Audiences and Media Industries
Controls and Constraints
Factors that influence or limit media production, including legal, ethical, political, financial, technical, audience and time considerations.
Codes are tools used to create meaning (technical, symbolic, audio and written).
Conventions are accepted ways of using codes that audiences recognise and understand.
Narrative Structure
The arrangement of events within a story, such as chronological order, multiple viewpoints or multiple plots.
Values and Attitudes
Values are beliefs about what is important.
Attitudes are responses or positions that arise from those values. Dominant values are widely shared within a culture or community.
Persuasive Techniques
Methods used to influence audience emotions, attitudes, opinions or actions, such as repetition, exaggeration, rhetorical questions and celebrity endorsement.
Niche Audience
A specialised audience with focused interests that differ from the broader mass audience.
Point of View
The intended perspective presented by the producer or the narrative position from which a story is communicated.
A chain of events linked by cause and effect, occurring in time and space and created through setting, character, conflict and resolution.
Representation
The way people, events, places and ideas are selected and constructed in media work.
Ethics
Standards of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour that guide media production and practice.
Media Trends
Directions in which media industries and media products are developing, influencing both production and audience expectations.
Selection Processes
The choices about what is included, omitted and emphasised in media work, shaping meaning, realism and audience interpretation.
Preferred Meaning
The producer’s intended message, created through deliberate choices of images, sounds, words, codes and conventions.
Context
The social, cultural, political, historical and economic circumstances that influence the production and interpretation of media work.
Propaganda
Media content deliberately created to persuade audiences toward a particular point of view and reinforce the interests of those behind its creation.
Commercial Media
Privately owned organisations driven largely by profit (e.g. Channel 7, News Corp)
Style
The distinctive appearance, mood or tone created through the organisation of techniques, codes and conventions.
Theme
The central message or idea that guides all aspects of a media work. A media work may contain multiple themes.
Representation
The way people, events, places and ideas are selected and constructed in media work.
Media Theories
Frameworks developed to explain relationships between media producers, media texts and audiences.
Non-Commercial Media
Publicly owned organisations where profit is not necessarily the main priority (e.g. ABC, SBS).
Aesthetics
The artistic combination and manipulation of codes and conventions to create emotional or intellectual responses.
Realism
The use of codes and conventions to create a believable representation of a constructed world.
The process by which repeated media representations become accepted as normal or accurate.
Agenda Setting
The theory that media influence what audiences think about by giving particular issues greater prominence.