Intro to Media & Culture: Chapter One Notes

Media Literacy

An understanding of mass communication developed through the critical process—description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement—that enables a person to become more engaged as a citizen and more discerning as a consumer of mass media products.

Culture

The forms and systems of expression that individuals, groups, and societies use to make sense of daily life, communicate with other people, and articulate their values

Culture

One way to understand the impact of media on our lives is to explore their relationship to _____

Mass Media

The industries that produce and distribute songs, video games, movies, novels, news, Internet services, and other cultural products to a large number of people.

Social Media

The digital web and app platforms that enable people to socially network, to share mass media content, and to create their own media content

Communication

The creation and use of symbol systems that convey information and meaning

Media Technologies

_____ are another important part of a culture because they influence how people communicate with one another and how a society gathers, uses, transmits, and saves information.

Affordances

The features or capabilities of a technology that help establish how we use it

Oral Era

Information first circulated through ___ traditions

• Without the ability to record information in written form, the primary way a community stores its knowledge is in people’s memories—a situation that gives elders, poets, teachers, and storytellers an important cultural role

Written Era

Alphabets and the technologies of writing emerged in some cultures starting around 3000 bce, but it took centuries or longer for a manuscript—or written—culture to overshadow oral customs

• Producing documents was expensive, requiring costly materials like ink and parchment as well as human labor; a document only existed if someone—a monk, a court scribe, or a philosopher—transcribed it by hand. These costs allowed rich and powerful institutions like the Catholic Church to gain centralized control over the production and circulation of manuscripts. In turn, this control over information distribution reinforced their political power. Working people, in contrast, were generally illiterate, and the economic and educational gap between rulers and the ruled was vast

Print Era

Emerged in the middle of the fifteenth century, when Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, invented a printing press that used movable metal type

• Printing presses and print publications spread rapidly across Europe by the early sixteenth century.

• Eventually, books became one of the first mass-marketed products due to the combined benefits of the printing press

• These developments prompted several important changes throughout Europe, each of which ultimately affected the larger societal structure and cultural values: resistance to authority, the spread of literacy, and a focus on individualism

Mass Communication

The process of designing cultural messages and stories and delivering them to increasingly large and diverse audiences through mass media channels like newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, television, and the Internet.

Resistance to Authority, The Spread of Literacy, and Focus on Individualism

How did the printing era change culture and society?

Electronic Era

The rise of new media technologies, corporate control of media, and widely shared media experiences.

• The Industrial Revolution had an enormous impact on life in Europe and the United States.

• Factories were replacing farms as centers of work and production, and the city began to overtake the country as the focal point of national life.

• Telegraph (1840s)

  • The first technology to manipulate electricity as a means of communication over long distances, the telegraph worked by sending electrical signals over a network of wires.

• Visual and audio media—including film and radio—transformed how people understood themselves, others, and their relationship to the world around them.

• Television (1950s)

  • Became the era’s dominant medium

    • Led to the rise of corperate control

Mass Nation

A society in which a large percentage of a diverse population went to the same movies, listened to the same Top 40 hits, watched the same TV shows, and trusted the same evening news anchors.

Consensus Narratives

Mass Media helped establish powerful _______ stories that reflected certain values and assumptions about what the world is and should be like

The Digital Revolution

Refers to a new way of converting, or encoding, information like images, text, or sounds into a format that can be saved and transmitted

Digital Communication

Converts media content into combinations of ones and zeros (binary code) that are then reassembled, or decoded, when someone plays a video game on a console, views a picture on Instagram, or asks an artificial intelligence tool to write a poem.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

A more recent product of the digital revolution and refers to computer systems that use machine learning of language, images, and enormous datasets to solve problems and simulate human communication.

Convergence

The first definition refers to the technological merging of once distinct and incompatible formats into a single format, which can then be accessed through one device. The second definition refers to the trend of media companies merging together in order to better position themselves for a world in which all media can be digital.

Niche Nation

A society in which people navigate a more varied and complex media landscape

• Rather than providing widely shared touchstones and consensus narratives, the media technologies we use and the media products we consume now sort us into narrow niches or subcultures, connecting us to some people but disconnecting us from others

  • Characterized by three key developments

    • New Viewing Practices

    • Participatory Culture

    • Fragmentation

Participatory Culture

A culture in which it is relatively easy for people to create and share their own content and build connections with others that often reflect and deepen the dynamics of a niche nation

Masspersonal Communication

A method of communication that mixes and matches aspects of mass communication (assumed to be one-to-many, public, impersonal, and produced by media industries) and interpersonal communication (assumed to be one-to-one, private, personal, and produced outside media industries).

Fragmentation

The increasing division of audiences into smaller, more targeted segments

Media Environment

Media as the habitat in which we conduct almost every aspect of our daily lives

Media Consumer, Media Producer, and Media Citizen

What are the three roles each of us play in the relationship to media

Media Citizens

We are members of societies that are saturated with media. As citizens, we have specific rights and responsibilities.

Media Producers

When we post a picture to Snapchat, create a video on TikTok, or stream live on Twitch, we’re producing media and often sharing it with large audiences. By pursuing a career in media—as a journalist, for example, or a screenwriter, videographer, game designer, publicist, or PR practitioner—we can also play the role of media producer.

Media Consumer

Every time we watch a TV show, play a video game, visit a website, scroll through Instagram, or use Google Maps, we consume media. We often have to turn over something in exchange—our money, our attention, or perhaps our data.

Linear Model of Mass Communication

Model of communication as a tool to explain how media messages and meanings are constructed and communicated in everyday life

• According to this model, mass communication is a linear process of producing and delivering messages to large audiences.

  • According to this model, mass communication is a linear process of producing and delivering messages to large audiences. Senders (authors, producers, and organizations) transmit messages (programs, ads, images, sounds) through mass media channels (newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, the Internet) to large groups of receivers (readers, viewers, and consumers). In the process, gatekeepers (news editors, executive producers, and other media managers) function as message filters, making decisions about what messages actually get produced for particular receivers. The model also allows for feedback, in which citizens and consumers can return messages to senders or gatekeepers through phone calls, email, web postings, talk shows, or letters to the edito

The Cultural Approach to Media & Communication

Five elements: media texts, technologies, industries, users, and the cultural context within which the other four are embedded. Each individual element focuses our attention on a different aspect of media and its relationship to culture, though ultimately, the model encourages us to analyze the interconnections among these five elements

Media Text

Refers to anything that conveys meaning or communicates information; a text is anything people “read” or interpret.

Technological Determinism

A common but sometimes simplistic way of thinking that sees technology as an independent force that appears out of nowhere and changes everything.

Media Technologies

refer to the tools and devices we use to create, send, and receive messages; store and retrieve information; and manage our relationship to the world.

Media Industries

Refer to the organizations that develop and manufacture media technologies; produce, distribute, and sell media texts; or play a role in creating and spreading information through media.

Media Users

Values, identities, and beliefs—are influenced by the texts they consume, but they do not passively receive messages, as the linear model suggests. Rather, they actively interpret them. Those interpretations can vary because people bring different experiences to their engagement with a media text—experiences that are shaped by factors like gender, race, age, class, sexual orientation, region, and religion

Cultural Context

Includes all the interconnected economic, political, and historically specific conditions and practices that characterize our social world.

Politics

Refers to the process by which power, resources, status, and visibility get distributed in a society—usually unequally

• Culture is part of that political process.

• It is the place where a society’s values get established and delivered, where certain ways of life and certain kinds of people get defined as normal and valuable, while others are labeled as abnormal or irrelevant.

Modern Era

The rise of mass communication industries, which were bound up with the era’s faith in expertise, rationalism, and progress

High Culture

A symbolic expression that has come to be identified with “good taste” and higher education and supported by wealthy patrons; it is associated with fine art, which is available primarily in museums, theaters, and concert halls.

Low Culture

A symbolic expression supposedly aligned with the “questionable” tastes of the masses, who enjoy the commercial “junk” circulated by the mass media, such as reality television, teen pop music, and violent video games.

Premodern Era

A period marked by a growing skepticism about expertise and the idea of progress. By the end of the twentieth century, scientific advances were no longer new and miraculous but the “new normal” and expected. In addition, modernization’s technological progress had led to unforeseen consequences and disappointments—the threat of nuclear annihilation, global warming, and continued economic and social inequality. As a result, an unquestioning faith in science and a deference to experts has eroded

Populism

A political approach that pits “ordinary” people against educated elites and nurtures a variety of movements on both the right and the left, such as anti-vaccine activists, the Freedom Caucus, and Amazon warehouse unionization.

Critical Process

The process whereby a media-literate person or student studying the forms and practices of media communication employs the techniques of description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement.

Description, Analysis, Interpretation, Evaluation, and Engagement

What are the five steps of the critical process?

Description

The first step in the critical process, it involves paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study

Analysis

The second step in the critical process, it involves discovering and focusing on significant patterns that emerge from the description stage.

Interpretation

The third step in the critical process, it involves asking and answering “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about one’s findings

Evalutation

The fourth step in the critical process, it involves arriving at a judgment about whether a cultural product is good, bad, or mediocre; this requires subordinating one’s personal taste to the critical “bigger picture” resulting from the first three stages (description, analysis, and interpretation).

Engagement

The fifth step in the critical process, it involves working to create a media world that best serves democracy by taking some action that connects our critical perspective with our role as citizens and watchdogs who question our media institutions, thereby adding our voice to the process of shaping the cultural environment.