Media terminology Flashcards
1
Q
Who are the target audience?
A
The group of consumers who the media text was made for.
2
Q
What is a billing block/credit block?
A
A block of text at the bottom of a film poster or dvd
3
Q
What are binary oppositions
A
Conflicting values
4
Q
What is a age certificate?
A
Age rating of the film
5
Q
What are props?
A
An object used on stage by an actor
6
Q
What is the setting/scenery?
A
The place or type of surroundings where something is positioned or where an event takes place
7
Q
What are colour codes
A
Colours used for a certain genre/ sets the mood
8
Q
What is lighting?
A
Effects used that helps create the atmosphere or emphasize particular parts of the poster
9
Q
What is a denotation?
A
To draw attention to something to show what it means. What an image actually shows.
10
Q
What is a connotation
A
Imply or suggest an idea of a feeling in addition to the literal or primary meaning
11
Q
What does signifies mean?
A
Also use this word for meaning ‘shows’, for example ‘ the man running signifies to the audience that there is a threat nearby
12
Q
What is a tagline?
A
Memorable motto or phrase - Like a slogan but for a film
13
Q
What are codes?
A
All media texts are encoded. The codes themselves are symbolic, technical or written. The technical code used depends on the platform.
14
Q
What is encoding and decoding?
A
Meanings are encoded by producers and decoded by the audience.
15
Q
What is positioning?
A
Media texts attempt to place the audience in a position whereby they hold a point of view or feel a particular emotion (basically manipulation)
16
Q
What is a preferred meaning?
A
A preferred meaning is one that might be put in place by the producers, or by the dominant values of society.
17
Q
When does an aberrant reading take place?
A
An aberrant reading takes place when the audience is resistant to the dominant values of society and instead negotiates or resists the intended meaning.
18
Q
What is Todorov’s narrative structure?
A
The media trains us to see the world in terms of narrative: beginning (equilibrium), middle (disruption and conflict), and end (new equilibrium). All media texts have a narrative structure.
19
Q
What is genre?
A
A category of texts with common conventions of style, narrative, and structure.
20
Q
What is iconography?
A
Particular visual signs associated with certain genres.
“The iconography of this text includes a deserted house and a sinister clown, both evocative of the horror genre.”
21
Q
What does evocative mean?
A
Bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind.
22
Q
What is mediation?
A
Anything we experience through the media (as opposed to directly) is mediated.
23
Q
What is the translation for mise-en-scene? What is mise-en-scene?
A
‘Put in the scene.’ Whatever appears within the frame.
“The director uses mise-en-scene to create a sense of loneliness by framing the character against an enormous, empty landscape.”
24
Q
What are regulations?
A
Laws, rules, guidelines which define and restrict the parameters within which the media work.
25
What is self-regulation?
Regulations within the industry (e.g. press complaints commission).
26
What is government regulation often operated by?
Often operated by QANGOs (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations - like OFCOM)
27
What is dismemberment?
In advertising especially, women's bodies are cropped in order to emphasise sexualised body parts
28
What are news values?
Criteria applied to determine what is newsworthy.
"News values determine the prominence given to news stories, their order, and whether they are included or excluded from the news agenda."
29
What is a stereotype?
An oversimplified, sometimes humorous, representation which is used to categorise and evaluate members of a particular group.
30
What is voyeurism?
The practice of gaining pleasure from looking at other people whilst remaining anonymous.
31
What are the three main ways of looking at audiences?
Hypodermic model/needle, uses and gratifications model and reception model.
32
What is the hypodermic needle theory?
The media is powerful and influential, able to inject ideas and behaviours directly into the audience - which must be protected from its power
33
What is Blumler and Katz's uses and gratifications theory?
Theory of audience which emphasises the range of needs/pleasures fulfilled by consumption of the media.
34
What is the reception model theory?
Theory of audience that emphasises the range of ways in which audiences receive and respond to media texts - including resistant or negotiated readings
35
What is open text?
- May have a variety of meanings dependent upon the age, sex, cultural background of reader.
- It's open to interpretation.
- Tend to be more high brow, high culture whereas closed texts tend to be more popular, mass culture e.g mass media texts.
36
What is closed text?
- A term used to describe a text that contains a dominant or preferred meaning
- Such texts attempt to direct audiences into understanding one particular meaning
- This is often done through a process of anchorage where words, captions or logos are used to direct a reader towards a particular meaning (adverts, newspapers, photos etc)
37
What is anchorage?
Is about how particular aspects of a text helps pin down (or anchor) its meaning.
E.g.
- Newspaper photographs are anchored by their captions
- Adverts may be anchored by a logo, slogan or the product itself in the picture.
- A celebrity endorsement may pin down down the message for a brand.
38
What is a direct address?
- Refers to texts that address you, the audience, directly to create a more personal connection either as an individual, friend, mother, wife etc.
- Often through a face that looks directly into a camera at you
- E.g. Magazine front covers
- The age, gender, values, lifestyle, look of a face on a magazine cover or characters/themes within a drama (e.g F.R.I.E.N.D.S) are designed to promote audiences identification.
- To get the audience to engage and feel connected to the text and ultimately spend money usually via adverts.
39
What are media texts?
Media texts always address somebody, they seek to engage their audiences in the practice of reading or viewing.
40
What is indirect address?
- Not looking directly into the camera
- More observational
- Less formal
- Audience addressed as casual observer/voyeur (looking into someone else's world)
41
What is preferred meaning?
- Refers to a text that prefers one particular meaning.
- This can result from the agendas and assumptions of media producers and can be ideological in nature
E.g
- A right wing (capitalist/conservative) or left wing (socialist/labour) newspaper can present news items with a particular political bias
42
Stuart Hall (1980) - 3 main types of audience decoding
1) Dominant - When the reader accepts the full preferred reading offered by the text.
2) Negotiated - Where the content of the message is adapted to fit the specific social condition of the reader to produce a new meaning.
3) Oppositional - Where the dominant reading is contested and a reading which opposes it is produced.
43
What is Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory?
When the audience is forced to view a media product through the eyes of a heterosexual male. Where women are sexualised and treated like objects.
44
What is the female gaze?
More recently, some media texts have reflected changing roles and empowerment of women by offering points of view from a female perspective (e.g viewing men as sexual objects).
45
Give examples of mise-en-scene.
```
Production design
Set
Location
Actors
Costumes
Make-up
Lighting etc
```
46
Why are close ups (and variations) used?
Close ups, including extreme, big and medium close ups, are used to draw the viewer closer and to involve them in what is happening; they're also used to observe reactions and emotions.
These shots are often used to privilege the protagonist over the other characters and position the audience with them. Long shots are more about context and are less subjective/emotional.
47
Why are high angles used?
To provide a view from above the subject(s), often making the subject look vulnerable, isolated or powerless. This is sometimes combined with a crane shot into a closer shot of the subject(s).
48
What can low angle shots indicate?
Power, aggression, strength etc.
49
What is diegetic sound?
Sound generated from within the narrative/production (natural).
50
What is non-diegetic sound?
Outside of the narrative such as an orchestra playing rousing music during a battle scene.
51
What is an enigma code?
A narrative technique that involves the creation of riddles or problems to be resolved. Refer to Barthes. E.g: suspense and horror genres use enigma to retain the attention of an audience.
52
What is high key lighting?
Bright lighting, often studio lighting/sun. Connotes optimism.
53
What is low key lighting?
Darker lighting scheme. Connotes mystery and suspense.
54
What is realism?
A film and television style that attempts to represent the real world. Most documentaries attempt this, some more successfully than others.
55
What is editing/montage?
How image are selected, cut/cropped and put together.
56
What are symbolic codes?
Codes that carry cultural/social meaning such as objects, colour, body language etc. Also look for composition (mise-en-scene) e.g what is included in the frame.
57
What is composition?
The placement of objects within a frame to create meaning or enable an audience to access and read usual information in a clear and pleasurable way.
Right side: power, control, assertiveness, respect, rationale, formal.
Left side: Passive, fluid, emotional, less powerful, open, informal.
Centre: Mix of left and right, can be quite weak.
58
Give examples of technical codes.
Camera angles, panning, shot sizes, colour, lighting, editing/montage, sound/music, mise-en-scene, composition, pov, iconography.
59
Give examples of cultural codes.
Body language, dress codes, movement.
60
What are narrative codes?
Enigma codes, structure such as: Todorov's equilibrium, action codes, pov, settings/locations, actors, iconography linked to genre.
61
What is branding?
Attaching powerful meanings or associations to products, especially in markets where one or more other products may be very similar.
62
What does branding involve?
Involves work on the reputation or image of the production company. Often extended now to images of people, nations, cities etc.
63
What is a broadsheet newspaper?
A type of 'serious' newspaper (UK) with larger, less square pages than tabloids, though recently 'broadsheets' have adopted tabloid sizing, referred to as 'compact'.
64
What is the burden of representation?
The problem arising when a previously under- or misrepresented group begins to be imaged in the media, and too few characters and producers have to bear the burden of being seen to represent the whole group - as a 'positive role model' etc.
65
What is capitalism?
A competitive social system which emerged in 17th century Europe, involving private ownership of accumulated wealth and the exploitation of labour to produce the profit which helps create such wealth.
66
What is a 'celebrity'?
Someone seen as having the same access to fame as stars, and with a constructed 'parallel media narrative' of their life, but without the same level of achievement in the cultural sphere which initially made them famous.
67
What is censorship?
Decisive acts of forbidding or preventing publication or distribution of media products, or parts of those products, by those with the power, either economic or legislative, to do so.
68
What does churn mean?
Measure of the rate at which media service providers lose customers compared with the number of new customers signed up.
69
What is classification?
Placing into categories, such as genres, or the BBFC's ratings, though there are a rage of other ways in which understandings of texts are prepared by different ways of classifying them.
70
What is compassion fatigue?
Loosely used term which suggests viewers are fatigued and numbed by the number of terrible events reported in the news. Aid organisations prefer 'media fatigued'.
71
What is conspicuous consumption?
A term used to describe the consumption of goods and commodities for the sake of displaying social status and wealth.
72
What is content analysis?
A form of analysis focusing on manifest features of texts via a coding frame of carefully chosen questions a ways of valuing what is found through them.
73
Who are content providers?
Media companies which produce programme material for specific delivery or distribution systems, especially cable, satellite and internet, i.e content carriers.
74
What is cross-generic?
Blending different genre elements, e.g horror and comedy. Arguably only a very few texts do not combine this way.
75
What is a cycle?
Related to genre, a series of films with very similar content or themes, often quite clearly referring to each other, produced over a short period.
76
What is decoding?
Semiotic term for 'reading' the codes in a media text.
77
What does deregulation mean?
Removal or 'lightening' of government restrictions on media industries, sometimes called 're-regulation' to draw attention to the ways in which it is not simply a liberation from rules.
78
What does diegesis mean?
The 'fictional world' of the audio-visual narrative. Most useful in distinguishing between 'diegetic' and 'non-diegetic sound'.
79
What is differential pricing?
Means of accumulating maximum profit on a product by differentiating its price depending on what different markets will allow.
80
What was direct cinema?
Documentary movement in 1960's US using new lightweight cameras and microphones, which kept as close to events as possible, with nothing rehearsed or scripted, no voice-over or music track, and a high shooting ratio.
81
What does disavowal mean?
In psychoanalysis, the process of refusing to recognise a troubling or traumatic perception. Applied by some theorists to account for the apparent power of advertising, entertainment and fantasy forms, etc. to 'mask' unpleasant realities. The term suggests some awareness on the part of audiences, along with their desire to ignore that for the sake of the pleasures of these forms.
82
What is a documentary-drama?
A re-enactment of 'real' events presented using techniques from fictional drama narratives.
83
What is a dystopia?
A term used in sci-fi; a dreadful future society, the opposite of utopia.
84
What is ecology?
A term used by McLuhan to suggest a kind of balance between different kinds of media, and their relation to human perception and understanding.
Some have suggested 'media ecology' avoids the different connotations of 'the capitalist media market'.
85
What is editing?
1. Sequencing of text, images and sounds, the 'shaping' of a narrative.
2. The overall control and direction of fact-based publications in print and broadcasting.
86
What is the effects model?
A model concerned with how the media 'does things' to audiences.
87
What are focus groups?
Method of audience research which assembles small, representative groups whose fairly informal discussions are facilitated, recorded and analysed.
88
What are the three different types of formats?
1. Different size or shape of common media products (newspapers are formatted as tabloid broadsheet, film as 35mm or 16mm etc)
2. A TV category allowing for the international trading of TV show concepts and set-ups e.g The Weakest Link and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? both belong to the genre 'quiz show' though their formats differ.
3. 'Format radio': station using only one kind of music or speech.
89
What are the two different types of framing?
1. Referring to an image selected to show a person or object; various framings from 'long shot' to 'extreme close-up' are defined by the size of the human body within the frame.
2. Referring to the power of the media to 'frame' or shape and set the limits to how audiences are invited to perceive certain groups, issues, stories, especially in news forms.
90
What are the two different types of franchises?
1. Generally a licence to use a brand name in retailing or the service sector. Now used in Hollywood to describe a successful film title that can be developed into new films and associated products e.g Harry Potter
2. In the UK, a term for the licences to broadcast specific services.
91
What is a genre?
Theoretical term for classification of media texts into type groupings.
92
What is globalisation?
A process in which activities are organised on a global scale, in ways which involve some interdependence, and which are now often instantaneous.
93
What is green-washing?
A term used describe claims of being 'environmentally friendly' made by companies about activities which in fact damage the environment.
94
What is horizontal integration?
When an organisation acquires or merges with competitors in the same industry sector.
95
What is a hybrid?
Combining differences, of style or technologies or cultural form (e.g Men in Black's combination of horror and comedy).
96
What is hypertext?
Text which includes links that take readers directly to other texts; hypertext mark-up language is used to write pages on the world wide web.
97
What is ideology?
Complex term involving ideas, values and understanding of the social world, and how these are related to the distribution of power in society. Also involves how such values come to seem 'natural'.
98
What is immersion?
The experience of being inside the world of a media product, which appears to surround the user. Term usually involves games, though recent films such as Avatar seek the same effects via 3D, IMAX etc.
99
What is an independent company?
Any company in a media industry which isn't seen as a major.
100
What is the internet?
The global 'network of networks' which links together computers and servers.
101
What is intertextuality?
The variety of ways in which media and other texts interact with each other, rather than being unique or distinct. Especially relevant for the proliferation of media forms now, and audience familiarity with them.
102
What is 'long tail'?
Theory of the ways that media businesses and economics have changed due to the impact of the internet and networking, so that smaller niche markets can be tapped, rather than the 'top-down' mass producers simply profiting from standardised markets.
103
What is iudology?
The study and theory of games, both pre- and post-internet.
104
What is a market?
The total of all the potential sellers and buyers for a particular product (and the number of products likely to be exchanged)
105
What is marketing?
The process of presenting a product to its target audience; the ways in which it is positioned in its particular market.
106
What is 'mode of address'?
The way a text 'speaks' to its audiences and, it is often argued, thereby 'positions' them - as young, old, respected or not etc.
107
What is a moral panic?
A term for a widespread public panic around a perceived 'crisis', often involving the overreaction of certain kinds of new media, and accompanying calls that 'something must be done', leading to pressure for legislation, 'stiffer penalties' etc.
108
What does the term 'multimedia' refer to?
Several traditionally separate media being used together e.g sound, image and text on computers.
109
What is narration?
The process of telling a story, the selection and organisation of the events for a particular audience.
110
What is a narrative?
Specialist term referring to the 'telling' of a sequence of events organised into a story. This shapes the events, characters, arrangement of time, etc. in very particular ways so as to invite particular positions towards the 'story' on the part of audiences.
111
What is narrowcasting?
A term which contrasts itself with broadcasting to draw attention to the assumed fragmentation of audiences addressed by much TV now.
112
What are news agencies?
Organisations =, such as Reuters, which gather news stories and sell them to broadcasters and newspaper publishers.
113
What are news values?
A set of widely recognised but rarely explicitly stated criteria used to select and prioritise news stories for publication. Now seen as a broad if rather reductionist guide, needing to be partly updated, especially to take account of 24-hour news ad interactive media.
114
What are niche markets?
Very small but highly profitable markets which can sometimes support specialist advertising-led media products.
115
What is a plot?
Defined in relation to 'story' as those events in a narrative which are presented to an audience directly. Others may be ignored because they are so routine (going to the bathroom) or 'hidden' to produce suspense.
116
What is privatisation?
Process by which services or utilities in the public sector are transferred to private ownership.
117
What is product placement?
An unofficial form of advertising in which branded products feature prominently in films etc.
118
What is propaganda?
Any media text which seeks openly to persuade an audience of the validity of particular beliefs or actions. Term is sometimes applied to 'black propaganda' which isn't open about its intentions e.g in wartime.
119
What is public service?
A service provided with a prime aim of meeting perceived social needs, rather than private profit. In broadcasting can be a requirement of a licence granted to private sector companies.
120
What is public service broadcasting (PSB)?
Regulated broadcasting which has 'providing a public service' as a primary aim.
121
What is qualitative research?
Research based on exploring the qualities of 'texts', defined broadly to include transcriptions of discussion groups, interviews, etc. as well as individual films, articles, game set-ups and so on.
122
What is quantitative analysis?
Partly defined by being amenable to statistical analysis, which qualitative research is not, generally.
123
What is 'reality TV'?
Form of factual TV on UK screens from about 1989. Now used loosely of TV which is largely unscripted, making substantial use of ordinary people, and mixing information and entertainment forms.
124
What does regulation mean?
The process of monitoring and to an extent controlling the activities of industries. Some media industries regulate themselves and others are regulated by bodies set up by legislation.
125
What is re-mediation?
The entry of one (usually older) media form into another, usually argued as occurring in the early years of a new medium (e.g early cinema used and adapted theatrical forms).
126
What is retro-sexism?
Recent term to describe the ways that older subordinate positions for women (as sex objects, as lower earning than men etc) can be discerned beneath the apparent irony and playfulness of 'laddish' and 'ladette' cultures, arguments about the 'empowerment' involved in pole dancing etc.
127
What is a shooting ratio?
The ratio between the total amount of footage filmed and the amount actually used in a final edited film or TV production.
128
What is social media?
Any tool or service that uses the internet to facilitate conversations.
129
What is soft money?
Film industry term for funding that derives from various forms of public revenue support such as tax breaks, grants etc
130
What is a story?
All of the events in a narrative, those presented directly to an audience and those which might be inferred.
131
What is subliminal advertising?
Kind of advertising associated with hypnosis. Said to work by flashing barely perceptible messages to audiences in between frames of a film or TV adverts. The idea still fascinates, though it's now discredited.
132
What is synergy?
The combined marketing of 'products' or commodities (inc people) across different media and other products, which are often owned by the same corporation such that the total effect is greater than the sum of the different parts.
133
What is a tabloid?
The size of a newsprint page, half that of the broadsheet; by extension: sensationalist media form (TV and radio as well as the press). Many broadsheet papers are now tabloid sized, so in the UK the term red-top often substitutes for tabloid.
134
What is 'unique selling proposition' (USP)?
Term used in brand advertising for the supposedly unique quality of products which advertisers seek to communicate to potential buyers.
135
What does verisimilitude mean?
Quality of seeming like what is taken to be the real world of a particular text.
136
What is voyeurism?
The pleasure of looking while unseen; has been used in thinking about (assumed) male pleasure in the ways cinema, advertising etc. construct women as 'objects of the male gaze'.
