Critical Issues: Chapter 6 (Terms)

Question 1

Alienation

Answer 1

A sense of distance from others in the social world, a loss of self, and sense of helplessness.

Feeling like you have no connection to the people around you.

Question 2

Citizen Journalism

Answer 2

Journalism that’s created by people who aren’t professional journalists and is distributed among the masses through web sites, blogs and social media.

Question 3

Culture Industry

Answer 3

A term from Frankfurt School that indicates how capitalism in the mid-twentieth century deliberately manufactured and homogenized cultures, giving consumers limited options for the media that they consume.

Considered to be dictated by a formula of repetition and encourages conformity.

Question 4

Diaspora

Answer 4

Various communities, usually of a particular ethnicity, culture or nation, scattered across different places outside their land of origin/homeland.

Question 5

Frankfurt School

Answer 5

A group of scholars and social theorists, working first in Germany
in the 1930s and then primarily in the United States, who were interested in
applying Marxist theory to the new forms of cultural production and social life
in twentieth-century capitalist societies.

Question 6

Global Media Events

Answer 6

Refers to forms of mass communication that reach across the world. Today that includes everything from traditional media, such as TV, radio, and newspapers, to social media like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

(example: 9/11 and when furries hacked the government)

Question 7

Globalization

Answer 7

The increase of movements and exchanges (of human beings, goods, and services, capital, technologies or cultural practices) all over the planet.

One effect of globalization is that it promotes and increases interactions between different regions and populations around the globe.

Question 8

Mass Culture/Mass Society

Answer 8

The idea of a monolithic “mass culture” is linked to the period of modernity and industrialization in which national newspapers, a national cinema, and national radio and television broadcast media shaped culture in industrialized nations and locations where this media was exported.

Question 9

Mass Media

Answer 9

Mass media means technology that is intended to reach a mass audience. It is the primary means of communication used to reach the general public and portrays dominant or popular representations of events.

The most common platforms for mass media are newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet.

Question 10

Media Infrastructure

Answer 10

Media infrastructure is, to put it simply, a road. Think of the car on the road as contents like movies and music, then all of these contents exist on the infrastructure. In other words, in the process of delivering content to users, all media can be infrastructure.

Question 11

Neoliberalism

Answer 11

Both a political philosophy and a term used to signify the late-20th-century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism. The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively.

In scholarly use, the term is often left undefined or used to describe a multitude of phenomena. However, it is primarily employed to delineate the societal transformation resulting from market-based reforms.

Question 12

Public Sphere

Answer 12

An area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action.

Question 13

Spectacle

Answer 13

A term that generally refers to something that is striking or impressive when visually displayed.