AS Media Studies U1 Flashcards
To Learn All Theorists and Terminology
What is an Active Audience?
This describes an audience who responds to and interprets the media products in different ways and who actively engages with the messages encoded in the products.
What is meant by Aspirational?
Aimed at or appealing to people who want to improve how they look, attain a higher social position or have better standard of living.
What is an Audience surrogate?
A character within a text that stands in for the audience. They may think as we do, or act as we ourselves might act in the same situation.
What Audience theory was Albert Bandura’s?
Media Affects:
What Audience theory was George Gerbner’s?
Cultivation Theory:
What Audience theory was Stuart Hall’s?
Reception Theory:
What is Brand Identity?
The image that a brand projects and the associations the audience makes with the brand. This is built up over time.
What is Colloquialism?
An informal expression that is often used in casual conversation rather than in writing. However, it is used in some media products to establish an informal communication with the audience.
What is connotation?
Refers to the meanings we associate with the sign, for example a red rose may connote love or the hoot of an owl may connote night-time.
What are cover lines?
The written text that features on the cover of the magazine providing a preview of the content that features inside.
What is cross-platform marketing?
When one form is advertised on another media platform. For example, BBC 1 will broadcast promotional advertisements for its radio stations; these will also be on the BBC website.
What are cultural competences?
Within a media context, this concept suggests that the cultural competence of an audience is the shared knowledge, related to their cultural understanding, of that audience, which means that they will take a particular pleasure from a media product. For example, the audience who understand and engage with the rules of Call of Duty, and have a certain computer literacy, will enjoy the control aspect of the game and the online sharing of techniques.
What is decoding?
The proccess through which an audience interprets a message.
What is Demographic profiling?
A way categorising audiences by dividing consumers into groups based on age, sex, income, education, occupation, household size, marital status, home ownership or other factors. This information is use to some media industries, for example it can help advertisers determine their target audience for particular products and develop adverts that focus on a specific demographic.
What is Denotation?
The literal or common sense meaning of a sign rather than the associated meaning of a sign.
What is Discourse?
The topics and lauangage used by a media text snd the way they are used. There are topics that would never appear in the discourse of a magazine tends to centre on image and how to look good
What is a Dominant-Hegominic position?
The position that the media encoder encourages the decoder to adopt when interpreting a text. If they adopt the dominant-hegominc position they read or interpret the message in the way that the encoder intended, making a preferred reading.
What is a Dominant-Ideology?
A set if values and beliefs that have broader social or cultural currency. This may be implicit or explicit as is evident in texts such as tabloid newspapers.
What is an ellispis?
Where sentences are incomplete and instead are finished with a set of three dots; the words need to be filled by the reader.
What is meant by encode?
Communicate ideas and messages though system of signs.
What is an enigma code?
Enigma codes are the questions or mysteries that a narrative sets up in order to make the audience continue watching. Roland Barthes refers to this as the hermeneutic code.
What is ethnocentric?
Roger Brown defines ethnocentric as ‘the application of the norms of ones own culture to that of others’ (Social Psychology, 1965, page 183). Stuart Hall refers to this definition in his theory of representations as he suggest that ethnocentrism is an example of the way in which stereotypes reinforce the power of certain groups over others.
What is meant by Foreshadow?
To hint at something that will happen later in the narrative.
What is meant by Formulaic Structure?
Where the texts has clear structure that is recognisable and rarely changes. For example, the front cover of a lifestyle magazine has key conventions and the audience has expectations of what will appear throughout the publication.