Media Studies Midterm

What is the Media (according to your first-day materials)?

The study of media should include social media, the internet, mail, networks, and foundational media like newsprint.

Define The Gaze in media studies

The preferences of a (usually dominant) group imposed through a normative mode of visual organization. It's a series of conscious decisions made to construct a specific message, meaning, or narrative in moving images.

What is The Male Gaze and who theorized it?

A perspective (theorized by Laura Mulvey) that represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer, splitting pleasure in looking between active/male and passive/female ("to-be-looked-at-ness").

What is Authenticity in representation, and why is it considered "transient"?

A transient state where something is represented as purely as it can, with minimal misdirection. It's transient because what is considered "authentic" can shift and change depending on the context and audience.

Define Decolonization.

The historically violent process of a colonizing force losing power over a colonized territory and its people, who then achieve national independence.

What are Imagined Communities?

A concept attributed to Benedict Anderson that explains how nationalism develops through mass media (like print or radio), allowing people to imagine themselves as part of a larger community despite never meeting most of its members.

What is the title and main point of Laura Mulvey's famous essay?

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1973). Main point: The unconscious of patriarchal society has structured traditional film form to cater to the male gaze.

What did Dominick and Rausch (1972) find about the representation of women in advertising?

Women were often confined to the home, shown with children, and frequently portrayed as either sex objects/decorationor housewives, with an emphasis on youth.

What was Frantz Fanon's key argument about radio in "This Is the Voice of Algeria" (1959)?

Initially, Algerians rejected French-operated radio as the "voice of the occupier." When revolutionary voices began broadcasting, radio became a tool for collective Algerian transformation and anti-colonial resistance.

According to Susan Douglas in "The Zen of Listening," why is listening to the radio pleasurable?

It demands imagination; humans find it pleasurable to use their brains to create their own images from sound. It allows listeners to experience multiple identities (national, regional, local) simultaneously.

What was the significance of the Lacina (2023) study on Captain Marvel?

It revealed a double standard and a disconnect between the MCU's imagined audience (white, right-wing men) and its actual audience (people of color, liberals), where Captain Marvel was judged for personality traits (like being "condescending") that Tony Stark was not.

What was the importance of the KDKA radio station?

It was the first commercial radio station in the US, launched in Pittsburgh in 1920, marking the beginning of the radio boom.

In the context of the Algerian Revolution, what became the paradoxical symbol of resistance?

The sound of static (caused by French attempts to jam anti-colonial broadcasts). The static became a source of revolutionary encouragement and a symbol of the Voice of Algeria.

AM (Amplitude Modulation). FM (Frequency Modulation) has a shorter range but a more stable signal.

What type of signal (AM or FM) travels farther but is more susceptible to noise?

According to Mulvey, how does Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window exemplify the male gaze?

The film makes "liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist," drawing spectators into his position and forcing them to share his look, which oscillates between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination.