Communication Theory Mid-Term Study Guide Flashcards

Comprehensive practice flashcards defining foundational terms, historical concepts, communication models, and media theories covered in the Communication Theory Mid-Term Study Guide.

Communication

The process by which meaning is shared between people; derived from the Latin roots communis ('common') and communicare ('to make common' or 'to share').

Transmission View of Communication

James Carey's conception of communication as the sending of messages across space from point A to point B for the primary purposes of control and persuasion.

Ritual View of Communication

James Carey's conception of communication as the construction and maintenance of a shared culture and collective beliefs over time, rather than merely the spatial transfer of facts.

Encoding

The stage in the communication process in which the sender converts ideas and intentions into symbolic form, such as words, images, sounds, or gestures.

Decoding

The stage in the communication process in which the receiver converts transmitted symbols back into meaning using their own past experience and frame of reference.

Physical Noise

Environmental disturbances in the transmission setting or channel that interfere with the message, such as traffic sounds, poor reception, or dropped calls.

Physiological Noise

Bodily conditions and sensory limitations of the sender or receiver that impede communication, such as hearing loss, fatigue, illness, or hunger.

Psychological Noise

Internal mental states, emotional conditions, and cognitive biases that distort meaning, including prejudice, anger, preoccupation, and stereotypes.

Semantic Noise

Interference originating from differences in meaning, ambiguous phrasing, technical jargon, or dialect mismatches between sender and receiver.

Intrapersonal Communication

Communication occurring within an individual's own mind, involving processes such as internal self-talk, dreaming, conceptual planning, and instantaneous internal feedback.

Interpersonal Communication

A personal, adaptive exchange between two people that can be face-to-face or mediated, characterized by immediate and rich feedback.

Mass Communication

The process by which specialized institutions employ technology to produce and disseminate symbolic messages to large, heterogeneous, anonymous, and widely dispersed audiences.

Mass Self-Communication

Manuel Castells' concept describing digital communication that reaches a mass audience while remaining self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and self-selected in reception.

The 'Mass' Concept (Blumer)

Herbert Blumer's 1939 collectivity category comprising individuals from diverse social strata who are anonymous, possess little to no interaction or organization, and are geographically dispersed.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

Ferdinand Tönnies' sociological typology contrasting traditional, close-knit, interpersonal communities (Gemeinschaft) with modern, impersonal, and individualistic societies (Gesellschaft).

The Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan's aphorism asserting that the structural and perceptual properties of a medium shape human society and consciousness far more than the specific content transmitted through it.

Hot Media vs. Cool Media

McLuhan's classification distinguishing high-definition media requiring low audience participation (such as radio and film) from low-definition media requiring high audience involvement (such as television).

Selective Exposure

The psychological tendency of media audiences to deliberately seek out and consume messages that conform to their existing beliefs while avoiding conflicting viewpoints.

Cognitive Dissonance

Leon Festinger's theory stating that internal discomfort caused by holding contradictory thoughts or receiving conflicting information drives individuals to avoid disconfirming messages.

Surveillance of the Environment

Harold Lasswell's media function concerning the continuous monitoring of worldly events to inform, warn, and alert the public to emerging opportunities or threats.

Correlation of Parts of Society

Harold Lasswell's media function involving the interpretation, analysis, and framing of information to coordinate social responses and shape public consensus.

Transmission of Social Heritage

Harold Lasswell's media function dedicated to passing down social knowledge, cultural values, norms, and collective traditions from one generation to the next.

Entertainment Function (Charles Wright)

A fourth media function added by Charles Wright in 1960 that provides diversion, tension reduction, amusement, and relaxation for its own sake.

Status Conferral

Lazarsfeld and Merton's concept whereby mass media coverage grants public prestige, prominence, and recognized authority to featured individuals, groups, or issues.

Narcotizing Dysfunction

Lazarsfeld and Merton's social effect wherein heavy exposure to news information causes passivity, leading citizens to confuse merely being informed with taking active civic measures.

Normative Media Theories

Theories outlining how mass media systems ought to operate according to specific political, social, and moral ideals, originally synthesized by Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm in 1956.

Authoritarian Theory of the Press

A normative theory originating in 16th- and 17th-century monarchies holding that media must strictly serve the state's leadership through licensing, censorship, and royal controls.

Libertarian Theory of the Press

An Enlightenment-rooted normative theory positing that rational individuals discover truth via a free marketplace of ideas, with the press serving as a Fourth Estate watchdog over government.

Social Responsibility Theory of the Press

A 20th-century normative theory resulting from the 1947 Hutchins Commission, asserting that media freedom requires moral obligations to offer accurate, comprehensive, and contextualized accounts of the day's events.

Soviet Communist Theory of the Press

A normative theory rooted in Marxist-Leninist thought asserting that media must be publicly owned instruments of the state and party dedicated to educating citizens and building socialism.

Development Media Theory

Denis McQuail's normative theory for emerging nations stating that media should actively prioritize national development goals, economic progress, and cultural identity over complete autonomy.

Democratic-Participant Theory

Denis McQuail's normative theory reacting against commercialized and bureaucratized media by advocating for citizen access, community radio, grassroots media, and the right to communicate.

Public Sphere (Öffentlichkeit)

Jürgen Habermas' concept of a communicative arena where private individuals congregate freely to debate public matters rationally, which he argued was later refeudalized by commercialism.

SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment)

A 1975–76 Indian landmark in development communication that utilized NASA's ATS-6 satellite to broadcast educational programming directly to approximately 2,400 rural villages in six states.

Media Chain

A concentration pattern where a single corporate owner or media company controls multiple distinct outlets within the same medium across different cities or markets.

Media Conglomerate

A large corporate parent company that holds major media firms alongside diverse, often unrelated business operations in non-media industries.

Cross-Media Ownership

An ownership structure in which a single corporate entity owns operating assets across multiple different media sectors, such as print newspapers, television networks, radio, and digital portals.

Vertical Integration

An industrial ownership strategy where a single company controls multiple stages of a media product's life cycle from initial production through final distribution and delivery.

Horizontal Integration

An ownership strategy in which a company acquires or merges with direct competitor firms functioning at the exact same level of production across the media landscape.

Synergy

The commercial practice wherein a media conglomerate cross-promotes and exploits a single content property across its diverse channels, platforms, publications, and merchandise lines.

The Propaganda Model

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's political-economic framework detailing how structural filters systematically condition market-driven news media to serve political and corporate elites.

Lasswell's Communication Formula

Harold D. Lasswell's 1948 linear model of communication structured around the five questions: 'Who? Says what? In which channel? To whom? With what effect?'.

Shannon-Weaver Model (1949)

A linear, engineering-based mathematical model mapping signal transmission from an information source through a transmitter, channel (subject to noise), receiver, and destination.

Entropy (Shannon)

A mathematical measure of uncertainty, unpredictability, or variety present within an information source; a higher number of possible messages yields greater entropy.

Redundancy (Shannon)

The predictable or repeated elements present within a message that assist the receiver in reconstructing the intended signal despite transmission noise.

Channel Capacity

The quantitative upper limit or maximum rate at which a given physical medium can reliably carry information without distortion.

Weaver's Three Levels of Communication Problems

Warren Weaver's framework classifying communication obstacles into Level A (Technical: symbol accuracy), Level B (Semantic: meaning accuracy), and Level C (Effectiveness: behavioral change).

Osgood-Schramm Model (1954)

A circular communication model that treats participants as equal, interchangeable actors who simultaneously perform the functions of encoding, interpreting, and decoding through feedback.

Field of Experience (Schramm)

Wilbur Schramm's concept denoting the total cumulative background, culture, language, and knowledge of an individual; communication can occur only within the shared overlap of both participants' fields.

Strain Toward Symmetry

The core dynamic in Theodore Newcomb's 1953 ABX model stating that when two related parties hold divergent attitudes about an external issue ($X$), internal tension compels them to communicate to restore balance.

Gatekeeper (C in Westley-MacLean)

A media organization or professional acting between an advocate ($A$) and the public ($B$) that selects, alters, and transmits environmental events ($X$) on behalf of the audience.

Gerbner's General Model of Communication

A 1956 comprehensive model detailing that communication begins when a human or machine ($M$) perceives an event ($E$) through selection and context to produce a statement ($SE$) combining content and form.

Hypodermic Needle Model

An early mass society perspective (magic bullet theory) assuming that mass media messages exert immediate, direct, and uniform effects upon passive, isolated audiences.

Two-Step Flow of Communication

Lazarsfeld and Katz's limited-effects finding showing that media ideas flow first to active opinion leaders, who then filter and interpret these messages for less active members of their social networks.

Culture Industry

Frankfurt School theorists Adorno and Horkheimer's term for the standardized, profit-driven production of mass commercial culture that pacifies audiences and reinforces capitalist conformity.

Hegemony (Gramsci)

Antonio Gramsci's concept describing how ruling social classes maintain authority and power not by force alone, but by engineering cultural consent through institutions such as mass media.

Agenda-Setting Theory

McCombs and Shaw's 1972 theory demonstrating that media prioritize certain issues, meaning that while they may not tell people what to think, they effectively determine what to think about.

Cultivation Theory

George Gerbner's theory asserting that long-term, heavy exposure to television gradually cultivates a world view mirroring television representations, leading to symptoms like the 'mean world syndrome'.

Spiral of Silence

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's 1974 theory proposing that individuals who sense their opinion is in the minority stay quiet out of fear of isolation, making dominant views seem overwhelmingly endorsed.

Encoding/Decoding (Stuart Hall)

Stuart Hall's 1973/1980 cultural model postulating that institutional texts encode dominant meanings, but active audiences decode them through dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, or oppositional readings.

Polysemy

The semiotic quality of media texts possessing multiple potential interpretations, enabling diverse audiences to construct varying, pleasurable, or resistant meanings.