Media Glossary

Key Terms:

Apathy – Not caring

Archetypal – Typical behaviour or actions

Associations – When things are linked together

Binary Oppositions – Class/race/gender/age/disability

Brand – The company or name that gets popular, attached to the person or product

Buzz Words – Words that have certain triggers

Collective Identity – Sense of belonging, sharing same interests as others

Connotations – The implied messages within media texts

Construction – The way something is put together

Counter Culture – A culture that goes against the mainstream

Democracy – The choice of voting for what you want

Dichotomous – The division of something

Direct Address – When a product or person is made to be reaching out to you personally

Enigma - Mysterious

Global media – The media worldwide

Hegemony – Dominant view

Iconography – Visuals associated with a person, can be part of their collective identity

Identity – Your characteristics and personality

Identity Construction – The creation of an identity

Ideology – A set of ideas

Intertextuality – Referencing other films

Marketing – The way something is advertised to the public

Marxism – Communism, one way of thinking and living

Media Saturated – Media is inescapable, we see it everywhere

Mediated – Changed, adapted

Mise en Scene – Literally what’s on the set (costume, props, backdrop)

Moral Panic – A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order.

Narrative – Story line

Neo Marxism – Modern Communism

Perspective – The viewpoint of someone or something

Post Modernism – Our reality is constructed

Regulation – Censorship, blocking of content

Representation – The way something is portrayed. (editing, camera, colours, mise en scene etc.)

Social inclusion – The breakup of groups

Social Order – Stance and status (hierarchy)

Socio-economic factors - associated with childhood survival and the economic perceptions of large family size

Star – The popular figure

Subculture – A group with their own separate beliefs to society

Subservient – Doing something without question

Subversion – Going against the stereotype or social norm

Superimposition – Overlying message

The Feminine Mystique – Women are capable of what men are doing

The Male Gaze – Women objectified by male media

Verisimilitude – The appearance of being true or real

Web 2.0 – Websites that allow users to create and share content rather than just receive it.

Althusser – Interpellation – We become bombarded with messaged, we become a subject rather than an individual as soon as we engage them, they control us (post modernism).

Blumer & Katz - Audience Gratification – Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine. Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life. Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts. Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains.

David Buckingham “A focus on identity requires us to pay closer attention to the ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequences for social groups”.

David Gauntlett – “Identity is complicated – everybody thinks they’ve got one”.

Henri Jenkins – Teens are constantly updating and customising their profiles online adding photos and songs and posting to each other’s virtual ‘walls’. While this could be interpreted as just playing around, these activities could also be a means to construct an experiment with their identity. In particular, it can be a space for exploring one’s gender identification and sexuality.

Henri Tajfel – Individuals strive to improve their self-image by trying to enhance their self-esteem, based on their personal identity or various social identities - ‘in’ group, ‘out’ group.

Hypodermic Needle Model – Media is like a drug, it’s all around us and we even take it in without trying. The Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciousness of the audience unmediated; the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text.

Jacques Lacan – Mirror stage study, child development. Children are able to recognise their selves in a mirror at a young age.

Jeff Shanz – Living anarchy (theory of Practice in Anarchist Movements).

Karl Marx – Marxism theory.

Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs – A pyramid of needs:

Biological and Physiological > Safety > Belongingness and Love > Esteem > Self actualisation

Merlau Ponty – We have an embodied experience and anything in which we use our bodies to create, we help builds our identity.

Michael Foucault – We are born with a basic identity. Our identity mediates as we get older and meet other people. We gain a collective identity by doing this and become part of a group. However, it can be seen as a negative to be part of a collective identity because this encourages stereotypes to be created. Once you are in a group, it’s hard to change and be seen as different.

Richard Dyer – “A star is an image constructed from a range of materials” (songs, album art work, media coverage, live performances, music videos)

Richard Jenkins – We need to interact in order to form our identity. With others or the media, partaking in an event (reality virtually) with people who help us form a collective identity.

Strinati – Post modernism is said to describe the emergence of a social order in which the impotance and power of the mass Media and popular culture means that they govern and shape all other forms of social relationships. Popular culture signs and Media images increasingly dominate our sense of reality and the way we define ourselves in the world around us. Now reality can only be defined by

surface reflections in a mirror.

Stuart Hall – Proposes that the media, as a principle from of ideological spreading, produces representations of the social world via images and portrayals. Hall asserts that ideological things become ‘naturalised’.