Toolkits: Essential Flashcards
Anchorage
Directing receivers towards one particular meaning from a range of possible meanings. A caption can anchor the meaning of a photograph.
Barrier
Anything which interferes with the processes of communication.
Channel
A communication route or connection.
Connotation
The meanings in a text that are revealed through the receiver’s own personal and cultural experience.
Convention
A rule of artistic practice.
Decode
To convert an encoded message into a form that can be understood.
Denotation
The specific, direct or obvious meaning of a sign rather than its associated meanings: those things directly referenced by a sign.
Encode
To convert a message into a means capable of being transmitted.
Form and Content
These describe the essential relationship between the ‘shape’ of a text (how it’s made) and ‘what’s in it/what it’s about’.
Function
What a text, group of texts, or indeed communication itself ‘does’ (inform, persuade, entertain, socialise, ect).
Gatekeeper
Someone who controls the selection of information to be offered to a
given channel. Thus, for example, newspaper editors are significant gatekeepers, but
we are all gatekeepers in an interpersonal sense, deciding as we do what we
communicate and what we omit or hold back.
Genre
Describes the subdivisions of the output of a given medium (e.g.
television, film, magazine publishing). A genre is a type, a particular version of a
communication medium. For example, soap opera is a television genre, for it
represents a particular approach to theme, style and form.
Icon
A sign that works by its similarity to the thing it represents.
Index
A type of sign (in C.S. Peirce’s categorisation) that has a direct or causal
relationship with its signified. The sign points (like an index finger) to its signified.
Smoke is an index of fire.
Medium (and Media)
The method(s) we use to communicate.