CMAF - Midterm Practice

Media/medium

Stores and transits information through different communication methods, whether digital, traditional, or oral.

Ontological

Relates to the branch of the past. Extends modern tools that we use and suggests that everything is connected.

The Dead Internet Theory

Suggests that only you are the actual human person that’s on the internet, in the cycle of bots, brand new content congested into slop/horrible quality mediums/media. Mainly a thought experiment.

Hot Society

Seeks change and growth. Utilizes high definition and seeks to engage audiences, requiring little to no attention.

Cold Society

Seeks stability and continuity. Utilizes high participation and seeks to encourage audiences to use their imagination. 

What are some examples of cold media?

Comics, telephones, pictographic writing

What are some examples of hot media?

Film, lectures, photography

What exactly does the Dead Internet Theory suggest in terms of digital spaces?

That commercialization, propaganda and misinformation is the main priority.

Take information that you see on the internet with a grain of salt, and think about content through several lenses before deeply consuming it.?

What does the Dead Internet Theory suggest?

Harold Adam Innis

One of the most prominent political economists. Focused on social histories of communication and coined the terms ‘space and time biases’. Believed change came from margins of society

“The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.”

What is the first riddle of the Minerva's Owl?

“Each civilization has its own means of suicide.”

What is the second riddle of the MInerva's Owl?

Key symbolism of wisdom, insight and reflection.

What does the Owl of Minerva symbolize?

The medium itself being the main focus. Shines importance in the device rather than the actual consumption. Suggests that the medium is what impacts cultural and social societies.

What does ‘the medium is the message’ mean?

That there are patterns in history and how we should reflect on how the past affected us, based on how civilizations prospered, but crumbled due to how biases were used.

What does the second riddle entail?

Time Biases

Slower and more progressive information that transfers through generational traditions. Depends on long term durability.

Space Biases

Widely ranged knowledge and quicker through multitudes of media. Degrades easily and holds weak information that can be replaced quickly.

Immediacy, ubiquity, and personalization

What are the three terms of space biases?

Gutenberg Press

A double edged sword for western religion. Assisted in mass production of books and challenged against those who had control over printing content. Went from mass production to the introduction of capitalism and industrialism.

Power and communication. To control how information goes around and manipulate it in a certain viewpoint.

What do societies form around? Why?

Transportation of Communication

States that communication equals something involving movement through speech. Carries through opinion, thought, commands, decrees.

Monopolies of Knowledge

Concept developed by Harold Innis. Focuses on the concentration and manipulation of knowledge via small groups and institutions. Limits the spread of ideas and information to only certain demographics.

Paywalls that prevent accessing information unless a small fee is provided.

What are some examples of monopolies of knowledge?

Algorithmic Media

The concept of drawing people’s attention through personalized content. Often used in social media platforms, marketplaces and shopping websites.

Enhancement, reversion, retrieval, obsolescence

What are the media effects?

The Enhancement Effect

Asks what the medium improves and intensifies. Often connected with portability, establishing the growth of communication and global connectivity.

The Reverse Effect

Asks us what mediums do when pushed to the limit. Emphasizes isolation and distraction through original mediums if characteristics of it are taken to the extreme.

The Retrieve Effect

Asks us what it recovers when previously lost. Captures earlier sensory and capability through informal conversation or recalling memory.

The Obsolescence Effect

Asks us what it does to drive out of prominence. Pushes aside outdated and no longer used media to the new. Can be digital, technological, or cultural.

To dissemble, shape, and construct social values, cultural norms and individualistic behaviour.

What is the role of Media?

Extensions of Man

A book written by Marshal McLuhan. Covers four main ideas, including media ecology and mediums being a stretch to the human.

The Attention Economy

A currency that uses attention of consumers as its primary source to supplement. As time is money, it is considered finite and is reasoned as such when described as currency.

Media Enviornments

Sets of factors that influence perceptions, interactions and behaviours. Can hold through natural and social aspects. Can come in forms such as broadcasting, news, recordings, etc.

Figure

The content of media. It is the product that an audience is paying attention to.

Ground

The background of media. It is a non-primal piece of media that floats around you. Can also mean environment.

Marshal McLuhan

One of the most prominent figures and contributors to communication studies. Recognized for his work on the effects of media and communication technologies, and wrote ‘The Extensions of Man’. Coined the term ‘the medium is the message’.

Audience Commodity

The treatment of people as products. Introduced by Dallas Smythe who states that this is the primary way that advertisements earn revenue by purchasing and selling within the industry. Aims to link fan labour as affective labour by using the audience to sell their products.

What is the meaning of ‘meaning’?

A person’s communication conveying through language. The explanation of something through ones own interpretations to another.

“The medium is the message.”

What is the most important message that McLuhan coined?

The Internet Era

Derived from Harold Adam Innis. Argues that tension should be kept constructive- aka, without it, societies grow stagnant and unmoving.

Personalization

The customized of media suit to an individual’s liking.

Ubiquity

The common appearance that rapidly hits to audiences through media; it is repetitive and consistent.

Immediacy

The process of information being transferred; the internet allowing us to search anything at the tips of our fingers.

“Money talks, people mumble.”

What is a quote coined by Dallas Smythe?

Commercial Media

A form of advertising that aims to persuade consumers into purchasing either a product or a service. Captures attention, and sells their eyes and ears to make a profit.

Prosumer

A professional producer and consumer. Online demanders who produce value and incentive to both audiences and suppliers.

Produsers

A professional user and producer. Creates content and contributes to it through active participation of the content, rather than consume it.

Why is attention scarce?

Entering the digital era, information is considered infinite, while our attention is considered finite. It is costly.

Consumerism

The idea of increasing consumer goods and preoccupying society with the main goal of purchasing products being a desirable goal in order to achieve happiness.

Political Economy

Focuses on social theory by connecting the systems of economies- corporations, businesses, and the like- with available resources and power. Focuses of the transformational results of industrialization and creates divides in spaces of production.

Industrialization

The transformation of economic and social change to manufacturing and industrial change. Went from agricultural based to mechanical based. Involves urbanization and mechanization.

Blindspot of Communication

The lack of attention to audience labour. It is the lack of recognition of what’s generating value for advertisers- that being the attention of the audience.

Encoder

A tool used by producers to deliver a message, or provide a intended statement in order to reach specific audiences according to resources and ideologies through media.

Decoder

A tool used by producers to get audiences to interpret the message through their own frameworks of knowledge. Processing the message and fundamentally with the ideologies they hold can find the message in a piece of media.

Dominant and Hegemonic Reading

An interpretation that share symmetry between the encoding and decoding of a message. Understands the meaning and accepts it.

Oppositional Reading

An interpretation that holds asymmetry between the encoding and decoding of a message. Understands the meaning but rejects it.

Negotiated Reading

An interpretation that partly holds symmetry between the encoding and decoding of a message. Resists and modifies based on their own perspective.

Stuart Hall

A prominent figure in communication studies that created the model of communication called “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse”.

Signifier

The thing we experience and is outside of us. Triggers images in an audiences mind and holds itself as a physical attribute to the sign.

Signified

The idea or mental concept drawn from a sign. Happens in the mind and can only be seen within an audience’s ideas.

Icons

A sign that resembles the object that it's signifying.

Indexes

A sign that’s directly related to the object.

Symbols

A sign that’s arbitrary to the object itself.

Denotation

The literal meaning of something.

Connotation

The metaphorical, cultural meaning of something.

Semiotics

The study of signs. Focuses on the behaviour and meaning of signs, whether physical, arbitrary or gestured. Can range from movements, imagery, and language. Examines their nature and their organization within systems.

Synchronic

Communication that concerns itself with real-time occurrences. Exchanges information almost instantly. 

Diachronic

Communication that concerns itself with the progressive evolvement of change over a period of time. Overlooks how it evolves historically.

The risk of a message being interpreted differently. Lies between how that idea can be understood by other people and how we can form that idea into mediated communication. Holds a risk that the fullness of those thoughts will never be reflected correctly.

What’s a problem that communication has?

Information Abundance

The amount of information that is offered to us at this very moment being monumentally overwhelming, especially in the digital age.

Information Scarcity

Opposed to the digital era, holds limited accessibility and isn’t easily transferable between organizations.

Mass Communication

The process of exchanging information through large amounts of media sources to impact society and culture. Used by Nazis during the Second World War to spread propaganda.

The Hypododermic Needle Theory

The idea of watching something will immediately make you believe the content's message. States that media messages are injected into passive audiences and transform their thoughts to brainwash them.

Influencer Marketing

A strategic form of social _______ involving endorsements to a __________ through collaboration.

Harold Lasswell

A promiment figure who studied propaganda films to figure out what kind of brainwashing and psychological effects it had, and asked how people have their perspectives fundamentally altered through certain types of media.

Paul Lazerfield

A person who examined why people believed extreme things from mass media. Attempted to create a practical use of tools to understand how it led to this justified violence and how we can prevent it. Looked into mass media through psychological reports via large-scaled surveys.

The Mathematical Theory of Communication

Observes everything with a technical system. Thinks how humans communicate like machines. Considered one of the strongest foundations in communication.

Feedback Control

Involves inputs and outputs (encoding and decoding). A system in which outputs are returned as inputs to influence future actions and emotions. 

The Filter Bubble

A personalized media form for individualistic users based off of what they consume on the internet. Breaks it down to more personalized feed and filters out unwanted noise.

The dissolvement of democracy. It removes new content and drags us to more personalized content, but in exchange doesn't allow exposure to new topics and contrary opinions.

What does the filter bubble risk?

Engima Machine

What was the machine that Nazis used to decode secret messages?

Developed almost unbreakable codes to send out to those who knew how to decode it through a cipher device. Produced electrical signals and routed through a series of rotating wheels.

How did the machine that Nazi's used to encode and decode information work?

‘Panem et Circenses’

A quote that stated the way to pacify people was to provide cheap entertainment- similarly to culture where media is mass produced to subdue others from real presenting issues.

Captialism

A politcal economic system that states the only way to access and gain resources is through money. Money is crucial, and everything has a price. Holds a system of value that equals itself to monetary value.

Wage Labour

Selling the labour being the commodity. Your time is the price.

Capital Accumulation

The process of increasing an assets value through investment and motivates the pursuit of profit.

Commodity

The thinking of physical goods that's sold for production or consumption.

Logistics

The movement of goods and commodities.

Ideology

The consciousness industy that manages other people's consiciousness in media.

The Circuit of Culture

States that it's the entire way of life based on commodities within a circle. Defined with five other definitions that circulate around one another.

Regulation

The law, policy, and technological aspects of the circuit of circle. Allows one to think of safety concerns, royalities, censorships, and other such related content.

Representation

The recognition of what's in the media itself in the circuit of culture.

Identity

The direct connection to culture within the circuit of culture. Often is used to dish out personalized content that is consumed by commodities.

Production

The supply factor to culture and commodities in the circuit of culture system. Holds algorithmic connection in media that is made.

Consumption

The state of mechanisms accessing mediums and commodities in the circuit of culture. Exchanges your participation and time by demanding a product.

Circulation

The process of moving or sharing mediums once it is created or produced.

Working capital equals current assets, subtracting by current liabilities.

What is the formula for capital?

Production

The process of creation and production to an informational piece from the beginning to the end.

Implies the importance of ‘following the money’ logic, allows us to think about the impact of concentration and ownership of media. If you have a lot of money, you can own and shape the range of accessible opinion and decide who can access your information.

What does the quote ‘whoever pays the piper calls the tune' define?

Media Concentration

The control of shares between different organizations and fewer individuals in mass media shares and the global market. Allows the companies to hold control over these shares and what is produced.