Midterm Flashcards
Why study media?
Media allows us to get a sense of the world
Media Literacy **
Ability to apply critical thinking skills to media
Utopian, Dystopian & Mirror views + critiques
Utopian:
Dystopian:
Mirror Views:
Cultural Studies & Methods
- Textual Analysis
- Audience Studies
- Political Economy
Ideology
Ideology:
- unconscious values & beliefs that people use to make sense of the world that they live in
- pleasures of consumption viewed as admirable and fundamental units of life
- Conditioned to accept these from birth from powerful institutions: families, religion, education, media texts
- hidden dimensions of ideology in stories we tell and hear
- listening to authority rather than community knowledge
- can be widely shared but not universal; there are many ideologies and numerous ways of making sense of the world
Hegemony & Counter-Hegemony
Hegemony: process of maintaining power
- line the powerful pockets not through force but through agreement
- struggle for a groups ideology to become the dominant ideology
- dominant class doesn’t rule but leads through a specific type of consensus that shows their interests as the interests of general society as a whole
- more effective way of ruling than a police state
- attaining and maintaining
Counter-Hegemony: dominant ideologies must be constantly reaffirmed through the media
Hall’s circuit model of comunication
- meaning is shaped in multiple stages
- each stage generates meaning and impacts the others; producers can’t fully control meaning
- always going to be people who reject and misunderstand
1st stage: production -where message is produced 2nd stage: circulation -message is distributed; meaning articulated/translated over medium of voice/air; but if super noisy than that's a factor that impacts circulation 3rd stage: consumption -message is received; meaning here can be shaped by factors going on inside them; Do they understand references being made? 4th stage: reproduction/feedback -message is accepted and reproduced
meaning is dependent on the audience in the circuit
Texts as polysemic
-not fixed in meaning
-can be understood/decoded in multiple ways (South Park Ginger Kid Kicking)
-Audience usually recognizes what media maker is doing but not always
SO: variable interpretations mean that texts are as sites of struggle
AND: different interests compete to promote different ideologies - people want to argue that their decoding is the most convincing
Hall’s encoding and decoding model
Encoding: how the producers put meaning into their production
Decoding: how the audiences perceive and interpret
Texts are ENCODED at the level of production
-producers encode program w/ preferred meanings
-wants to provoke a specific emotive response
-Producers usually ideologically/economically linked to hegemonic elite
Texts are DECODED at the level of consumption
-where the viewer fits into this; viewer attempts to make sense of text
Three decoding positions:
1. Dominant/Hegemonic = accepts preferred meaning
2. Negotiated = partially accepts/understands preferred meaning
3. Oppositional/counterhegemonic = rejects preferred meaning favor of alter; sometimes bc of misunderstanding
Values of encoding/decoding model
- helps us recognize that all media messages contain more than one potential reading; media maker may prefer ambiguity or might want to make it visible and evident and powerful
- media maker can’t control audience’s meaning making capacities
- escape from linear system of communication - our experiences color our decodings; expresses how ones one life associations impact the reading experience
- struggle with getting people’s ideological agreement; people are always debating with meaning
Criticisms of encoding/decoding
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Encoding: different codes can be interpreted differently
Celebrity
- person who attracts public and media attention
- his/her off-screen lifestyle & personality are of interest to the public that feeds off of it
- private life is something that audiences and media want to know more about and uncover
Intertextual vs. Extratextual
Intratextual: analyzing based on work they’ve done within the entertainment industry
Extratextual: everything else in the celebrity’s life
Star Text & its four components
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Startext: sum of everthing we afiiliate with them, bcz of this we can analyze them by meaning in songs, movies, and tv. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Celebrity of audience-driven
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huh
relevant fantasy (Fiske) **
…
definition of genre
content sharing the same conventions & codes; an attempt to manufacture success; to make the unpredictable predictable; a means of creating familiarity in new texts
genre conventions vs. codes ** (3)
Conventions: specific narrative elements (STORY)
- Setting - where does a show take place?: in space think of scifi; westerns in frontier towns
- Character type - a character found in genres (ex: sitcoms goofy man child)
- Plot/narrative structure - typical plots
- Iconography - typical images (ex: Western = tumbleweed)
- Emotional affect - comedies make us laugh, melodramas make us cry
Codes: modes of production external to the narrative (STYLE)
- length (ex: comedies usually 30min drama 1hr)
- visual style: lighting, editing, camerawork, animation (ex: laughtrack
industrial utility of genre
Management of consumer interest/expectation managed through promotion
1) Attempt to make success predictable
- production trend = if people like the genre, make more
- reduces risk by allowing producers to rely on past success
- organizes production
2) genre acts as a “contract” between producers & audiences
- we use genre to suit our moods; labels/containers of the familiar
- consumers know what to expect; feel like a comedy; horror film; we understand elements of genre even if we can’t articulate them
genre mutations and recombinations**
combine elements of two or more established genres
(genre provides predictability and surprise)
(mediamakers use, change, subvert codes and conventions)
Ex: Zombieland, failure: CopRock
Mutation: putting two or more genres together that dont really match?
genre as a cultural category (Mittell)
-old approach: compare a set of shows belonging in a genre, where category predetermined before analysis
PROBLEM? circular reasoning (have to know what sitcom is before pick programs to study)
new approach: genre is a cultural category, by critics, audience, scholars, industry
-We know what genre is by the way it’s discussed in culture, so we understand how genres change with how they’re defined, interpreted, evaluated.
-texts not so much examples of genres but sites of generic discourse that positions genre. and bc discourses change, genre categorizations change
characters, narrators and audiences (3) ***
characters:
narrators:
audiences:
anthology, episodic, serial (TV Narrative forms) (3) **
Anthology
- Self contained, closure brings a new/final status quo
- Program would begin with a status quo, and end with a new one
- Next week : new setting, new characters
• Episodic
- Circular closure : Status quo is disrupted but returned to at the end of the program
- Econ advantages :
• Same characters, similar situations
• Audiences become loyal, but it’s OK to miss/mix-up episodes
• Serial
- Continual change of status quo
- Accumulation of detail, characters and storyline multiply, history
- Economic disadvantage : can alienate viewers
- Economic advantages : potential for revision
• Fosters “loyals”
TV & multiple plotlines
• Some stories have multiple plot lines
- “A plot” : primary conflict (most screen time) usually with lead character
- “B plot”, “C plot”, etc. : secondary conflicts (“subplots”) usually with secondary characters
beat, episode, arc
beat: smallest mode of narrative (builds plots, but also contains drama and purpose)
episode: most familiar mode of storytelling (structured by culmination/theme, 3/4 acts (curtains before commercials)
arc: crosses several episodes or seasons, storyline or character arcs, goal: continued audience engagement
narrative complexity & context for experimentation
• Some TV is “narratively complex” in order to:
- Appeal to desirable and “loyal” demographics
- Take advantage of new technologies
• Context for experimentation
- Improved cultural clout
- For advertisers: increase viabilities for smaller audiences
- New technologies enable “rewatchability”
- Growth of online engagement with television
- Highly engaged audiences are more receptive to commercial breaks and more likely to remember advertising
“operational aesthetic” (Mittell)
- Audiences enjoy trying to follow how the plot works
- Ex: Seinfeld, episodes started with four plot lines for each of the main characters, and they all came together at the end of the episode
- Long arcs and refusal of closure
- Enigma that the plot slowly builds to resolve
- Analysis of plot and style
- Invites long-term engagement through disorientation and confusion (false leads, complications, swerves, wild goose chases, etc.), keeps you anticipating what’s going to happen next
- Encourages focus on story world and plot mechanics
- Result : audiences focus on formal analysis in addition to content
“realism”
realism is measured in plausibility (collection of material facts filtered through own experiences)
constructing “realism”
- all media representations impacted by commercial concerns, creator bias, the acts of reading and editing, etc.
- so no unbiased, objective representations of reality (but some more/less unbiased than others)
hyperreality
- Reality TV is manipulated to be exciting but also retain the appearance of reality
- Hyperreal : constructed to suit audience expectations
- More real than real
- This is shaped through codes and conventions
- “I’m not here to make friends” : somebody says it because they are expected to
four ways of constructing reality TV (Kraszewski)
1.
2.
3.
4.
characteristics of consumer culture
• Focus on accumulation consumer goods
• Tied to free choice and identity
• Tradition becomes lifestyle (an elective community)
• Results:
- Isolated from tradition and community, we become open to manipulation (through media)
results of consumer culture
• Results:
- Isolated from tradition and community, we become open to manipulation (through media)
- Creates inexhaustible dissatisfaction
mass culture & what it provides
-commodities produced for maximum profit, not from the masses, FOR the masses.
standardized and pacified.
GOAL: to promote escapist consumerism rather than responsible citizenship.
PROVIDES:
-artifical concerns (cheats people out of real happiness)
-absorbs leisure time
-no sense of collectivity/community
false consciousnessi
- definition: mislead people into believing that root of happiness is through consumption rather than upward mobility.
- protects power from threats and lines pockets from distracted/deceived workers spending money on this
- messages communicated through ideological work
mass media industrialization
Media is recycled. Popular media becomes ….
critiques of Frankfurt School
disregards how the media can be influenced by the consumers and how it is a cycle.
cultural studies & quality
audience more powerful, where popular culture is site of contestation and discussion
given to people, but they decide what to do with it (adapt/understand in different way)
quality: who has the power to decide what is quality? Whose tastes are being marginalized? (must look beyond of judgement into context)
material function vs. cultural function (Fiske)
Material function: role in circulation of wealth (example: in “Beautiful” by Cristina Aguilera, still meant to sell song to make money, bring attention to album)
Cultural function: role in the circulation of meaning, something that can be adapted (example: “Beautiful” has social message of girl power, positive body image)
DIFFERENCE?? between power of culture industry and power of impact
popular culture as a process (Fiske)
Pop culture is a process, not thing or category, of distributing and sharing meaning making.
in industrialized world, assembled from resources not of own making, but still not just derivative circulations of meanings, creating new understandings, identities, experiences, pleasures
=INCLUSIVE
But always contains opposition or subversion within it
pop culture analysis
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incorporation vs. excorporation
Incorporation: Companies scanning popular culture for new trends (mass culture) and ways to make money
Excorporation: Consumers scan mass culture and reappropriate it as popular culture
popular culture & immediacy
Relationship btw Mass Culture & Popular culture always unstable with competing interpretations, feedback loop—what audiences do with culture incorporated into cultural production, and way that makes market products is excorporated
o PC texts “throwaway”
o PC ties to immediate social conditions (Aren’t meant to last forever)
o Useful because represents immediate values and social concerns
criticisms of popular culture
· Populist celebration (romanticized reaction to celebrate consumption, culture, and audience resistance instead of interrogating)
· Can spread repressive representations too
· Validates dominant/commercial interests in people rather than objecting
· Audiences can be active but that doesn’t mean they’re powerful. CAN ONLY RESPOND, not create so much
four media production logics
• Focus on accumulation consumer goods
• Tied to free choice and identity
• Tradition becomes lifestyle (an elective community)
• Results:
- Isolated from tradition and community, we become open to manipulation (through media)
- Creates inexhaustible dissatisfaction
two hybrid production logics
1: Economies of Scope - selling a product across multiple revenue streams
2: Combo of forms (newspapers are both commodities and they are ad supported media.)
rationalizing the consumption process
Hedge the likelihood of success/reduce the risk by using proven tactics and formulas (making the unfamiliar familiar/predictable)
eight advertising persuasive techniques
1: famous person testimonial
2: plain-folks pitch-product fits into the lives of everyday people
3: snob appeal-product will elevate your social status
4: association principle-associate product with positive image or value
5: bandwagon effect-claims you are being left behind
6: hidden fear appeal: plays on anxiety or insecurity
7: irritation advertising-produce name recognition by getting in your head, more common with local advertising (example apply directly to your head)
8: shock advertising- edgy appeal cuts through
technological determinism vs. SCOT vs. SST
technological determinism:
SCOT:
SST:
“the medium is the message” (McLuhan)
the sensory experiences of emerging media shape our thinking. The media itself is more important than the content. “people powerless in the face of new technology;” ideas branch off from TD
convergence
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technological & context convergence
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transmedia extensions
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transmedia storytelling (Mikos)
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advantages of context convergence
- keeps audience engaged between airings and maintains their attention across media
- collects two kinds of viewers: demographically wide AND desirables “loyals”
- by requiring viewers to use multiple media, they are exposed to even more ads
convenience techs & what they allow more of digital divide
-gap between those with access to digital techs and those without (and why)
-also quality of access, familiarity, and social interactions
-more skilled, can use internet to better your life
1st level: WHO? white, male, urban, American, younger, mid to upper class, (college) educated
2nd level: not that they can’t, but don’t know how to (use tech to better life) like job search, learn language, code?, product recalls, news)
domestication of technology
successfully domesticated → ordinary
integrated, no longer fascinating, practically invisible, fears and panic diminish
:: who gets to use media and at what cost?
Dominant ideology
- has ruling ideas that support the status quo shared by the majority
- power in society unequally distributed; elites have the power to shape ideology through institutional control
- Dominant Ideology result of conditioning held by the majority
- reinforces the power of the few - make it possible to rise above social standing
- yet shared by the majority
