Agency and Control Flashcards
Agency
**Ability to act and make choices
**-When a media audience, producer or institution has agency, they can feel they can use a medium or platform however they choose – to express themselves, to use the media for a specific purpose, or to communicate a message
Control
The ability to exert power over somebody else’s actions or choices
The Tension Between Agency and Control
-Many social media platforms sell the illusion of agency to an audience when in fact their use of the system intightly controlled
-Some audiences enjoy subverting the systems mediums or platforms to give themselvesmore agency
-Media institutions are often fighting for more agency in how they interact with the different regulationsystems that attempt to control them
Polysemic
The factors which enable different viewers to make different sense of the same text
Consumption
Refers to the social, cultural, and technological influences over the way the audiences read media products
Reception
Refers to the way in which an audience engages with a tangible or intangible media product and the waythat can influence how it is read
Case Studies
Not credible, moral panics
Laboratory Research
Experiments replicated again and again, ignores the fact that media consumption happens in the real world.
Quanlitative
Credible way of measuring media influence
Hypodermic Needle Theory
The hypodermic needle theory is a linear communication theory which suggests that media messages are injected directly into the brains of a passive audience. It suggests that we’re all the same and we respond to media messages in the same way.
-Not really accepted
Agenda Setting Function
McCombs and Shaw: Agenda setting function theory suggests that the media can’t tell you what to think but it can tell you what to think about.
-Media decides what is important
How Agenda Setting works
McCombs and Shaw argue that the media uses a number of cues to indicate the importance of an issue.
-On the frontpage of a newspaper, for example, the importance of a story is indicated by the size of a heading.
-Likewise, a storythat appears on the front page in more important that a story that appears on page five.
-According to this theory, the media has power to focus public discussion on particular issues.
Reinforcement Theory
Argument that the media has little power to influence people and, most of the time, it just reinforces our preexisting attitudes and beliefs
Two Step Flow Theory
Paul Lazarsfield: Theory that opinion leaders pay close attention to the mass media and pass on their interpretations of media messages to others.
-People are more influenced by the ‘opinion leaders’ than the media.
Use and Gratification theory
Katz and Blumler: Theory that audiences have uses for particular forms of media, and through a process of selection and omission use their chosen media for personal gratification
-Audiences are active and can have power over the media. If people don’t watch a television program, it won’t rate,and it will be taken off the air.
Encoding/Decoding
Theory that audience derive their own meaning from these media texts. These meanings can be dominant, negotiated or oppositional.
-Audiences are active in decoding media messages. They can accept or reject parts of the text based on their personalbeliefs or attitudes
Cultivation Theory
George Gerbner: Theory that the media, contributes to the audience’s perceptions of social reality.
Semiotics
About how a message is encoded by the sender and the decoded by the receiver
The filter bubble theory
Eli Pariser: The internet’s personalisation tools isolate us from opposing view points.
1- You are not alone in it
2- The filter is invisible
3- There is no choice but to enter the bubble
Active audience theory
Theory that when individuals consume a media text, they are not just blindly accepting themessage, but are intellectually engaging with it, which gives them some agency and control over it.
-Interpretation, rating, enjoyment provide agency
Media Globalisation
The process whereby the world’s people are becoming increasingly interconnected in all facets of their lives.
Cultural imperialism, Integrity and diversity of news media, Erosion of government power
Cultural Imperialism
Cultural dominance by powerful nations over weaker nations via the unequal flow of film, television,news, music etc. from western countries (predominantly America)
Integrity and diversity of news media
-the top 7% of sites collect 80% of online traffic
-on audiences to determine whether the news they are reading on the internet is reputable
-online news is quite often tailored for the user based on their interests andvalues. This can cause what is known as the ‘echo chamber effect’.
Erosion of government power
Globalised media possess the potential to spread democratic values and beliefs which would be less welcomed in countries with differing political and economical ideologies
