Theories Flashcards
To learn the theories and the theorists
What is Curran and Seaton’s power and media industries theory?
The idea that the media is controlled by a small number of companies primarily driven by profit and power.
What is Livingstone and Lunt’s Regulation Theory?
The idea that there is an underlying struggle in recent UK regulation policy between the needs to further the interests of citizens (by offering protection from harmful or offensive material), and the needs to further the interests of consumers (by ensuring choice, value for money, and market competition)
What is David Hesmondhalgh’s Cultural Industries Theory?
The idea that cultural industry companies try to minimise risk and maximise audiences through vertical and horizontal integration, and by formatting their cultural products (e.g. through the use of stars, genres and serials)
What is Albert Bandura’s Media effects Theory?
The idea that media representations of transgressive behaviour, such as violence or psychical aggression, can lead audience members to initiate those forms of behaviour.
What is George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory?
The idea that exposure to repeated patterns of representation over long periods of time can shape and influence the way in which people perceive the world around them.
What is Stuart Hall’s reception theory?
The idea that there are three hypothetical positions from which messages and meanings may be decoded:
• the dominant reading - the encoder’s intended meaning (the preferred reading) is fully understood and accepted.
• the negotiated reading - the legitimacy of the encoder’s message is acknowledged in general terms, although the message is adapted or negotiated to better fit the decoder’s own individual experiences or context
• the oppositional reading - the encoder’s message is understood, but the decoder disagrees with it, reading it in a contrary or oppositional way.
What is Henry Jenkins’ Fandom Theory?
The idea that fans construct their social and cultural identities through borrowing and infecting mass culture images, and are part of a participatory culture that has a viral social dimension.
What is Clay Shirky’s End of Audience Theory?
The idea that the internet and digital technologies have had a profound effect on the relations between media and individuals.
What is Barthes’ Semiotics Theory?
5 different semiotic elements that are common in all texts.
- Action Codes
- Cultural Codes
- Semantic Codes (Hidden Meaning)
- Symbolic Codes
- Enigma Codes (Mystery)
What is Todorov’s Narrative Theory?
The idea that all narratives share a basic structure that involves a movement from one state of equilibrium to another.
What is Steve Neale’s Genre Theory?
The idea that genres may be dominated by repetition, but are also marked by difference, variation and change.
What is Levi-Strauss’ Structuralism Theory?
The idea that texts can best be understood through an examination of their underlying structure.
What is Baudrillard’s Postmodernism Theory?
The idea that media images have come to seem more ‘real’ than the reality they supposedly represent (hyperreality)
What is Stuart Hall’s Theory of Representation
(think stereotyping)
The idea that stereotyping, as a form of representation, reduces people to a few simple characteristics or traits.
What is Gauntlett’s Theory of Identity?
The idea that the media provides us with ‘tools’ or resources that we use to construct our identities.
