Key Terms
This term describes how media constructs the world for us, shaping how groups, events, and identities appear.
What is representation?
He developed the encoding/decoding model and emphasized that audiences play an active role in interpreting messages.
Who is Stuart Hall?
This mode views communication as sending information from one point to another, often for persuasion.
What is the transmission model?
This field studies how real audiences interpret media texts in their everyday lives.
What is reception studies?
This theory argues that media have limited, not all-powerful, influence on people.
What is moderate effects theory?
Orgad's major concept that explains how media help people imagine themselves as part of a global community.
What is the global imagination?
This French theorist analyzed cultural signs in everyday life, calling them “mythologies.”
Who is Roland Barthes?
This model sees communication as building shared meaning and maintaining communities rather than transmitting information.
What is the ritual model?
Morley’s study of The Nationwide Audience showed that differences in this factor shaped how viewers interpreted the same TV program.
What is social class?
This approach argues that media shape the conditions under which people grieve publicly and emotionally.
What is grieving in the digital age (or mediated grieving)?
Stuart Hall’s idea that audiences can accept, partially accept, or reject the preferred meaning of a media message.
What are dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings?
A theorist who argued that communication is best understood through the ritual model rather than the transmission model.
Who is James Carey?
This approach focuses on how audiences use media to satisfy needs such as entertainment, identity, or social interaction.
What is Uses and Gratifications?
Ang’s work demonstrated that audiences do this when they read media texts in ways that reflect their lived experience.
What is negotiate meaning?
Postman argues that this dominant medium of the 20th century transformed serious public discourse into entertainment.
What is television?
This term describes a society where media no longer function as spaces for critical debate but instead resemble elite-controlled displays of power.
What is refeudalization (Habermas)?
He wrote about the public sphere and warned that modern media could erode democratic debate.
Who is Jürgen Habermas?
This approach emphasizes that audiences interpret texts differently based on culture, class, gender, and other social locations.
What is British Cultural Studies (or reception studies)?
Lewis argues that audiences must be understood as active, not passive—engaging in this process of making meaning.
What is decoding (or interpretation)?
This term refers to how digital platforms create a new form of exposure, where once-private practices become public due to constant visibility.
What is the “new visibility”?
Neil Postman uses this concept to explain how the dominant medium of a society shapes what counts as truth and knowledge.
What is media as epistemology?
This theorist claimed that television reduces public discourse to entertainment, fundamentally damaging a society’s ability to think critically.
Who is Neil Postman?
This comprehensive framework analyzes media by examining production, representation, identities, consumption, and regulation.
What is the Circuit of Media Study?
This concept explains why audiences may not interpret media the way producers intended, due to factors like culture, identity, and ideology.
What is polysemy (or audience variability in meaning)?
Shirky argues that social media expand public participation by lowering barriers to collective action, explaining this shift in political power.
What is the political power of social media (or digitally-enabled collective action)?