Media Final Flashcards
media
The main means of mass communication
Outlet used to store and deliver information
media studies
The study of the mass media as an academic subject
critical thinking
The objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment
argument
“A claim advanced with a reason or reasons in its support”
Karl Marx
Philosopher who invented Marxism and wrote the Communist Manifesto
Marxism
A theory presented by Marx that focuses on the struggle between capitalist and the working class (Class conflict)
Political economy of media
focuses on economic distribution and on the relationship between the economy and democratic politics (Fenton
capitalism
Refers to a system in which the circulation of money and profit making becomes an end in itself at the expense of labor and laborer
false consciousness
Person’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist society due to the prevalence within it of views that naturalize and legitimize the existence of social classes
commodification
The action of treating something as a mere commodity (material)
media labor
ideology
Simply put, it is the ideas behind a media text, the secret (or sometimes not-so secret) agenda of its producers.
hegemony
a type of domination based primarily on dominated people’s and groups’ consent rather than purely on a leader’s coercion and exerted force (think of dictators or veil video)
media regulation
Promoting Diversity and flow of information
content: focuses mainly on indecency, sex and violence
types of media regulation
Media regulation by the government:
Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
Department of Justice (DOJ)
Landmark Acts
Radio Act of 1927
Communications Act of 1934 (FCC was established by this Act).
Telecommunications Act of 1996
Media regulation by the industry (self regulation):
National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA
deregulation
the removal of regulations or restrictions, especially in a particular industry
conglomeration
A company that owns numerous companies involved in mass media enterprises
ex: AOL and Time Warner
vertical and horizontal intergration
Vertical: A media company owns different businesses in the same chain of production and distribution
Horizontal: A media company takes control of another media company that is in a similar field
National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)
Self regulation by the industry
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
In 1968 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) established a system of movie ratings for parents to use as a guide to determine the appropriateness of a film’s content for children and teenagers. The ratings system is voluntary, and there is no legal requirement that filmmakers submit their films for rating
Media ownership
The common ownership of multiple media sources by a single person or corporate entity
Big Six and who owns what
Comcast: Brian Roberts (Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, Focus Features, and Illumination Entertainment)
The Walt Disney Company: Bob Iger (Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel)
At&T: Randall Stephenson (Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO Films, DC Films, and CNN Films)
21st Century Fox: James Murdoch (20th Century Fox, Blue Sky Studios, Fox Searchlight Pictures)
National Amusement, Inc. : Sumner Redstone
( also owned by NAI) CBS Corporation (CBS Films and CBS Records)
Viacom (Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central Films, Nickelodeon Movies)
When was the FCC established?
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent regulatory government agency established by the Communications Act of 1934. The act created a seven-person board (reduced to five in 1983) charged with developing and regulating a rapid, efficient, nationwide communications system.
Telecommunications act of 1996
The act significantly reduced regulations on media concentration and cross-ownership of media outlets. This deregulation led to less competition and allowed such companies as AOL/Time-Warner and Viacom to purchase multiple media outlets in local markets
Media and democracy
accounting of people in power
fact checking
diversity of opinions
AT&T - Time Warner merger
fourth largest deal attempted in media
idea was they have leverage over rivals and extract higher prices
vertical integration
Robert McChesney
3 main components in political economy of the media:
- addresses in a critical manner how the media system interacts with and affects the overall disposition of power in society
- examines how market structures, advertising support, labor relations, profit motivation, technologies, and government policies shape media industries, journalistic practices, occupational sociology, and the nature and content of the news and entertainment
- detailed examination of the policymaking process
Functions of Journalism in a democracy
The purpose of journalism is thus to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments
advertising + commercial media
affects how we consume products and purchases
all around us, see 3,000 ads a day (supposedly)
synergy
Combination of elements to maximize profits
block-buster
typically used to describe a feature film produced by a major film studio, but also other media—that is highly popular and financially successful
cross promotion
The use of one product or service to promote another
Representation and language
R: Communication through symbols, like words or image, that stand for other things
Standing for is what representation is
Emphasizes political and symbolic
Language: Without language, nothing meaningful exists
Structuralism
Approach to media analysis which borrows its principles from linguistics (the study of language)
Poststructuralism
a set of 20th century about language and representation, that have been very influential in the humanities. especially in literary criticism
Semiotics
study of everything that can be used for communications
smallest unit of meaningis called the sign
sign
signifier
signified
referent
arbitrary nature of the sign
there is no logical relationship between signifier or signified
signifer
a sign is physical form (like sound, printed word, image)
signifed
meaning/idea expressed by a sign
(image that pops into head or resonates)
chain of signification
series of signifiers that are linked together
range of different but linked texts
each sign “sides under” the subsequent signifer
denotation
literal meaning
connotation
associated meaning
myth
cultural meaning of a sign
text
can be almost anything that you can give meaning to: song, movie, book, painting, etc.
author
in the form of director, writer, showrunner, or game designer—is useful: useful to media industry marketing
machines, and useful to scholars analyzing bodies of work
reader
Makes meaning shaped by available linguistic and cultural referents, social position, and other factors
Readers can read the text in a variety of ways (accept, negotiate, or oppose)
intertexuality
seeks and theorsies links and connections between media texts and textualism social life
textual analysis
Primary mode of “doing” media studies, as scholars seek to ascertain what a text means, how it means, and what its themes, messages and explicit and implicit assumptions aim to accomplish
polysemy
interpretive scope of media texts, the argument being that several interpretations coexist as potentials in any one text (more than one perspective)
discourse
Language is structured in patterns or discourses
Language is fundamentally unstable
Meanings are flexible and can never be permanent fixed
Different discourses are engaged in a constant struggle with one another to achieve hegemony, that ism to fix the meanings of language in their own way
Discourse limits our horizon. It is difficult to think out of it
discursive struggle
competing
Ferdinand de Saussure
looked at element of language and divided into two parts: sound of word signifier and what it represents: signifer the union of the two is a sign
FS: gave college lectures, died, students made a book with his notes
Charles Sanders Peirce
Peirce’s Sign Theory, or Semiotic, is an account of signification, representation, reference and meaning
Roland Barthes
Barthes argues that myth is the primary way in which the mass media communicate ideological meaning.
Stuart Hall
influenced by: postructuralism
believed: languages as a system of representation
“without language nothing meaningful exists”
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
Wrote about political discourse
The workings of hegemony
Contemporary social struggles
Discourse theory
Franz Fanon
West Indian psychoanalyst and social
philosopher known for his theory that some neuroses are socially generated and for his
writings on behalf of the national liberation of colonial peoples. His critiques influenced
subsequent generations of thinkers and activists
James Baldwin
a gay American writer. He garnered acclaim across various media, including essays, novels, plays, and poems
Cultural studies
an interdisciplinary field that aims to understand power and inequalities through the analysis of popular culture
identity
is a concept that communication scholars use to explore the answers humans give to these fundamental questions.
changes overtime, everything influences it. Arises in communication and relationships
identity politics
a study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies
Killing Us Softly/Jean Kilbourne
documentary on the depiction of women in advertising and how it promotes unrealistic beauty standards or objectifying women
Edward Said
developed the term orientalism
Postcolonial studies
any work scholarly or creative that deals with the issues of European colonization and that traces what the colonizers did
simple definition: a study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies
Orientalism
asks the question of why, preconceived notion (example of middle east and stereotypes even if we have never been, how they speak, act, etc)
Gender/gender stereotypes
Male/Female sex
Ascribing a man or woman certain characteristics solely due to their membership in the social group of men or women
Feminism
media is a foundational tenet to feminism
the early 1970s, labeled as analyzing “sex role stereotypes,” relied on content analysis to quantify what kinds of roles women had in TV shows or how often female voiceovers (as opposed to male) were used to sell a host of products like laundry detergent or cosmetics
Feminist media studies
Driven by the conviction that sexism and discrimination against girls and women in employment, education, relationships (every aspects of everyday life) were driven and legitimated by dismissive stereotypes of women in the media
Society was structured, institutionally and ideologically, through patriarchy (the domination of men over women)
male gaze theory
made by J Berger and L Mulvey
through media and culture women are objectified and seen primarily for their physical appearance
intersectionality
encourages an interrogation of media that acknowledges the intersecting gender, class, and racial dimensions of media representations
Micheal Foucault
was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions
power
Foucault: everyone has some form of power
panoptican
refers to a watchtower in a prison
essentialism
assuming and attributing a quality that is fixed and unchanging to an individual or group
symbolic annihilation
george gerber’s studies with effects on violence
postfeminism
Phase beyond feminism where it isn’t needed and is a thing of the past
The commodification of feminism
Betty Friedan
Writer of The Feminine Mystique that singled out the mass media as a central culprit in promoting sexist representation of women
George Gerber
His research focused on media affects and particularly violence
Content analysis (quantitative)
Counted every instant of violence and when a man or woman was the main character, ratio was 3:1 (men-women)
Laura Mulvey
within film, males are the active viewer and females become the passive subjects, meant to represent male desire (male gaze theory)
Angela McRobbie
a magazine for teenage girls, laid out how dismissing such a publication as “silly, harmless nonsense”
ignores the powerful ideological work it does in socializing girls into restrictive codes of femininity. Another line of work, however, began to ask why women might take pleasure in media texts created for them even if such texts were denigrated as examples of “trashy” mass culture
Janice Radway
Reading the romance 1984, found that despite narratives that affirmed women’s subordination to men, the novels also provided satisfying fantasies of
women humanizing the male heroes, making them more nurturing and caring
all thought housework was unrewarding
John Berger
the representations of men and women in visual culture entice different “gazes”, different ways in which they are looked at, with men having the legitimization of examining women, and women also examine women (male gaze theory)
argued that female nudes were painted for the
pleasure of male viewers, that women were constantly under surveillance, and that such depictions persisted right up to the present.
referent
the thing that a word/phrase denotes/stands for (the actual item)
discourse analysis
interested in power relations in
language and what people actively do with language. They are interested in (among other things)
* ideological effects of discursive practices
* patterns of domination and subordination
semiotic analysis
the study of everything that can be used for communication: words, images, traffic signs, flowers, etc
rhetorical analysis
informs, persuades or motivates audiences by appealing to emotions, as well as shared values or logic
colonialism
the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically
ex: spanish influence in Latin America
Silvio Berlusconi
italian media tycoon and politician
Rupert Murdoch
Businessman, media proprietor, and investor
Sumner Redstone
Businessman and media magnate who was the founder and chairman of Viacom
Antonio Gramsci
wrote about hegemony
ad hominem
personal attack on someone’s character rather than addressing the actual issue
cross advertising
Targeted with a similar product after being a customer of another product
history vs histories
The history assumes body of knowledge that is objective
Histories pays attention to how multiple perspectives depict an event
fallacy
a failure in reasoning which renders an argument as valid
