Theorists Flashcards
Levi Strauss
Binary Opposition
- A signs meaning is derived from its context and binary opposites formed the basis of humanity’s understanding of reality.
Roland Barthes
Semiotics + Enigma Code
Semiotics - Signs, Signifier + Signified (Connotation + Denotation).
Enigma Code - When a narrative deliberately withholds information from the audience with the intent of leaving tings unexplained, causing us to form our own conclusions.
Judith Butler
Gender Performativity
- Feminism has made a mistake by trying to assert that ‘women’ were a group with common. characteristics and interests.
Stanley Cohen
Believed that the media are often responsible for stoking fear and terror about social issues such as violence in the media, which results in ‘moral panics’.
Noam Chomsky
Freedom of Speech
- if we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all.
Livingstone & Lunt
The needs of a citizen are in conflict with the needs of the consumers, because protection can limit freedom.
Regulating media to protect citizens from harmful content can limit freedom of expression.
David Gauntlett
Does not believe the media causes violence and thinks that causation is impossible to prove.
Thinks Bandura and other people that believe this are gullible and stupid.
Laura Mulvey
Male Gaze
- Where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and are represented as passive objects of male desire.
Henry Jenkins
Media Spread
- The concept of online media becoming participatory and interactive.
Textual Poachers - How fans construct their own culture by poaching content from the mass media.
Participatory Culture - How audiences are active and create participants rather than passive consumers.
Fandom - Social structures and cultural practices created by the most passionately engaged consumers of mass media.
Curran and Seaton
Power And Responsibility
- How the media narrow in their business model so that few companies own and control the majority of media output. Gaining the ability to control and gatekeep what we do and do not receive.
Tapscott and Williams
Prosumer (Wikinomics)
- The merging roles of producer and consumer.
Prosumer - focuses on the idea that the creation and development of a media product is largely based on its unlikely audience. Entirely created by its customers, who become the producers.
David Hesmondhalgh
Cultural Industries
- Major conglomerate media companies try to minimise risk and maximise audiences through vertical and horizontal integration, formatting their cultural products.
Clay Shirky
Active Audiences
- Every consumer is also now a producer. No longer are we a passive audience, but instead we interact with, and sometimes produce our own media.
Gerd Leonard
Content 2.0
- Companies no longer rely on making money from simply distributing their films/music because piracy is so common.
- Offer their products in a way that is ‘better than three’ with additional experience.
IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES.
Alvarado
Non-White Characters
- Exotic
- Pitied
- Dangerous
- Comedic
Stuart Hall
‘These representations do not reflect reality but they are engaged in defining reality’.
Antonio Gramsci
Cultural Hegemony
- Does the representation reinforce stereotypes, reproducing dominant ideology, normalising the status quo?. Is this a form of cultural hegemony.
Dutton
How are the audience positioned to respond to the stereotype, to laugh/pity/fear the group individual.
Lyotard
‘Death Of The Grand Narrative’,
The postmodern age has turned to a smaller, narrower petit recis (little narratives), such as the history of everyday life and of marginalised groups.
Focus has shifted away from traditional narratives, to smaller and more subjective ones.
Baudrillard
Simulacra and Hyperreality
- Four stages of simulation, each stage becomes less connected to reality until the fourth stage which is ‘pure simulacra’ - no connection whatsoever to reality.
- Simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and ‘false’, and the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’.
Angela McRobbie
‘The coming into being of those whose voices were historically drowned out by the modernist metanarratives of mastery, which were in turn both patriarchal and imperialist’.
- the emergence of individuals/groups whose perspectives were ignored or oppressed, implying a shift in societal awareness and acknowledgment of previous marginalised voices.
Roland Barthes
‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author’.
- The death of the author explains that each reader experiences texts subjectively, therefore the author does not control the reader’s experience of the text.
Pariser - Postmodernism
‘A passing of torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones’,
‘Invisible algorithmic editing of the web’.
