Chapter 1: Media, Culture, and Communication

Question 1

What is media literacy?

Answer 1

it is understanding how media constructs meaning.

Question 2

What is mass media?

Answer 2

Industries that produce and distribute cultural products, including songs, tv shows, radio, newspaper.

Question 3

What is communication?

Answer 3

Creation and use of symbol systems that convey information and meaning.

Question 4

What is culture?

Answer 4

Beliefs, customs, traditions created of a specific group of people.

Question 5

What are affordances?

Answer 5

Features or capabillities of a technology that help establish how we use it.

Question 6

What is mass communication?

Answer 6

the process of designing cultural messages and stories and delivering them to a diverse audiences through the mass media industry.

Question 7

What is mass personal communication?

Answer 7

Ways in which we mix and match aspects of mass and interpersonal communication.

Question 8

What is oral and written communication?

Answer 8

Spoken messages written by philosophers, monks, and spread through elders and poets. Working people during this time were generally illiterate, so only “sophisticated” people were doing this.

Question 9

What is print communication?

Answer 9

This included Gutenburg’s printing press which started mass production, created the idea of individualism, and increased literacy.

Question 10

What is individualism?

Answer 10

it is giving priority to ones goals over the group.

Question 11

What is electronic communication?

Answer 11

This led to the telegraph in the 1840s, which led to fax, radio, and cell phones. This resulted in corporate control of communication systems.

Question 12

What is a mass nation?

Answer 12

This is a society in which a large percentage of a diverse population takes in the same media.

Question 13

What is the digital revolution?

Answer 13

This is the conversion from mechanical and analog devices to digital devices. The major milestone was the launch of the iphone in 2007.

Question 14

What is digital communication?

Answer 14

This was the process of converting media content into combinations of ones and zeros that are reassembled or decoded.

Question 15

What is media convergence?

Answer 15

The process of all devices fitting into a singular format, or when tech companies combine to all function with the same format.

Question 16

What is a niche nation?

Answer 16

A society that people navigate a more varied and complex media landscape.

Question 17

What is a participatory culture?

Answer 17

A culture where it is easy for people to create and consume media that society creates.

Question 18

What is a media enviroment?

Answer 18

A habitat in which we conduct almost every aspect of our daily lives.

Question 19

What is high culture?

Answer 19

An expression used to describe “sophisticated taste” when it comes to Modern Era media.

Question 20

What is low culture?

Answer 20

An expression used to describe “junk taste” when it comes to Modern Era media.

Question 21

What is the Modern Era?

Answer 21

(1800s - 1950s) This was the rise of the mass communication industries, and was the height of the differentiation between high and low culture. This viewed culture as a hierarchy.

Question 22

What is the Postmodern Era?

Answer 22

(1950s - present day) This was the continuing exsistence of hierarchies, including lots of political and cultural populism.

Question 23

What are the steps to the critical process?

Answer 23

description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, engagement