Exam 2

Question 1

Fry’s Definition of Algorithm

Answer 1

“Algorithms rule the days. They are mathematical models that track individual browsing and sharing. They determine the ads and information in one’s personal feed. They are what search engines, social media sites, and advertisers all rely on to reach target markets. They are the financial foundation of the web.”

Question 2

Media Ecology

Answer 2

suggests every communication technology has key physical, psychological, and societal features that are relatively distinct and fixed, and these features shape how users of that medium process information and make sense of the world
- tells use every communication medium trains our consciousness in particular ways

Question 3

Characteristics of Twitter

Answer 3

• narcissistic
• demands simplicity
• promotes implusivity
• fosters incivility

Question 4

Parasocial Relationships

Answer 4

one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence

Question 5

Basic Meme Forms

Answer 5

• image macro meme
• reaction photoshop meme
• meta meme/meme inception

Question 6

How are memes rhetorical?

Answer 6

• Memes function through juxtaposition between text and image, or different images, and the association among them that forms the meme’s argument
• Visual arguments
• Intertextuality
• Visual enthymeme
• Synecdoche

Question 7

Intertextuality

Answer 7

the relationship between common texts in a particular culture

Question 8

Incongruity

Answer 8

when a persons non verbal messages do not support their spoken word

Question 9

Synecdoche

Answer 9

part of the whole

Question 10

Visual Enthymemes

Answer 10

an argument with assumed cultural knowledge that helps them make connections between the original and the remix

Question 11

Conspicuous Consumption

Answer 11

consumption designed to signify one’s social status; rich and famous are the marker of the good life

Question 12

Hyper Commericalism

Answer 12

• consumerism in overdrive
• more is better, Americans living with so much credit card debt, we live in a society where there is a commercial answers to all problems

Question 13

Scripting of Reality

Answer 13

contriving situations for contestants, pre-screening contestants, re-shoots to get the “right story”

Question 14

Rags-to-Riches

Answer 14

• Draws attention away from economic exploitation and financial precarity
• The ideological function is to prove that the class system is permeable, that people who have wealth earned it through hard work alone, and individuals are exclusively to blame praise for their circumstances
• Structural inequality is a myth, all based on individual work ethic

Question 15

Reality Charity

Answer 15

• Reality TV poorly represents the realities of poverty
• Proposed solutions: cutting a check, building a dream home, undercover boss posing as one of his employees for a day
• Shows individualized solutions to cases of poverty and class oppression rather than real, systemic solutions

Question 16

Pasquale Definition of Algorithms

Answer 16

It’s a computer program, or calculations encoded into computer software to assimilate information so as to predict future behavior or risk. They are often called “Black Box” techniques, data is collected in secret to be used to make critical judgments about people. The evidence might be wrong or discriminatory

Question 17

Alt-Right

Answer 17

this collection of lots of separate tendencies that grew semi-independently but which were joined under the banner of a burst forth of anti-PC cultural politics through the culture wars of recent years

Question 18

Cyberutopia

Answer 18

a naive optimism focusing on the Internet’s positive political potential for participatory democracy and freedom (a leveler of hierarchies, blurring the roles of producers and users, and fostering collaboration), downplaying its use for surveillance, manipulation, (and promotion of consumerism)

Question 19

Cyberdystopia

Answer 19

• The alt-right’s anti-PC taboo-breaking culture is not just “for the lulz”
• Spontaneous leaderless Internet-centric network is a form not a messiah
• The online environment has undoubtedly allowed fringe ideas and movements to grow rapidly in influence

Question 20

GamerGate

Answer 20

understood as a war over “ethics in games journalism” or as an excuse to attack feminists and women entering the gamer world

Question 21

Media Cultivation Theory

Answer 21

long-term exposure to media shapes how the consumers of media perceive the world and conduct themselves. The cultivation hypothesis states that the more television people watch, the more likely they are to hold a view of reality that is closer to television’s depiction of reality

Question 22

Mean World Syndrome

Answer 22

the theory that if you watch enough brutal violence and crime on TV and in the movies, you come to believe that you are living in a cruel, gloomy, and scary world, in which you feel more vulnerable, insecure, and in danger

Question 23

Visual Rhetoric

Answer 23

rhetorical forms that are other than language, or that include more than language, are typically referred to as “visual rhetoric”

Question 24

Visual Culture

Answer 24

a culture distinguished by the ubiquity of visual forms of communication that appear in multiple media outlets at the same time (TV, Internet, cell phones, print media)

Question 25

Rhetoric of Display

Answer 25

a rhetoric that makes ideas present through visual display has become the dominant mode of communication in visual culture

Question 26

Presence

Answer 26

- Images create a sense of presence by making something visible and immediate within an audience’s conscious - Acts directly on our sensibility; can create a virtual experience; and makes things that are distant feel closer

Question 27

Absence

Answer 27

- Visual rhetoric draws our attention to some things and away from others - Selects and deflects reality - Lacks immediacy - Just like narratives, images are selective and exclusionary

Question 28

Iconic Photographs

Answer 28

photographic images produced in print, electronic, or digitial media are: - Widely recognized by everyone within a public culture - Understood as representations of historically significant events - Objects of strong emotional identification and response - Regularly reproduced access a range of media, genres, and topics

Question 29

Dominant Audience Readings

Answer 29

critic reads with the hegemonic grain of a text, this is the easiest reading to perform because dominant culture gives us the codes to access the preferred reading

Question 30

Negotiated Audience Readings

Answer 30

this position is located between dominant and oppositional reading positions; here the critic might read with and against the preferred meaning of a text

Question 31

Oppositional

Answer 31

the critic reads against the grain and resists the preferred meaning and its ideological commitments (values, beliefs, attitudes)

Question 32

Body Rhetoric

Answer 32

rhetoric that foregrounds the body as part of the symbolic act - often used by people who are denied access to more traditional forms of verbal address

Question 33

Circulation

Answer 33

encourages critics to study the manner in which a visual movies through space and time, sometimes unmoored from its original location of production, and how the meaning of the artifact changes in the movement

Question 34

Image Events

Answer 34

staged acts designed for media dissemination - Combine visual and verbal rhetoric - Structures to elicit media attention - Operate holistically often relying on disidentification - Attempt to alter perception

Question 35

Entactment

Answer 35

occurs when the person engaging in symbolic action functions as proof of the argument they are advancing – they can be the argument

Question 36

Memorials & Monuments

Answer 36

- Physical space position those who view and enter the space in particular ways - Play important roles in the creation of public memory - What is remembered has less to do with what happened in the past than with the needs of the present - The process of remembering always involves an act of forgetting as well, creating both presence and absence

Question 37

How we are bought and sold

Answer 37

- Newspapers are more in the business of selling audiences than in the business of giving people news, especially as more and more newspapers are owned by fewer and fewer chains - Magazines, perhaps more than any other media demonstrate this point: they are essentially catalogs of goods with less than half of their pages devoted to editorial content

Question 38

Goals of Advertising

Answer 38

one aspect of the culture advertisers create is our worship of: - Celebrity - Affluence - Consumerism

Question 39

Why is advertising not targeted at the poor?

Answer 39

the poor can't always afford unnecessary products; the rich can

Question 40

Ethnic Marketing Campaigns

Answer 40

the multiculturalism that we see in advertising is about money not about social justice

Question 41

How do Advertisers get inside our minds?

Answer 41

advertisement directed for children's gaze