouTube gives suggestions based on previously watched content.
What happens during the innovation stage? Distinguish between Marketing and Technological innovation. Can you come up with examples?
Marketing innovation: Marketers attract attract new users to the medium and convince them that is a superior way for those users to access media messages. Technological innovation: Inventors develop a new form of transmitting innovation.
The book re-examines the case for special treatment of children. What are the three major notions that do not fit into the original set of claims?
Maturation: People keep maturing past adolescence throughout one's life Experience: -Even though young people have spent less time on earth, this does not necessarily affect experience -There are many adolescents an adults who have been having the same experiences over and over so that as they age, their experiences stay the same.
What strategies do media industries use to survive in the game?
Maximizing Profits, Minimizing Expenses, Constructing Audiences (a quality audience strategy; long tail marketing), Conditioning Audiences, and Reducing Risk
With media literacy, we need strong knowledge structures in five areas. What are they?
Media effects, media content, media industries, the real world, and the self
What is Media Literacy? Please provide definition. Then consider and explain the following characteristics of Media Literacy. Specifically address what do we mean when we state them: a. Media literacy is a broad approach that considers all media. b. Media literacy acknowledges that media may have harmful effects but also suggests that media messages offer potential for positive effects.
Media literacy is a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to the mass media in order to interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter; media literacy is multidimensional, consisting of cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and moral dimensions, and media literacy is a continuum, not a category. It considers all media with regards to visual literacy (the ability to process two-dimensional pictures or our three-dimensional world), story literacy (the ability to follow plots on TV and film), and computer literacy (the ability to record one's own messages, to search for messages, and to process meaning from electronic screens). Newer technologies of communication offer fewer opportunities to develop certain skills but at the same time increase the opportunities to develop other kinds of skills.
What strategy they should use?
Media literacy strategy: People who follow this strategy understand the economic game and how to be a better player. This means they have higher expectations for a return on the resources they expend, want more than minimal satisfaction from exposures, and think much more about the value of their own resources and want to negotiate a better exchange for those resources.
How do people keep up with large amounts of information? Does multitasking work? Why and why not?
One thing we try to do is multitask. It is not, however, a good enough strategy for helping us keep up with the flood of information. If you wanted to view all the videos uploaded to YouTube in just one day, it would take you a year of viewing by watching on 16 screens at once with no breaks.
Analyze the idea of exposure to media messages. Consider different forms of exposure? How is exposure different from attention?
Physical exposure: The message and the person occupy the same physical space for some period of time Perceptual exposure: The media message falls within a human's bandwidth of visual and/or auditory perception Psychological exposure: A media message creates a trace element in a person's mind
What are the stages of moral development as defined by Kohlberg?
Preconventional stage (2-8), conventional stage (8-adolescence), and post-conventional stage (adolescence-adulthood)
What are some additional indicators of decline and adaptation stages? Which industries are declining or adapting?
Revenues are not as strong as they used to be, strong decline in subscription/use, and the medium adds a new element to keep up with current trends. Newspapers, phones.
What are the stages of cognitive development defined by Jean Piaget?
Sensorimotor stage (birth-2), pre-operational stage (2-7), concrete operational stage (7-12), and formal operational stage (12-adulthood)
What are automatic routines?
Sequences of behaviors or thoughts that we learn from experience then apply again and again with little effort. Ex: tying your shoes, brushing your teeth, driving to school
What are knowledge structures?
Sets of organized information in our memory
What are the Three Building Blocks of Media Literacy?
Skills, knowledge structures, and personal locus
Why are some forms of segmentation outdated these days? Which forms are successful?
Some are more important for some types of media than others, and demographics have changed over the decades. Psychographic, social class, and geodemographic segmentation are successful.
What is the Information Problem in modern society? What are the three factors that contribute to the information problem? Make sure you understand each and can provide examples for each factor.
The Information Problem is that our culture is over saturated with media messages, and the rate of that saturation is growing at an accelerating pace. It takes about 2 years for the total amount of information to double. One reason is that more people are producing information than ever before. Another reason is that technology now exists to provide easy-to-use platforms to share information. Another factor is that media are highly attractive, so we increase the time we spend with media messages each year.
What do we mean when we say: "Our brains are programmed to maintain our physical and social well-being?"
The brain oversees the body's internal states by constantly monitoring the performance of the organs to keep them functioning properly, and it has been programmed to monitor a person's environment for threats. Also, the ability to develop and produce language is hardwired into the brain so we can express meanings for things and access others' thoughts; thus the brain enhances our social well-being. Other examples of this are morals, emotions, the ability to enhance one's own skills.
What is psychological convergence?
The breaking down of barriers between audiences and mass media organizations as well as the barriers separating audience members from one another due to geography or other social constraints
What are the primary characteristics of the computer industry? What stage of development it is in? What are the three categories of this industry?
The computer medium is moving into dominance. It is in the penetration stage. 1. Businesses that have been primarily the developers of hardware and software that they have sold to relatively large audiences (i.e. Microsoft, Apple). 2. Conglomerates that have acquired many media companies over the years and now market messages across many different channels (i.e. Disney, Time Warner). 3. Companies that provide internet-based services (i.e. Facebook, YouTube).
Why was the idea of mass audience rejected? When did this happen? What evidence was there to suggest that it was time to give up on the concept?
The concept of mass is not accurately applicable to the audience. Around the 1950s. People attend movies, listen to the radio, and watch TV within an interpersonal context.
What is Mental Software? What is its function?
The mind is the mental software. It tells the brain how to function and how to perform those functions.
What is Mental Hardware? How's our mental hardware aid information processing?
The most remarkable piece of hardware is the human brain. The human brain is composed of 100-billion neuron cells. Each cell is linked by synapses to as many as 100,000 others. The brain is constantly monitoring the environment.
What is Convergence?
The moving together over time of things that were previously separated. The blending together of previously separate channels of communication such that the characteristics that have divided those channels into distinctly different media have been eroding.
What Is a Mass Audience? What does the term refer to? What are the four characteristics of mass audience?
The outdated conceptualization of the media audience as being a very large mass with no social organization or interaction among audience members, who are heterogeneous, anonymous, and interchangeable. It refers to an audience composed of individuals who share the same needs. 1. Although society is heterogeneous, everyone had been transformed into having one lifestyle. 2. The individuals in a mass society were anonymous to media businesses and advertisers. 3. There was no interaction among the members in the audience. 4. The mass audience had no social organization, no body of custom and tradition, no established set of rules or rituals, no organized group of sentiments, and no structure or status roles.
What characterizes the penetration stage?
The public's growing acceptance of the new medium
What is life cycle pattern? Make sure you know at which stage of development the major media are these days.
The way in which forms of media begin, grow, and eventually decline and die.
How many stages of development the media industry can go through?
There are five stages: innovation, penetration, peak, decline, and adaptation.
Who benefits the most from the way that our code has been programmed? Who's programmed us, where are the mental codes coming from?
There is no simple answer to this because many different forces have been active in influencing how your code has been programmed over the course of your life so far. Some influence has come from parents, friends, siblings, and people who have had your best interest in mind. Other influences are school, religion, and society.
What is Twelve American Lifestyles? How was it developed?
They are representations of the different types of lifestyles in America (different types of consumer audiences). It was developed by William Wells.
Why do we need knowledge structures?
They provide the context we use when trying to make sense of each new media message. The more we have, the more confident we can be in making sense of a wide range of messages.
How does cognitive maturation influence how children watch television?
They start out paying attention to certain motions, color, music, sound effects, or unusual voices, and through cognitive maturation they begin to notice and pay attention to plot as well as distinguish the ads from the programs.
What is the goal of the game?
To maximize the value of the exchange for themselves
What are the rules of the game?
To play, you must have resources and a willingness to exchange them for resources. If you lack either the resources or the willingness to engage in exchanges, you are irrelevant to the game. All other rules are made up by players as they negotiate.
What is marketing convergence? How does it manifest itself? How does it affect how audiences are perceived? What is the principle of lowest common denominator (LCD)?
Using the advantages of technological convergence across channels of media to attract niche audiences for a particular message with as many platforms as possible. Companies no longer view audiences so as to appeal to everyone without offending anyone; long tail marketing is now used. Now they are perceived as different groups of people with varying characteristics and values. LCD is a programming principle where a media company (esp TV) tries to attract the largest audience possible by creating messages that will not offend anyone and thus appeal to a wide range of people.
Media literacy is a set of perspectives. How do we build these perspectives? What are our tools, raw material, and motivations? Once we built these perspectives, how do we use them, what for?
We build our perspectives from knowledge structures. The tools are our skills, the raw material is information from the media and the real world, and the motivations come from our personal locus. We use these perspectives to process and interpret the meaning of messages.
Can a single person be a member of more than one audience niche?
Yes
What are the advantages of developing a higher degree of Media Literacy?
Your appetite for a wider variety of media messages will grow, you learn more about how to program your own mental codes, and you are able to exercise more control over the media.
What do we mean when we state the following: a. Media literacy is multidimensional and requires that we acquire information from cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and moral dimensions. b. Media literacy is a continuum, not a category.
a. Media literacy requires that we not only acquire cognitive information. Cognitive: dates, names, and definitions; Emotional: feelings; Aesthetic: how to produce messages; Moral: values b. There are degrees of media literacy. You cannot be only media literate or not media literate. There is a spectrum.
What is personal locus. How does it relate to media literacy?
i. Your personal locus is composed of goals and drives. ii. The more you engage your locus, the more you will be increasing your media literacy.
