Week 1: Culture, Context, Para-social, Development of Technology

Question 1

Communication

Answer 1

Practice of creating meanings

Question 2

Culture

Answer 2

Totality of communication practices and systems of meaning

Question 3

Cultural literacy

Answer 3

The knowledge of meaning systems, the ability to negotiate meaning systems within different cultural contexts (analysis of communications often involve analysis of culture as well)

Question 4

Pierre Bourdieu

Answer 4

The analogy of the journey and the map.

The map = rules and conventions
The journey = cultural practices

Question 5

When is one culturally literate?

Answer 5

When one can negotiate through cultural rules and conventions

Question 6

What does practice mean?

Answer 6

Performance of cultural literacy

Question 7

Pierre Bourdieu

Answer 7

• Communications is a cultural practice
• Communications require cultural literacy
• What we do is constrained by and develops in response to the rules and conventions of a culture

Question 8

Communication and culture (basic components)

Answer 8

• Communication and culture cannot be separated

- Meaning and practice are context specific

Question 9

Sender Message Receiver (SMR Model)

Answer 9

Communications was seen as a tangible thing - something that can be held

Question 10

How do we communicate when we do not understand what the other is saying?

Answer 10

Binaries - how meaning is produced through 2 different concepts
Markers - signs of difference

Question 11

Why do binaries and markers matter?

Answer 11

Because they are capable of creating or indicating hierarchies and power relations

Question 12

Context

Answer 12

Context is made up of meaning systems (eg: fashion, body language, religious codes), material conditions (urban or rural), participants or members

Question 13

Contextual complications?

Answer 13

Not everyone agrees what a certain context means. Meanings can change according to persons, place and time

Question 14

How are contexts made stable?

Answer 14

• Some contexts are regulated (legal, army)

- Regulated by ‘ideology’ - how we understand and make meaning of the world

Question 15

How does one make meaning of the world?

Answer 15

• Mediated by family, friends, experiences
• Physical and social (Before, when one wanted to know the news, they had to travel)
• Modern communications broke down boundaries (eg: FB enables people to make friends all over the world)
• Electronic messages no longer weighed down by paper letters

Question 16

Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard

Answer 16

Derrida - “there is nothing outside of the (con)text”
Baudrillard - “The Gulf War did not really happen - rather it created the theatre of war (He also said that “art doesn’t exist”)

Question 17

Paul Levinson

Answer 17

• Rejects social theorists critique that media distorts the human condition
• Argues that human beings use media to recreate what is ‘natural’ and ‘human’

Question 18

The para-social

Answer 18

• Talk show hosts have a way of breaking down boundaries
• One feels that a host is one’s friend (eg: Ellen Degeneres)
• How does this take place in our lives? Real friends vs para-social friends
• Applied to media - death of Nelson Mandela: funeral was televised
• Fan letters and shows of support to favourite artists, actors, actresses

Question 19

Para-social relationships

Answer 19

• They are one-sided, where one person invests their energy and time whereas the other party is completely unaware of the others’ existence

Question 20

Masses

Answer 20

• New word for mob
• Product of modern, urban and industrial society
• Are large and anonymous
• Are described as detached, unstable, leaderless with no organisations or rules
• Often looked down upon due to its working class background
• Yet, known to be convergent when issues unite or bring people together
• Differs from crowds because there is no will or location

Question 21

Mass democracy

Answer 21

In a mass democracy, mass communication has the power to influence political decisions

Question 22

“The man on the street”

Answer 22

Argument: most of us know ourselves too well to fit into the category of the ‘man on the street’

• Therefore, we are not the masses - other people are
• The man on the street is a collective image, but we know our differences from him

Question 23

History of mass comm

Answer 23

• pre mass comms: oral language
• printing: 1800s
• transport: road, rail, sea, air
• cable, telephone, telegraph
• new media, radio, cinema, TV

Question 24

Distinguishing features in mass comms

Answer 24

• Audience is physically not present
• Mass comms require technical means (books vs film and radio)
• often understood as commodified (advertising)
• messages are restricted and regulated (newspapers and the state)

Question 25

Analysing mass comms?

Answer 25

• socio-historical (eg history of media institution)
• how the message is constructed (eg censorship)
• modes of reception (eg what is the audience context - young or old?)
• ideology (ways of understanding the world): can contribute towards our selective reproduction of ideologies of cultural forms. Media selectively extracts then selectively expands