Media Studies 10 Midterm

Media + Literacy

• All Media texts that can be read for meaning

• Reading skills are learned through media literacy

• Reading requires an active process of interpretation

Media + Everyday life

• A source of pleasure and routine

• A tool for learning and interpretation

• A form of connection and social currency

• An expense paid for in $$$, time, and/or info

Utopian views and critiques

perspective

• If you find it objectionable, there’s something else

• It can act as an informational & educational resource

• It’s a window to new experiences

• THUS: Multiplicity of choice & viewpoint

criticisms

• Dismissive of social harm

• Ignores commercial interests: Is there really something for everyone

• Ignores production hierarchies

• Employs the “myth of progress”

Dystopian views and critiques

perspective

• Passive & addictive

• Exploitative & formulaic 

• Consumerist

• THUS: directly harmful to individuals & society

criticisms

• Totalizing: is it all bad?

• Nostalgic

• Elitest

• Assumes passive consumption

Mirror perspective views and critiques

Perspective

• Media mirrors major social changes

Criticisms of the mirror perspective

• Ignores media maker agency

• Ignores the selective process of production 

• Different reasons why audiences watch

• Different audience interpretations

INSTEAD: the cultural approach

Media changes society + society changes media as “cultural context”

• Media Text

• Media Users

• Media Industries

• Media Technologies

Technological convergence

“Black Box”” combing a variety of different media techs into a single machine

Content convergence

Content from one medium now available through a variety of devices

Implications of content convergence

FOR THE INDUSTRY: Collect fragmented audiences through many outlets

FOR MEDIA MAKERS: More outlets for material // opportunities for $$$

FOR AUDIENCES: Individualized consumption experience

• Timeshifting

• Placeshifting

• Greater content variety

• BUT: must navigate options and choices

Transmedia extensions & goals

Supplemental content from one medium on other platforms (finding show content through music, video games, behind the scenes video content. HAS TO BE LICENSED, fan fiction does count in this content

Transmedia Storytelling

A form of TM extension in which all media share the same “textual universe” across media (Star Wars)

Codes

(STYLE)

• Length

• Visual Style (lighting, camerawork, editing)

• Audio Style (musical accompaniment, sound design)

Conventions

(STORY)

• Setting 

• Character Type 

• Plot

• Ideology

The evolving “screen ecology” (Craig & Cunningham)

“LEGACY MEDIA” “OLIGOPOLY” STABLE…

“SoCal Business culture” = Hollywood “w/ their time-honored business models of talent-driven mass media & premium content & limited measurement”

…UNITL CHALLENGED BY “DIGITAL MEDIA PLATFORMS”

“NorCal Business culture” = IT strategies, “permanent beta,” automation. Sophisticated measurement, “constant iteration,” etc. 

• “Portals” like Netflix w/ “closed” “pro-generated content” w/ TV-like content

“social media entertainment” (Craig & Cunningham)

like IG & YT w/ “open” “user-generated content” w/ “Social media logics”

• Feels just like social media

Stories have audiences

Audiences consume/decode the story

• Imagined audience = intended audience of consumers

• Actual audience = including “interlopers” not part of the imagined audience

Paratexts

“extratextual” material operating outside of the text

• impact audience, industry, & critical understanding 

• THUS: They help create the text

• AND: paratexts operate as the source of meaning for the majority of people who never consume the text

Ideology & Dominant ideology

Values & Beliefs that people use to make sense of the world

• Feel commonsense/natural to those who hold them

• Spread through powerful institutions like family, education, government, media, etc.

• Can be widely shared, but never universal

Those with power shape the “dominant ideology” through institutional control

1. Reinforces the power of the few . . .

2. . . .yet is shared by the majority.

AND: dominant ideologies can evolve over time

Hegemony & Counter-hegemony

The process of maintaining power through seeking ideological consensus

• Agreement rather than force

• media reinforcing the interests of the powerful vs….

• media provide resistant “counter-hegemony” challenging these interests

• SO: ongoing process that must be constantly reaffirmed 
  Ex: The American dream

texts as polysemic

They can be interpreted in multiple ways

• SO: Audiences are active participants in interpreting a message based on their own experiences & beliefs

• BUT: shared cultural experiences & beliefs mean some meanings are more widely recognized

• HOWEVER: Variable interpretations mean that texts are sites of struggle

encoding vs. decoding (Hall)

• Media makers encode the text w/ preferred meanings

• which are often hegemonic in that they reflect the dominant ideology

vs.

Texts are DECODED at the level of consumption in one of three positions:

1. Dominant-hegemonic = accepts preferred

2. Negotiated = partially accepts preferred meaning

• 3. Oppositional = rejects meaning for an alternative one

Values of encoding/decoding

• All messages contain more than one potential interpretation

• Producers (aka media makers) can’t close off all decodings

• Our own experiences & beliefs color our decodings

• The struggle w/ getting people’s ideological agreement

Criticisms of encoding/decoding

• Few perfectly dominant or oppositional readings

• Works better for overtly ideological texts over ambivalent/ambiguous ones

• Multiple motivations behind production/encoding

• Needs to link decoding back to encoding

Textual approach to genre

GENRE = Content sharing conventions & codes

Problematizing the textual approach

Determining genre is based on a mix of conventions & codes

• BUT: based on select differences

• SO: no system for what differentiates demand for a new category

• THUS: some shared categories matters, others don’t

• THIS MEANS: Genres aren’t textually self-evident

Discursive approach to genre (Mittell)

Genres determined by cultural discourse (common, shared understandings)

Genre= a category “agreed upon” by industry + critics + audiences

APPROACH: Not determining its codes & conventions but how genre is understood through discourse (the cultural)

• Ex: Genres based on address

• Ex: Animation

Industrial utility of genre

1. Organize production

2. A label to manage consumer interest

• An attempt to manufacture success by offering the familiar

• BUT: genre must be communicated through promotion (trailers, posters, etc.)

• “Horizon of expectation” = genre is a “contract” between producers and audiences

AND: Genres can become more or less popular overtime

• Production run = spike in genre/subgenre copycats after success

Genre innovation

Problem of generic repetition = risk of bored audience

SO: Genres are “dynamic” & mutate to add differences

• Repetition = followed established genre codes & conventions

• Innovations = deviate from genre codes & conventions

RESULT: Predictability + surprise

Ex: The sitcoms of codes & conventions

AND becomes established if codes & conventions widely adopted

Genre hybrids

• Texts that can’t be reduced to a single genre

• Shows how generic elements can be combined & subverted

• AND: This is party of the audience pleasure in consumption

story characters & audiences

Characters are assigned traits that impact the story

• lead character = the protagonist driving the story

• Audiences are encouraged to identify with the protagonist 

  • *Externally (frequency/screen time, reaction shots, achievement)

  • *Internally (voiceover, POV, memory/dream sequence)

Hierarchy of knowledge

Revelation = when a story point is revealed to the audience

Recognition = when a story point is revealed to the character

• Revelation & recognition together = surprise

• Recognition before revelation = audience curiosity 

• Revelation before recognition = suspense

Paratexts for industry & audience

Paratexts = “extratextual” material operating outside of the text

• impact audience, industry, & critical understanding 

• THUS: They help create the text

• AND: paratexts operate as the source of meaning for the majority of people who never consume the text

Industry = use of paratexts is intensifying 

• synergy across various media holdings (TV, film games, etc.)

• Intense promotion is necessary in crowded media environment 

Audience = speculative consumption in making determinations about the text

Studying media industries & audience

Discourse on workers & roles focuses on the most “exceptional” (including leaders and “auteurs”)

BUT: they (and other workers) are one part of media creation, management, production, distribution, etc.

• “complex, specialized, & multifaceted” structures of industries & institutions 

• Dynamics of “circumcised agency” of industrial roles & everyday practices

Value of Studying media workers (H/L/P)

Provides nuanced understanding of media industries

• How they evolve over time (including duties, skills required, & status)

• How they shape content

• Reflect in part larger “traits or issues facing media industries”

Mediation

Practice of recording/selecting/ordering events into media narratives

• Not reality but a representation of it

• A construction shaped through codes & conventions + narrative structure 

News & How it’s shaped

The result of routines that become formalized into professional norms

GOAL: Newsworthiness + Objective reality

SHAPED BY:

1. Social process ($$$, deadlines, experts used, creator bias, recording, etc.)

• SO: no objective representations of reality

1. Codes & conventions (visual style, music, character types, setting, etc.)

SO: news is constructed to “feel” objective + newsworthy

Four ways of constructing reality TV (Kraszewski)

Reality TV is constructed through: 

• Selecting participants

• Overarching & mini narrative structures

• Location 

• Editing 

The Real World utility + narrative (Kraszewski)

INDUSTRIAL UTILITY: 

• Expand original production using cheap reality TV

• Help create a routine schedule 

NARRATIVE:

• Respond to charges of realities exclusion & promote liberal values

• Blames racism on the rural individuals 

• Absolves target demos, structural factors

SO: the construction of reality TV helps construct our beliefs & values

Celebrity

Person who attracts attention to such a degree that their life & personality are of public interest

BOTH: 

Workers + Products

cultural products + economic products

Economics of celebrity

GOAL: Encourage consumers to buy a new product by offering something familiar & appealing

Proliferation of celebrity b/c:

• Celebs want to increase their audience appeal by increasing their visibility

• Media companies want to promote their products using celebrity marketability

• Other media also rely on celebrity to generate $$$

Star image & its four components

1. Body of work (roles, albums, etc.)

2. Promotion (authorized & calculated image construction)

3. Publicity (generated by the press etc. outside of direct control) 

4. Audience practices (including general public, fans, and anti-fans)

+ INTERNET = more of everything & greater sense of intimacy/connection

Celebrity & Audiences

Stars are the product of audience fascination

• “Embodied attention” = mimicking celebrities style, buying products, consuming their media & media about them, etc.

• AND: Celebrities as proxies representing broader cultural identities, values, and concerns

• SO: What does the public’s interest in particular celebrities say about your concerns & values?

Relevant fantasy (Fiske)

• Celebrities can provide an empowering relevant fantasy capable of modeling alternative identities

SO: They’re polysemic in meaning that they are capable of multiple decodings

Character Types vs. Stereotypes

• A “shorthand” to help media makers communicate quickly meaning 

• Intertextual constructions w/ commonly understood traits & behaviors

vs.

• Reduce an entire group into a few simple characteristics, + or -

• Emerge from inequalities of representational power

• Spread intertextually through repeated media representations

Representation

To represent

1. To stand for

2. The practice of image creation (“the work of representation”)

In mediamaking

• SINCE: Every representation includes/emphasizes & excludes/deemphasizes

• RESULT: helps “construct” reality by perpetuating or challenging values/beliefs/norms

Power & Representation (Croteau & Hoynes)

PORTRAYAL OF DIFFERENCE

• Inclusion “who is represented, & who is absent”)

• Roles (“what are the quality of roles available?”)

• Control (“who has the power to construct media, & who is representing whom”?)

The Other & how media spread it

• Anyone who is “not like us”

• “We” are “normal” 

• Presented as a contrast to “us”

Media spread othering through:

1. “Symbolic annihilation” (absence of representation)

2. Stereotypes

3. 3. Absence of self-representation

“Splitting” (Hall)

Splitting = fix boundaries between social groups

1. Create differences and fix boundaries

2. Us vs. them (normal/mainstream vs. abnormal/outsiders)

GOAL: Maintain ‘social order’ through reinforcing power inequalities

Multicultural representation

• Visibility & diversity alone can yield “plastic representation” (including via “blind casting” & ensembles)

• INSTEAD: cultural specificity 

• EVEN BETTER: multicultural representation

  • *portrayal of culture differentiates within groups

  • *not just “role models” but multiplicity” of characters, realities, contexts

  • *more characters = less weight of single representation as “burden of representation”

Four Media sales logics

Commodities = paid in full by consumers

• One time sale (consumers keep product)

• Price covers all costs (including profit)

Turnstile = sell access to content

• Consumer pays “admission”

• Ex. Movie theaters, concerts, streaming TV

Ad-supported = “free” to consumer

• Advertisers pay cost of media in exchange for access to consumers (“impressions”)

• Consumer pay in attention + time + increased product costs + data

Microtransaction = lots of little payments

• Ex. “Freemium” (free-to-use + “premium”) options app-based games

• Payments from big spenders subsidize other users 

Three Hybrid sales logics

Combination = multiple simultaneous logics

• Ex. Some streaming services = Turnstile + ad-supported

• Ex. Some video games = commodities + micro transaction

Economies of scope = selling a product across multiple revenue streams”windows” & logics

• Ex. Movie “windows” = “theatrical”

  • “video”

  • “rental”

  • “subscription

  • “free TV”

Premium option = changing additional $$$ for a premium version with additional perks

• Ex. Turnstile add-ons

• Ex. Ad-free Spotify, YouTube Premium

Maximizing profit vs. market share

Increase revenue: economies of scope, international markets, overproduction (successes offset failures)

Minimize expenses through economies of scale: the cost of making a product decreases with the # of units sold

vs.

The % of a market held by a specific company

Tracks how well a company does compared to its competitors 

Maximizing investment capital vs. sunk cost fallacy

• The more money it invests in/promotes the project, the greater likelihood of success

• BUT: the more time & money you invest in something the harder it is to walk away from it.

The culture industry

Commercial producers of mass culture

• GOAL 1: Maximize return on investment

• GOAL 2: Reinforce the dominant ideology through media

• PRODUCT: Spectacle, diversion, consumerism INSTEAD OF communication & enlightenment 

• RESULT: Mass produced entertainment exploiting, alienating, & stunting the working class

Mass culture

Not authentic “folk culture” or original “high culture”…

…but industrialized & formulaic media produced by the culture industry

• SO: not from the masses, for the masses

• Reifies audiences (turns them into objects)

Impact of mass culture

Undifferentiated “dull, unimaginative, repetitive” media fosters…

Undifferentiated “dull, unimaginative, repetitive” audiences.

• Conformity 

• Mindless stimulation 

• Artificial concerns

• Leisure time becomes commodified 

• No sense of community/collectivity

False conciousness

• Mislead people into thinking that the route to contentment comes from consumption rather than upward mobility

  • Presents accumulating consumer goods as an expression of identity and “free choice” 

  • RESULT 1: Fantasy of control really creating inexhaustible dissatisfaction

  • RESULT 2: de-skills, de-politicizes, desensitizes, isolates overworked masses

Mass media industrialization

Media is manufactured like other industrialized commodities 

• Standardization = formulaic assembly line production

• Social Cement = “commodified catharsis” providing just enough relief to sustain capitalism through work

• Pseudo-individualization = same product hidden by a veneer of difference

Criticisms of the Frankfurt School

CRITICISMS:

• Elitist defense of high culture (only see that the media they consumed is the non-harmful one)

• Sweeping generalizations re: production

• Greater media choice today compared to the past 

DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR

• Failure (mass media’s failures in interaction with the masses)

• Innovation

• Actual audience interpretation

Structuring social relations (Fiske)

Value systems to which we understood & orient ourselves

• Social norms that guide individual social relationships

• Grants power to some groups over others

• Ex: New Newlywed Game & “official” vs. “popular” winners

BUT: these can be contested in the “space between social norms & their particular application”

Embarrassment & Quality (Fiske)

• Embarrassment occurs when social norms/SSRs are disrupted

• INCLUDING: taste hierarchies as “legitimate” & “illegitimate” pleasures

• AND: overcoming embarrassment can challenge & change culture

Popular culture

A process, not a thing or category

• Assembled from mass culture resources

• Concerned with meaning at consumption, not producer intentions

• The meaning-making process turns mass culture to pop culture

Explaining how people use & understand media

• Interpretation

• Pleasure

• Sociality

• Contestation

Excorporation vs. Incorporation (Fiske)

Mass culture & Pop culture feed off of each other (jeans example)

• Pop culture scans mass culture for resources it can appropriate 

• Mass culture scans pop culture for tastes/interests it can commodify

Criticisms of pop culture analysis

• Popular celebration

• Pop culture spreads harmful ideas too

• Validates dominant/commercial interests 

• Audiences can be active but that doesn’t meant mean they’re powerful

What concepts (for midterm) did Craig & Cunningham talk about

• The evolving “screen ecology”

• “social media entertainment”

What concepts (for midterm) did Hall talk about

• Encoding vs. Decoding

• Splitting

What concepts (for midterm) did Fiske talk about

• Relevant fantasy

• Structuring social relations

• Embarrassment & Quality

• Excorporation vs. Incorporation

What concepts (for midterm) did Croteau & Hoynes talk about

• Power & Representation

What concepts (for the midterm) did Kraszewski talk about

• Four ways of constructing reality TV

• The Real World utility + narrative

What concepts (for the midterm) did Mittell talk about

• Discursive approach to genre

What concepts (for the midterm) did (H/L/P) talk about

• Value of Studying media workers