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For Barthes, this is what happens when a basic sign becomes the signifier for a broader cultural meaning.
What is myth/mythology?
This semiotic unit consists of a signifier and a signified.
What is a sign?
Police, prisons, and the military are examples of this apparatus, which operates mainly through coercion.
What is the repressive state apparatus?
Barthes contrasts this material with plastic to highlight myths of naturalness versus synthetic substitutability.
What is wood?
This opposition captures the difference between an emphasis on agreement in public discourse and an emphasis on ongoing conflict among publics.
What is consensus vs contestation?
Hall’s model for how media messages are produced in one moment and interpreted in another.
What is the encoding/decoding model?
This reading position accepts much of a media text’s preferred meaning, but adjusts parts of it to fit local experience.
What is a negotiated reading?
Schools, families, churches, and media belong to this apparatus, which reproduces labor-power primarily through ideology.
What is the ideological state apparatus?
Veblen and Bourdieu help explain this kind of consumption, where goods are displayed as markers of status.
What is conspicuous consumption?
On the public screen, this kind of communication privileges striking visuals and image events over extended verbal argument.
What is imagistic discourse?
Gramsci’s term for rule maintained through consent and the shaping of common sense, not just force.
What is hegemony?
Du Gay and Hall use this device to show how identity, production, consumption, and representation interact.
What is the Sony Walkman?
Gitlin’s term for the limited independence media institutions may possess while still usually staying within hegemonic boundaries.
Bourdieu’s term for the durable dispositions that shape taste, judgment, and behavior.
What is habitus?
McLuhan’s phrase for media technologies as human sensory and bodily enlargements.
What are "extensions of man"?
Habermas’s idealized space of rational-critical debate among private people discussing matters of common concern.
What is the “classic” public sphere?
DeLuca and Peeples use this term for a media environment centered on circulation, spectacle, and images rather than sustained rational debate.
What is the public screen?
Fraser’s term for parallel discursive spaces created by subordinated social groups.
What are subaltern counter-publics?
De Certeau’s idea that consumers do not just receive meanings passively, but actively remake them in practice.
What is consumption as production?
This view argues that technologies are shaped by social institutions, cultural choices, and historical context rather than driving change all by themselves.
What is social construction of technology?
Bolter and Grusin’s term for how newer media refashion older media.
What is remediation?
McLuhan’s phrase for the idea that the social effects of a medium matter more than the specific content it carries.
What is "the medium is the message"?
This term refers to the social process by which people are formed as recognizable subjects through culture and representation.
What is identification/identity?
This term names the practice of creatively piecing together and repurposing cultural materials.
What is bricolage?
This view argues that technologies themselves are major drivers of social transformation.
What is technological determinism?