Midterm Flashcards
(58 cards)
Why study media?
Media allows us to get a sense of the world
Media Literacy **
Ability to apply critical thinking skills to media
Utopian, Dystopian & Mirror views + critiques
Utopian:
Dystopian:
Mirror Views:
Cultural Studies & Methods
- Textual Analysis
- Audience Studies
- Political Economy
Ideology
Ideology:
- unconscious values & beliefs that people use to make sense of the world that they live in
- pleasures of consumption viewed as admirable and fundamental units of life
- Conditioned to accept these from birth from powerful institutions: families, religion, education, media texts
- hidden dimensions of ideology in stories we tell and hear
- listening to authority rather than community knowledge
- can be widely shared but not universal; there are many ideologies and numerous ways of making sense of the world
Hegemony & Counter-Hegemony
Hegemony: process of maintaining power
- line the powerful pockets not through force but through agreement
- struggle for a groups ideology to become the dominant ideology
- dominant class doesn’t rule but leads through a specific type of consensus that shows their interests as the interests of general society as a whole
- more effective way of ruling than a police state
- attaining and maintaining
Counter-Hegemony: dominant ideologies must be constantly reaffirmed through the media
Hall’s circuit model of comunication
- meaning is shaped in multiple stages
- each stage generates meaning and impacts the others; producers can’t fully control meaning
- always going to be people who reject and misunderstand
1st stage: production -where message is produced 2nd stage: circulation -message is distributed; meaning articulated/translated over medium of voice/air; but if super noisy than that's a factor that impacts circulation 3rd stage: consumption -message is received; meaning here can be shaped by factors going on inside them; Do they understand references being made? 4th stage: reproduction/feedback -message is accepted and reproduced
meaning is dependent on the audience in the circuit
Texts as polysemic
-not fixed in meaning
-can be understood/decoded in multiple ways (South Park Ginger Kid Kicking)
-Audience usually recognizes what media maker is doing but not always
SO: variable interpretations mean that texts are as sites of struggle
AND: different interests compete to promote different ideologies - people want to argue that their decoding is the most convincing
Hall’s encoding and decoding model
Encoding: how the producers put meaning into their production
Decoding: how the audiences perceive and interpret
Texts are ENCODED at the level of production
-producers encode program w/ preferred meanings
-wants to provoke a specific emotive response
-Producers usually ideologically/economically linked to hegemonic elite
Texts are DECODED at the level of consumption
-where the viewer fits into this; viewer attempts to make sense of text
Three decoding positions:
1. Dominant/Hegemonic = accepts preferred meaning
2. Negotiated = partially accepts/understands preferred meaning
3. Oppositional/counterhegemonic = rejects preferred meaning favor of alter; sometimes bc of misunderstanding
Values of encoding/decoding model
- helps us recognize that all media messages contain more than one potential reading; media maker may prefer ambiguity or might want to make it visible and evident and powerful
- media maker can’t control audience’s meaning making capacities
- escape from linear system of communication - our experiences color our decodings; expresses how ones one life associations impact the reading experience
- struggle with getting people’s ideological agreement; people are always debating with meaning
Criticisms of encoding/decoding
***
Encoding: different codes can be interpreted differently
Celebrity
- person who attracts public and media attention
- his/her off-screen lifestyle & personality are of interest to the public that feeds off of it
- private life is something that audiences and media want to know more about and uncover
Intertextual vs. Extratextual
Intratextual: analyzing based on work they’ve done within the entertainment industry
Extratextual: everything else in the celebrity’s life
Star Text & its four components
**
Startext: sum of everthing we afiiliate with them, bcz of this we can analyze them by meaning in songs, movies, and tv. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Celebrity of audience-driven
**
huh
relevant fantasy (Fiske) **
…
definition of genre
content sharing the same conventions & codes; an attempt to manufacture success; to make the unpredictable predictable; a means of creating familiarity in new texts
genre conventions vs. codes ** (3)
Conventions: specific narrative elements (STORY)
- Setting - where does a show take place?: in space think of scifi; westerns in frontier towns
- Character type - a character found in genres (ex: sitcoms goofy man child)
- Plot/narrative structure - typical plots
- Iconography - typical images (ex: Western = tumbleweed)
- Emotional affect - comedies make us laugh, melodramas make us cry
Codes: modes of production external to the narrative (STYLE)
- length (ex: comedies usually 30min drama 1hr)
- visual style: lighting, editing, camerawork, animation (ex: laughtrack
industrial utility of genre
Management of consumer interest/expectation managed through promotion
1) Attempt to make success predictable
- production trend = if people like the genre, make more
- reduces risk by allowing producers to rely on past success
- organizes production
2) genre acts as a “contract” between producers & audiences
- we use genre to suit our moods; labels/containers of the familiar
- consumers know what to expect; feel like a comedy; horror film; we understand elements of genre even if we can’t articulate them
genre mutations and recombinations**
combine elements of two or more established genres
(genre provides predictability and surprise)
(mediamakers use, change, subvert codes and conventions)
Ex: Zombieland, failure: CopRock
Mutation: putting two or more genres together that dont really match?
genre as a cultural category (Mittell)
-old approach: compare a set of shows belonging in a genre, where category predetermined before analysis
PROBLEM? circular reasoning (have to know what sitcom is before pick programs to study)
new approach: genre is a cultural category, by critics, audience, scholars, industry
-We know what genre is by the way it’s discussed in culture, so we understand how genres change with how they’re defined, interpreted, evaluated.
-texts not so much examples of genres but sites of generic discourse that positions genre. and bc discourses change, genre categorizations change
characters, narrators and audiences (3) ***
characters:
narrators:
audiences:
anthology, episodic, serial (TV Narrative forms) (3) **
Anthology
- Self contained, closure brings a new/final status quo
- Program would begin with a status quo, and end with a new one
- Next week : new setting, new characters
• Episodic
- Circular closure : Status quo is disrupted but returned to at the end of the program
- Econ advantages :
• Same characters, similar situations
• Audiences become loyal, but it’s OK to miss/mix-up episodes
• Serial
- Continual change of status quo
- Accumulation of detail, characters and storyline multiply, history
- Economic disadvantage : can alienate viewers
- Economic advantages : potential for revision
• Fosters “loyals”
TV & multiple plotlines
• Some stories have multiple plot lines
- “A plot” : primary conflict (most screen time) usually with lead character
- “B plot”, “C plot”, etc. : secondary conflicts (“subplots”) usually with secondary characters
