Week 3 Language Flashcards
Language as Site of Power
- Representation is like a dialogue: encode/decode
- Meanings are stabilized by power
- Language is not neutral, it is gendered, racialized, and shaped by social and economic conditions
- It is constitutive part of media representations, negotiated and contested by audiences
The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language
- Social uses of language owe their specifically social value to fact that they tend to be organized in systems of differences which reproduce in symbolic order of differentiated deviations in system of social differences
Domination 101
- Power stabilizes meanings
- Meanings are based on binary distinctions
- These distinctions carry particular values (+/-)
- Access is limited: capacity to speak is universal but socially conditioned ways of realizing this natural capacity
Postrace and Feminism
- Impressions that markers of identity (eg race, gender) no longer matter
- Conceal discrimination: pretending it doesn’t exist
- Language is structured by binary distinctions that are embedded in social and economic conditions
Media Studies and Audiences
- Media culture: “the materials out of which people forge their very identities
- Media representations: one of the ways in which ideological struggle takes place and ideologies are transformed is by articulating elements differently, thereby producing different meaning
- Audiences construct self-images in conversation with their screens
Language as Domination (Pierre Bourdieu)
- Official language is bound up with state, both in its genesis and in social uses
- Integration into single linguistic community, which is a product of political domination that is endlessly reproduced by institutions capable of imposing universal recognition of dominant language, is condition fro establishment of relations of linguistic domination
Language as Cultural Space and Site of Power
Representation is like a dialogue: encode/decode
- “What sustains the “dialogue” is the presence of shared cultural codes, which cannot guarantee that meanings will remain stable forever - though attempting to fix meaning is exactly why power intervenes in discourse”
- “But, even when power is circulating through meaning and knowledge, codes only work if they are to some degree shared, at least to extent that they make effective translation between speakers possible”
Info Literacy
- “Info literacy means being able to recognize that there are hierarchies in source quality, pseudo-facts can easily masquerade as facts, and biases can distort information we are being asked to consider, leading to bad decisions and bad results
News Literacy (Questions to ask)
- What’s the source?
- Why is it credible
- Why is it important?
Three kinds of conversation (Duhigg)
- What’s this really about?
- How do we feel?
- Who are we?
- Decision making mindset: negotiating opinions, discussing intellectual concepts, determining what to discuss
- Emotional mindset: shaped by beliefs, emotions, and memories
- Social mindset: thinking about “other people, oneself, and the relation of oneself with other people” (Lieberman)
Effective Communication
- Knowing what kind of conversation is occurring
- Synchronizing
- Symmetry: “Matching isn’t mimicry”
Rise of Storytelling
- Narrative journalism
- Narrative therapy
- Narrative mediation
- Political narratives
- Narratives in branding, marketing, advertising
Sociology of Storytelling
- How do stories work?
- What are they good for?
- Why should they be trusted?
- How are they related to power, solidarity, inequality, and social change
Plot (different kind of explanation)
- Plot is NOT an explanation based on formal logic
- Plot is structure of a story
- What would otherwise be mere occurrences is assembled in way so that it creates casual links between event
Types of Paradigm
- Rational-World Paradigm (‘Rationality’ is determined by how much we know and how well we argue)
- Narrative Paradigm (‘Narrative rationality’ is determined by coherence and fidelity of our stories)
