Intro to Media Studies Final Exam

Representation

The use of language, marks, and images to create meaning about the world around us

Semiotics

Signs and symbols that can carry multiple interpretations

The Myth of Photographic Truth

Photographs don’t hold an objective truth bc it is shaped by people’s interpretations which are made from cultural and historical contexts.

Visuality

The ways in which we make meaning of images through cultural and historical context and in relation to power

Ex: painting of slave owner on horse looking down into slaves working on field

Signs

fixed by social conventions

Signifier

Physical form of a sign; the word, image, sound

Example: the word MOP being the letters M O P and the sound it makes when said

Signified

The mental concept or meaning it represents

Example: a MOP as a cleaning device for floors

Connotation

Values and beliefs attached to image

Denotation

Literal and descriptive, the thing itself represented

Myth

Widely held cultural beliefs expressed at the level of connotation

Icons

How does something become more significant over time

Ideaology

the means by which certain values — for example, individual freedom, progress, or the importance of family and home — are made to seem natural.

Interpellation

Sturken and Cartwright use the term “interpellation” to discuss how producers mold viewers into consumers.

To “interpellate” according to Sturken and Cartwright is “to interupt a procedure in order to question someone or something formally”

Difference

Difference refers to socially constructed distinction (such as race, gender, sexuality, class) that are produced, organized, and given meaning through systems of power rather than existing naturally

In Gray’s work, difference functions as a technique of power — a way of classifying population hierarchically in order to regulate access to resources and value.

Sturken and Cartwright similarly treat difference as something visual culture actively produces and manages through representation, rather than merely reflects.

Gaze

The gaze describes a structured relation of power embedded in looking practices, particularly within visual culture. Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze argues that classical cinema positions men as active lookers and women as passive objects of visual pleasure, reinforcing patriarchal power.

The gaze is not neutral; it organizes who is seen, how they are seen, and who holds visual authority. Sturken and Carwright emphasize that the gaze is historically, socially, and politically produced rather than biologically determined.

Examples: hollywood scenes of romance, women being sexualized, and the visualities of women presented on films

Identity

Identity is understood as relational, unstable, and shaped through representation, discourse, and power. Rather than a fixed essence, identity emerges through processes of identification — how subjects see themselves and are seen by other within cultural system.

Gray highlights identity as something produced through racial projects and media systems, while Sturken and Cartwright link identity formation to visibility, spectatorship, and recognition.

Race

Race is legal, social, and cultural invention rather than given in nature, and the knowledge of race and its deployment are exercises of power expressed in encounter among groups for control over resources.

The social construction of race trains our focus on the practices of race, including the terms of its creation, deployment, and enforcement as a mode of group subordination and regulation.

Race as a technique of power identifies arbitrary differences such as skin color, hair texture, nose and eye shapes, and thinness of lips as sites of knowledge (classification, hierarchy, and value) about variations in human intelligence, capacity, creativity, development, indeed what it means to be human (Herman Gray)

Gender

Gender refers to socially constructed roles, behaviors, and expectations associated with masculinity and femininity. In visual culture theory, gender is inseparable from power:

Mulvey shows how cinematic form naturalizes male dominance by positioning men as agents of the gaze and women as visual objects.

Sturken and Cartwright stress that gender is performed, represented, and contested through visual regimens rather than biologically fixed.

Sexuality

Sexuality is not merely a private or biological drive, but a historically produced domain regulated by institutions, discourse, and power.

Foucault situates sexuality within the emergence of biopower, where states manage populations through norms surrounding reproduction, desire, and health.

Sturken and Cartwright show how sexuality is visualized, disciplined, and sometimes resisted through representational practices.

Intersectionality

Refers to the way systems of power — such as race, gender, class, and sexuality — interact simultaneously to shape lived experience. While not name explicitly in these excepts.

Gray’s analysis of race as intertwined with media, economics, and state power, and Sturken and Cartwright’s insistence that the gaze is shaped by multiple identities, reflect an intersectional framework in practice.

Power does not operate along a single axis but through overlapping structures.

the Other

Concept analyzed by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright mentions: The 18th century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegal introduced the concept of “the other” to describe the self-aware individual

Orientalism

the Orient (south asia, easy asia, and the middle east) is not a place or culture in itself, but rather a european colonial-era construction of a category.

he describes orientalism as a european style in which fantasies of the “the orient: are given a special place in European Western literature and art.

Adjacent to Europe, “the orient” is the site of europe’s richest and oldest colonies and the source of it’s civilizations and languages.

A historical site of conquest and pillage, it continues to … as the mirror through which Europe’s image is constituted (as what “the orient” is not)

Argued that the staging of “the orient” as other established Europe and the West as the global norm. Orientalism is an ongoing ideology that can be found not only in political policy but also in cultural representations of people, places, and things.

***** Furthermore, The Orient is often deployed as an exotic setting for the enhancement of Western subjectivity, often as a fantasy that recalls colonial-era travel. Despite the complexities of contemporary branding, this trope is still pervasive in advertising.

Biopower

Is a modern form of power that focuses on managing life rather than simply exercising the right to kill. Foucault argues that from the 17th century onward, power shifted toward regulating bodies and populations through institutions such as medicine, education, and the state.

Operates through two poles: disciples of the individual bodies and regulation of populations, making life itself an object of political control.

Globalization

Refers to the uneven, disjunctive intensification of worldwide social, cultural, economic, and technological flows that destabilize local boundaries without producing a single unified global culture.

Appadurai rejects centre-periphery or simple imperial models, arguing instead that globalization operates through multiple, overlapping “scape"s” that move at different speeds and logics.

Tomlinson reframes globalization less as sameness and more as a shift in control from local to decentered global systems, threatening cultural autonomy rather than cultural difference per se.

Disney

Functions as a typical framework of western media globalization — often cited in homogenization arguments as evidence of U.S. cultural dominance.

Within Tomlinson’s critique, Disney should not be read simply as cultural sameness imposed from above, but as a part of a more complex global system in which local audiences actively reinterpret global media forms rather than passively absorb them.

Global Village

Implied by Marshall McLuhan: it describes the idea that electronic media collapse spatial distance, creating intensified global interconnection.

In Appadurai’s framework, this notion is inadequate because it assumes shared experience, whereas mediascapes actually produce fragmented, imagined worlds, not a unified global consciousness.

→ McLuhan Mentions, we have extended our central nervous system itself into a global embrace. 

We now live in a global village that compels commitment and participation.

We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

Cultural homogeneity

the claim that globalization produces sameness through Westernization or Americanization.

Appadurai treats this as one pole of a false binary, arguing that homogenization always coexists with local indigenization.

Tomlinson critiques homogeneity as a misleading “master narrative” that reflects Western anxieties rather than lived cultural realities.

Cultural heterogenization

Cultural heterogenization refers to the production of difference through globalization, as global flows are selectively adapted, reworked, and localized.

For Appadurai, heterogenization is not resistance to globalization but one of its constitutive dynamics—global forms become indigenized rather than simply replicated.

Cultural autonomy

the capacity of a culture to make meaningful choices free from external, heteronomous control.

Tomlinson argues that the real threat posed by globalization is not sameness but the erosion of local decision-making power, as cultural environments are increasingly shaped by distant institutions and systems beyond local influence.

Hybridity

describes the mixing and recombination of cultural forms produced through global flows.

While Appadurai does not foreground the term explicitly, his account of indigenization, imagined worlds, and disjunctive scapes presumes hybridity as the dominant outcome of globalization rather than pure imitation or resistance.

Mediascapes

The distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc) which are no available to a growing number of private and public interests through the world;

image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them.. “imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places”

Mediascapes are the global flows of images, narratives, and information produced by television, film, newspapers, and digital media.

They provide the symbolic materials through which people construct imagined worlds, shaping desires, identities, and political imaginaries across national boundaries. 

Ethnoscapes

The landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers, and other moving groups and person.

Are the shifting landscapes of people—migrants, refugees, tourists, exiles—whose movement destabilizes ideas of fixed national cultures.

transform politics, identity, and belonging by making population movement a defining feature of global modernity

Technoscapes

The global configuration …of technology, and of the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previous impervious boundaries.

Technoscapes refer to the global circulation of technologies—both mechanical and informational—that move rapidly across borders and reorganize labor, production, and communication.

These flows operate independently of national control, contributing to the disjuncture of globalization

Financescapes

Global flow of capital/financial markets.

describe the rapid, opaque movements of global capital through currency markets, stock exchanges, and speculative investment.

Their volatility makes them difficult to regulate and intensifies the disconnect between economic power and local social life.

Ideoscapes

Global circulation of ideological values.

are flows of political ideas and values—such as democracy, rights, sovereignty—that circulate globally but are translated unevenly across contexts.

These concepts fragment as they move, producing competing interpretations rather than universal meanings

Global Hollywood

refers to the worldwide dominance of U.S. film and entertainment industries.

 Within Appadurai’s framework, Hollywood functions as part of mediascapes whose narratives are reinterpreted locally, undermining claims of total cultural domination.

The American Century

This is an implied Cold War media and ideology concept: The American Century refers to the period of U.S. global dominance in the twentieth century, particularly through economic power, military influence, and cultural production.

In globalization theory, it underpins fears of Americanization that Appadurai and Tomlinson both seek to complicate.

Voice of America

is a U.S. state-funded international broadcaster designed to disseminate American political values abroad.

It exemplifies ideoscapes and mediascapes operating as tools of soft power rather than neutral information flows.

Radio Free Asia

is a U.S.-backed broadcaster aimed at providing alternative political narratives in regions with restricted media environments.

It illustrates how global media flows are deeply entangled with ideology and state power.

clandestine media

refers to unofficial, underground, or oppositional communication networks that circulate outside state or corporate control.

In Appadurai’s model, these operate as counter-mediascapes that challenge dominant narratives.

Hallyu

refers to the global spread of South Korean popular culture.

exemplifies cultural heterogenization: a non-Western media flow that disrupts assumptions of one-way American cultural dominance. (Implied heterogenization example)

Starlink

Implied technoscape: Starlink represents contemporary technoscapes, as satellite internet infrastructure that bypasses national boundaries and regulatory frameworks.

intensifies global connectivity while raising questions about sovereignty, control, and access in the digital age.

Media Logics:

are the dominant norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economic rationalities that shape how media systems organize communication and social interaction.

Van Dijck and Poell:

social media logic from traditional mass media logic, arguing that platforms actively structure visibility, interaction, and participation rather than merely transmitting content neutrally

Affordances

are the material and technical properties of networked technologies that shape—but do not determine—how people can interact within them.

Boyd emphasizes that affordances configure environments by enabling and constraining practices, giving rise to recurring social dynamics such as persistence, visibility, scalability, and searchability.

Forms of address

refer to the ways media position and speak to audiences—whether as specific individuals, imagined collectives, or abstract publics.

Peters shows that mass media typically employ indefinite address, speaking to “anyone” and “everyone” simultaneously, which fundamentally shapes how publics are constituted and how meaning circulates

Programmability

is the capacity of platforms to shape user activity through algorithms, interfaces, and code while simultaneously responding to user engagement.

describes a two-way dynamic in which platforms steer interaction, and users’ actions feed back into algorithmic systems that recalibrate visibility and flow.

Popularity (visibility through algorithms and user engagement):

Popularity refers to how social relevance is measured and amplified through quantified metrics such as likes, shares, rankings, and trends.

Visibility is not organic but algorithmically produced through feedback loops between user engagement and platform design, making popularity a key mechanism of power in social media ecosystems.  

Connectivity

describes the engineered linking of users, content, advertisers, and institutions within platform ecosystems.

Unlike interpersonal connection, connectivity is a strategic, monetized principle that organizes social relations in ways that serve platform interests while appearing natural or user-driven.

Datafication (strategies for predicting and repurposing user need):

is the process by which social actions, emotions, and relationships are translated into quantifiable data that can be tracked, analyzed, and monetized.

Platforms use datafication to predict behavior, personalize content, and repurpose user activity for commercial and institutional goals. 

• ads

• marketing

• generated content that is specific

Hyperconnectivity

is the condition in which individuals are continuously connected to others, platforms, devices, and data streams across time and space.

 Brubaker frames it as a “total social fact” that reshapes not only communication and politics but the very formation, regulation, and governance of the self. 

Emancipatory self:

refers to early and enduring hopes that digital connectivity enables exploration, experimentation, and liberation from bodily, familial, or communal constraints.

Brubaker treats this emancipation as ambivalent: while hyperconnectivity can enable self-expression and recognition, it simultaneously subjects the self to intensified surveillance, quantification, and control.

Networked publics:

Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. They exist simultaneously as spaces created through digital architecture and as imagined collectives formed through interaction.

Boyd emphasizes that networked publics differ from traditional publics because their structure is shaped by technological affordances rather than physical co-presence

Scalability

refers to the capacity for content and interactions in networked publics to reach audiences of vastly different sizes without changing form.

 A message intended for a small group can easily circulate to massive publics, collapsing assumptions about audience size and control.

Collapsed contexts:

describe the convergence of multiple social audiences—such as friends, family, employers, and strangers—into a single communicative space.

This collapse disrupts traditional strategies of impression management, as users can no longer easily tailor messages to distinct social settings. 

Blurring of public and private:

the blurring of public and private refers to the erosion of clear boundaries between intimate self-expression and public visibility in networked environments

Boyd shows how everyday communication becomes publicly accessible through architectural affordances, while van Dijck and Poell demonstrate how platforms institutionalize this blurring to extract value from personal interaction.

network effects

 A phenomenon where a product or platform becomes more valuable as more people use it. The utility increases with the size of the user network.

economies of scale:

 Cost advantages gained when producing at larger scales. Media industries have extremely high first-copy costs but near-zero reproduction costs.

This drives consolidation and allows big companies to dominate the market. (ex. Netflix original: unlimited streaming to the world)

platforms and platform capitalism:

An economic system in which digital platforms dominate markets using data, algorithms, and network effects. (ex. Spotify discovery mode)

attention economy:

An economic model in which platforms monetize human attention.

Zuboff argues that platforms capture and manipulate attention as a foundation of surveillance capitalism. 

surveillance capitalism

A system in which companies extract behavioral data to predict and modify future actions for profit.

Zuboff explains that behavioral data becomes “prediction products” used to control and shape behavior.

epistemic inequality:

 An inequality created when corporations possess far more knowledge about individuals than individuals possess about the systems watching them. 

Enshittification

A structural decay where platforms shift value from users to advertisers to themselves, degrading over time.

Doctorow argues that Enshiftification is an inevitable outcome of platform profit motives and investor pressure.  

exploring self:

refers to practices enabled by digital connectivity that expand the range of possible identities, experiences, and ways of being available to individuals.

Brubaker frames exploration as the use of digital environments to experiment with identity, compare oneself to others, and encounter alternative “possible selves.”

This exploration is ambivalent: it can enlarge horizons of selfhood while also producing fragmentation, anxiety, and overload through constant comparison.

emancipating self:

designates the capacity of digital connectivity to loosen the grip of family, community, and local institutions over self-formation.

 Hyperconnectivity enables individuals to access alternative communities, counter-publics, and forms of recognition, thereby redistributing control over socialization.

Emancipation here is descriptive rather than normative: it frees the self from some constraints while often entangling it in new forms of technological dependence and surveillance.

objectifying self:

describes the process by which individuals come to see themselves as objects through durable digital representations—profiles, posts, images, metrics, and data traces.

Hyperconnectivity routinizes self-objectification by embedding the gaze of others directly into digital platforms, making the self continuously visible, inspectable, and assessable both to other users and to algorithmic systems.

quantifying self:

 refers to the transformation of self-knowledge and self-evaluation into numerical form. Through social media metrics, self-tracking devices, and data analytics, the self becomes known, compared, and governed through numbers.

Quantification does not merely measure the self; it reshapes behavior by making visibility, popularity, health, and productivity calculable and competitive.

• good example of this is the aura ring

producing self:

 captures the obligation, intensified under digital hyperconnectivity, to actively construct the self as a consumable object for others.

Beyond self-presentation, individuals are expected to continuously produce a distinctive, engaging digital identity—often framed as authenticity or personal “branding”—that competes for attention in a saturated media environment.

• how you present yourself and cater to the public or the platform you are on

regulating self:

 refers to practices through which individuals manage mood, attention, bodily rhythms, and emotional states using digital technologies.

Regulation increasingly occurs through external prompts—notifications, vibrations, alerts, feedback loops—that intervene directly in embodied experience, shifting self-control from reflective deliberation toward automated or semi-automated correction.

governing self:

names the broader political and infrastructural condition in which selves are shaped, nudged, and managed by sociotechnical systems

Governance operates through data collection, algorithmic inference, and behavioral modulation rather than overt coercion

 The self is governed both internally—through internalized metrics and norms—and externally—through platforms, institutions, and predictive systems.

wearable tech

refers to sensor-embedded devices worn on or integrated into the body that track, translate, and act upon physiological and behavioral data.

These technologies collapse boundaries between body and machine by rendering bodily processes legible to computational systems and feeding data back to users through dashboards, alerts, or haptic signals.

data-driven life:

is a mode of existence in which everyday decisions, habits, and self-understanding are increasingly shaped by continuous data extraction and analysis.

 As described by Brubaker and echoed in the VICE critique of personal computing, lived experience is reframed as an optimization problem, where bodies and behaviors are treated as inputs to be measured, predicted, and improved

Haptics

 refers to technologies that communicate information through touch—vibration, pressure, force—rather than sight or sound.

In the context of wearable tech, haptics convert abstract data into bodily sensations, creating what scholars describe as an “algorithmic skin” that intervenes directly in perception and action. Haptic feedback shifts attention from reflective self-awareness toward momentary, externally triggered responses.

First Amendment:

U.S. Constitution protects freedom of speech, freedom of the press, assembly, and petitioning the government against abridgment by government actors

This means the government generally cannot restrict speech because of its content or viewpoint.

It does not apply directly to private companies like social media platforms unless the government coerces them into restricting speech. 

Section 230

 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 immunizes online platforms from being treated as the publisher or speaker of content created by their users, meaning they generally cannot be held legally liable for user-created third-party content even if they moderate it.

Publisher vs distributor:

A publisher edits, selects, or exercises editorial control over content and can be liable for third-party content (like a newspaper).

A distributor merely disseminates content created by others (like a bookstore) and has limited liability unless it knew or should have known of illegal content.

Section 230’s language was designed to treat online platforms neither as traditional publishers nor as distributors for liability of user content.

Content moderation:

refers to the policies and practices online platforms use to review, remove, restrict, or flag user-generated content, including harmful, illegal, or policy-violating speech.

Section 230 encourages content moderation by protecting platforms from certain liability even when they remove or restrict content in good faith.

Gonzalez v Google:

 (2023), the Supreme Court considered whether platforms like YouTube lose Section 230 immunity when their algorithms recommend harmful third-party content (e.g., ISIS recruitment videos).

The Court ultimately declined to resolve the breadth of Section 230 immunity on those grounds, saying its decision in Twitter v. Taamneh was sufficient to dispose of the case.

It therefore did not directly rule on whether algorithmic recommendations strip Section 230 protection.

Liability shield:

shielding of responsibility toward the users/content for the platforms (legal shield) – A liability shield refers to legal protections (like Section 230(c)(1)) that prevent platforms from being held responsible for third-party content or actions by users—effectively shielding platforms from many lawsuits based on user speech. Section 230 became such a shield in part to prevent incentives against content moderation.

Brandenburg v Ohio:

 (1969) is a Supreme Court First Amendment decision holding that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite such action.

This case sets the modern standard for when speech advocating violence loses constitutional protection. (Although not directly about platforms, it shapes how courts view speech restrictions generally.)

NY Times v US:

(1971) held the government cannot impose prior restraint (pre-publication censorship) on the press to prevent publication of classified documents unless it can show direct, immediate harm.

This landmark case reinforces robust constitutional protections for press freedom against government restriction. (Again, this applies directly to government actors, not private platforms.)

New York Times v. United States (1971) is the Supreme Court case that ruled the government could not use prior restraint to stop newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Court held that the government failed to meet the extremely high burden required to justify censorship before publication.

Key point:
This case establishes a constitutional rule, not a historical fact.

• Addresses First Amendment protections

• Concerns prior restraint (pre-publication censorship)

• Limits government power over the press

• Applies even when the government claims national security concerns

Conceptually:
This is about press freedom, constitutional limits on state power, and the role of journalism in democracy.

Government (Pentagon Papers):

The Pentagon Papers refer to a classified U.S. Department of Defense study commissioned by the government that documented the history of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam. The papers revealed that successive administrations had misled the public and Congress about the scope and prospects of the war.

Key point:
This term refers to the documents themselves and the government’s attempt to keep them secret, not the legal ruling.

• Produced by the executive branch (Pentagon)

• Classified as national security material

• Leaked by Daniel Ellsberg

• Triggered a confrontation between the government and the press

Conceptually:
This is about state secrecy, information control, and national security claims.

Texas v Johnson:

Texas v. Johnson (1989) held that burning the American flag is protected symbolic speech under the First Amendment. This case confirms that even unpopular or provocative expressive conduct cannot be outlawed simply because it is offensive. (Illustrative of broad speech protection doctrine.)

Ragebait:

Ragebait is a form of online content deliberately designed to provoke outrage and emotional arousal (e.g., through inflammatory language or imagery) to maximize engagement, clicks, and sharing.

 Although not a legal term, it has practical significance in content moderation debates: platform recommendation algorithms often amplify ragebait because higher engagement signals boost visibility, which courts and commentators have discussed in cases like Gonzalez v. Google in the context of algorithm liability.