Chapter 4 Flashcards
(44 cards)
What did McQuail believe was wrong with the mass audience?
lacked self-awareness or self-identity and was incapable of acting together in an organized way to secure objectives. Homogeneous in choice of interest and in belonging to demographic groups but heterogeneous in its diversity
What does audience fragmentation mean?
Breakup of television audiences because of the growing number of tv channels. Audience members use multiple devices at the same time so their attention is not focused on one device/program.
How does audience fragmentation pose a threat to broadcasters and how do they work to overcome this challenge?
Leads to lower advertising rates for any one program, making less profit. Broadcasters are working to re-aggregate audiences across different platforms, ex. streaming the same program across different platforms so the audience can watch the same program on any device.
What are the factors that impact an audiences interpretation of media?
- social background/history
- current state of mind of viewer
- social context or situation within which the media consumption is taking place
- the content including the range of character of media options
How does culture play a key role in an individual’s interpretation of media?
The individuals cultural milieu create identity through acting as the reference to a host of factors.
What is the definition of agenda-setting function in terms of media?
media works to draw the public’s attention to a particular event and circumstance
what is cultivation analysis?
content is studied for its ability to encourage particular attitudes in viewers toward people or perspectives
what is effects analysis?
abstracts the process of communication from its social context and tries to draw a straight line between sender and receiver. Weak in its ability to illustrate the factors that influence decoding.
What is uses and gratification research?
answers: what do audiences do with the media? Focuses on the agency of audience members and explore their motivations in the active selection of media content. It is FUNCTIONALIST meaning that it is based on the assumption that media serve audience needs and researchers must set out to find what that need is.
How are uses and gratifications research and effects theory similar?
They both abstract or seperate media consumption from the larger social context. Media consumption is reduced to an individual desire and influences of social, cultural, or ideological factors are not explored
What is the Frankfurt school and what is their perspective on media and audience relationships?
Following Marxist perspectives, they argued that capitalist methods of mass production had impacts on cultural life. Developments of capitalism (products, entertainments, etc.) penetrated into cultural life and made a new way of life through the marketplace. Media serve making capital and audiences are fed meaning by advertisers
What does it mean when they say audience members are unpaid “workers”
As capitalism makes its way into cultural life and influencing society, audience members are seen as unpaid “workers” for the capitalist “consciousness industry” and are drawn by the media into a perfect cut world where choice is an illusion
What is the culture industry?
mass produced cultural products such as symphnoies, ballet, theatre, poetry, etc. all high-cultural forms of leisure and entertainment
Describe British Cultural Studies?
began as a reaction to Marxist theories that downplayed the role of human agency and popular culture. Development of Birmingham School or cultural studies.
What are the two main lines of development in the history of the Birmingham School
Analysis of young working class males and young working class females. Concerned with the use of mass culture by both genders to create and define identities
How are the Birmingham school and the Frankfurt School different?
Birmingham believed individuals could take products and manipulate them to create new self-definitions, unlike the Frankfurt school that believed the opposite; individuals being manipulated by the products of mass culture
How can you apply the analysis of cultural studies to certain media?
Relationship between music styles and certain identities, ex. black music and the culture of young black males such as hip-hop
Define ideology
Ideology is generally taken to mean a set of social values, beliefs, and meaning that people use to decode
What is the Marxist interpretation of ideology?
how a set of ideas, values, and beliefs support the dominant or ruling class and this is seen as fair by the poor. This leads to the oppression and exploitation of the working class, they have fallen into a ‘fale consciousness’ on how capitalist society works.
What was the dominant ideology at the time and how was this questioned?
Dominant ideology was the one that helped keep wealthy white males in position of power
Which other forms of ideological oppresion was there?
Ideological oppression of people of colour, women, and other social groups that were in a subordinate position in society.
What did researchers of cultural studies believe about British television in terms of ideology?
British television is what reproduced this dominant ideology. Powerful primary definers (politicians, experts, etc.) are allowed to frame issues and opinions and opposing issues were hardly ever allowed to air
What are the three different responses to media?
Dominant, negotiated, and oppositional views
How has media been involved in the rise of feminism?
News print began translating feminist ideas into protest activities and feminist periodicals and articulating suffragettes in a male public sphere. Some films also contributed to media framing feminism
