Multiple choice questions:
Mass culture theory:
- Pierre Bourdieu; asks how logic of taste and preference work challenges notions of innate taste or ‘authentic’ sensibilities.
- Different forms of culture provide different forms of pleasure.
- Tastes and notions of quality are socially constructed. Used differently by different groups to gain status.
- Cultural Capital; invest into consumption practices- acquiring status – producing symbolic capital of power. Can be acquired through education and its value can shift when context is changed.
Saussure/Signs – semiotics:
- Language not just a way of classifying objects in an external world
- Words only have meaning as parts of systems i.e. languages
- Langue = the system or language
- Parole = actual utterances of words
- Signifier (concept)+signified (word)=sign
- Signs only have meaning within particular systems of meaning
- Denotation and connotation.
- Pierce: Symbolic; signs in which the relationship between the sign and its meaning are totally arbitary, Iconic; signs that resemble their meaning in some way, and Indexical signs; signs that indicate what they stand for.
Structuralism (Wright, Eco, Barthes):
- Propp - 'narratemes' - he designed a structure of narratemes made up of 8 character roles, and 31 basic narratemes.
- Todorov supports Propp, claiming all stories have the same universal formal properties.
- Wright = westerns and Eco = James Bond.
Fabula/syuzhet (Bordwell):
- Fabula is deducted from Syuzhet
- Syuzhet is an employment of narrative and fabula is the chronological order of the retold events.
Genre Theory:
- Another way to explore the media text constructed meaning.
- Genre is a signifying system; a paradigm (lists of possible signs from which particular signs are selected to form syntagms).
- Agents of ‘ideological closure’
- Limit meaning potential; ‘Contract’ between producer and audiences as to content; Annoying when broken.
- There are usually generic features to genres. But there is also genre hybridity.
- Genre changes and develops over time.
Political economy:
- To fully understand media and cultural texts we have to examine the material conditions in which they are produced
- Relate texts to wider social relationships and power
- Hard power - control of capital, military, legal systems, etc.
- Soft power - symbols, discourses, the cultural and semiological
- Power – works at three levels
- 1. The ability to influence decisions
- 2. The ability to set the agenda in the first place
- 3. Structural power - the effect an institution has by simply ‘being there’
Hegemony
- Power – works at three levels
- The ability to influence decisions
- The ability to set the agenda in the first place
- Structural power - the effect an institution has by simply ‘being there’
- Hegemony - when popular ideas or ‘common sense’ reflect the interests of the powerful ideology. Also known as ‘culturalism’.
- Hegemony never finally secured.
- Resistance to dominant ideologies. Media and cultural texts can be sites of resistance.
Stuart Hall:
- Popular culture; he suggests the boundaries of popular culture become a site of contestation.
- Constructions of art are merely weapons of power struggle.
- Encoding and decoding model;
- Dominant : Share's the text's code, and accepts/reproduces the text.
- Negotiated - partly shares the codes but may resist/modify the code to reflect their own life
- Oppositional - understands the reading but does not share/deal with it.
Lister:
- Audience identity; new media-virtual reality.
- Identities and communities online; new media provides new ways of experiencing self and relating to groups in society. ‘In touch but, never touching. As deeply connected as they are profoundly alienated.
- Being anonymous; different mediation allow is to express different parts of our identity. Different communications effect how we present ourselves.
- Belonging; online communities create a sense of belonging and use them as an antidote to social fragmentation.
The Chicago school:
- Offer a mode of regulation: law; social norms; the market; architecture.
- Social norms; the prescribed and proscribed forms of media of behaviour. They aren’t administered through authority.
- Markets; availability and prices regulate by effecting how we consume or produce. Independent of laws and social norms.
- Architecture; forms of constraints that prevent us doing things – passwords regulate our use of networks. They are pre-action constraints – social norms and law are post action constraints.
- Changes to one will affect the regulated activity, they all regulate to different degrees.
Narrative:
- A communicative act – narrative involves a ‘teller’ and a ‘listener’.
- All narratives involve a sequence of events (they are located in time).
- All narratives are constructed.
Framing and priming:
- Framing: helps to construct the ‘preferred’ reading. It’s the media perspective.
- Priming: endorses certain responses to active certain thoughts (in the preferred readers mind)
Computer mediated communications:
- The separation between reality and online reality.
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Todorov – structuralism
- Believes there are common structures in the narrative of a story. Equilibrium – disequilibrium –equilibrium.
- The structure of narratives tends to suggest that the restitution of the status quo is ‘normal’ and ‘appropriate’
- Suggests ideology.
Barthes
- Believes narratives have up to 5 distinct codes operating below the surface.
- This includes enigma code (meaning) - this activates the viewer or readers interest in guessing the meaning or ending.
- Enigmas or ‘puzzles’ are introduced, resolved, reintroduced.
- Symbolic codes (through which stories are symbolically represented)
- Cultural codes – narratives frequently draw upon ‘authoritative knowledge’ or popular shared assumptions.
- Myth - wrestling
- Myth is political and ideological.
- Codes which are taken for granted and seen not as codes but as ‘natural.
- Signs placed in different codes operate in different ways
Uses and gratifications
- Katz and Blumer.
- Audience can control media exposure.
- People use media for what they want, his may be complex and conflicting.
- May be expressed in different ways:
- 1. To reinforce existing views
- 2. To identify opposing views
- 3. To be immersed in a community
- 4. To escape reality
Chomsky and Herman:
- Outlined a propaganda model; focuses on the effects of US capitalist ideology on agenda setting in the media.
- They said there were five main filters or ways media is given consent in society.
- By size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of the dominant mass media firms.
- By advertising as the primary income source of the mass media.
- By the reliance on the media on information provided by government, business and experts.
- By ‘flak’ as means of disciplining the media.
- By anticommunism as control of mechanism.
- ‘Flak’refers to negative responses to media or news programmes. The ability to produce flack is the greatest for the powerful institutions most committed to the capitalist cause.
- Media professionals are puppets of capitalism.
- Everything media professionals do can be explained in terms of ideology and its effects.
- Ideology explains media effects take many theoretical forms.
- Suggest there is a ruling class and that this ruling class controls the media and their effects.
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