Week 1: Culture, Context, Para-social, Development of Technology Flashcards
Communication
Practice of creating meanings
Culture
Totality of communication practices and systems of meaning
Cultural literacy
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)
Pierre Bourdieu
The analogy of the journey and the map.
The map = rules and conventions
The journey = cultural practices
When is one culturally literate?
When one can negotiate through cultural rules and conventions
What does practice mean?
Performance of cultural literacy
Pierre Bourdieu
- 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
Communication and culture (basic components)
- Communication and culture cannot be separated
- Meaning and practice are context specific
Sender Message Receiver (SMR Model)
Communications was seen as a tangible thing - something that can be held
How do we communicate when we do not understand what the other is saying?
Binaries - how meaning is produced through 2 different concepts
Markers - signs of difference
Why do binaries and markers matter?
Because they are capable of creating or indicating hierarchies and power relations
Context
Context is made up of meaning systems (eg: fashion, body language, religious codes), material conditions (urban or rural), participants or members
Contextual complications?
Not everyone agrees what a certain context means. Meanings can change according to persons, place and time
How are contexts made stable?
- Some contexts are regulated (legal, army)
- Regulated by ‘ideology’ - how we understand and make meaning of the world
How does one make meaning of the world?
- 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
Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard
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”)
Paul Levinson
- Rejects social theorists critique that media distorts the human condition
- Argues that human beings use media to recreate what is ‘natural’ and ‘human’
The para-social
- 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
Para-social relationships
- They are one-sided, where one person invests their energy and time whereas the other party is completely unaware of the others’ existence
Masses
- 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
Mass democracy
In a mass democracy, mass communication has the power to influence political decisions
“The man on the street”
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
History of mass comm
- pre mass comms: oral language
- printing: 1800s
- transport: road, rail, sea, air
- cable, telephone, telegraph
- new media, radio, cinema, TV
Distinguishing features in mass comms
- 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)
Analysing mass comms?
- 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
