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.
Message
The meaning carried by an act of communication or text.
Model
A graphic or verbal representation of communication processes or aspects of them: a diagrammatic representation of a communication issue.
Noise Source
The origin of any barrier to communication.
Open and Closed Texts
Eco talked about two tendencies of texts: the tendency to
be ‘open’ and allow/invite/encourage a wide range of different interpretations: the
opposite tendency presents ‘closed’ text which can only be read in a limited number
of ways, sometimes only one way.
Process School
A school of thought in which communication is conceived as a process whereby information is transmitted.
Reader
The active interpreter of a message.
Reading
Hall et al. conceive of three distinct ‘varieties’:
a) Dominant-hegemonic: the ‘intended’ meaning or ‘preferred’ reading
b) Negotiated: an interpretation of a text that identifies the dominant reading but
also seeks to mediate this
c) Oppositional: any reading that rejects or significantly ‘quarrels’ with the
dominant reading and/or presents different/contrary meanings.
Receiver
Someone to whom a message is directed.
Register
A form of linguistic performance which is responsive to the situation in which communication is taking place.
Semiotics
The study of signs and how they communicate.
Sender
The originator of communication.
Sign
That which stands for or represents an object, idea or mental concept.
Symbol
An arbitrary sign that works by the agreement among people as to what it represents.
Text
This term is used to refer to anything which can be ‘read’ for meaning. In this
sense, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a bowler hat, a television advertisement and
Buckingham Palace are all texts.
