Sociology of Popular Culture - Module 2 Vocabulary

Flashcards covering key vocabulary from the sociology and popular culture lecture notes.

Cultural Studies

An interdisciplinary field of enquiry that explores the production and inculcation of maps of meaning

Popular Culture

Popular culture is an arena of consent and resistance in the struggle over cultural meaning.

Ideology

A body of ideas that are articulated and communicated by a specific group, understood in terms of power and power relations.

Encoding/Decoding Model

Pairs the interacting concepts in an effort to integrate textual analysis and audience studies, including an examination of both the production of the text and the reception of the text.

Dominant (Hegemonic) Reading

The viewer’s interpretation of the text is in agreement with the dominant or obvious meaning system operating within the cultural text.

Oppositional Reading

The viewer rejects the dominant (mainstream, “normal”) message and meaning in their interpretation of the text.

Negotiated Reading

A compromise is drawn between the dominant and oppositional readings in which a viewer accepts part of the dominant meaning but rejects certain elements of it as well.

Discourse

Addresses our relationship to knowledge, subject matter, behaviour and events as they are represented and constituted in our language use, declarations and statements, as well as through shared ideas as they exist socially; provides a framework through which to see, negotiate and interpret the social world around us.

Quality Television

Shows with sophisticated scripts, complex multi-layered narratives, and visually expressive cinematography, combined with its exploration of contemporary anxieties

Cultural Capital

Determined by the value that an individual holds in relation to culture, producing a value system that permits maintaining different, and even antagonistic, relations to culture depending on the social group or class to which an individual belongs.

Taste

Classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ and taste ‘is what brings together things and people that go together; a reflection of social power on the basis of cultural distinction

Ideology

Ideologies are not just a group of ideas normalized as common sense to a population through the dominant culture, but ideology works beneath the level of the conscious mind and persuades us to accept the values of our culture as if they were produced by nature.

Hypodermic Needle Theory

The hypodermic needle theory suggests that the media injects ideas

Spectatorship

Addresses the act of viewing itself, in which members of the audience respond to media and the cinema through the eyes of different cultures and sub-cultures.

Intertextuality

The insertion of allusions to other works of art or literature into a text; the relationships among texts.

Globalization

Refers to the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole.

Convergence

The merging of technologies, industries, and content, especially in the realms of computing, telecommunications, and media.

Cultural Studies

An interdisciplinary field of enquiry that explores the production and inculcation of maps of meaning

Popular Culture

Popular culture is an arena of consent and resistance in the struggle over cultural meaning.

Ideology

A body of ideas that are articulated and communicated by a specific group, understood in terms of power and power relations.

Encoding/Decoding Model

Pairs the interacting concepts in an effort to integrate textual analysis and audience studies, including an examination of both the production of the text and the reception of the text.

Dominant (Hegemonic) Reading

The viewer’s interpretation of the text is in agreement with the dominant or obvious meaning system operating within the cultural text.

Oppositional Reading

The viewer rejects the dominant (mainstream, “normal”) message and meaning in their interpretation of the text.

Negotiated Reading

A compromise is drawn between the dominant and oppositional readings in which a viewer accepts part of the dominant meaning but rejects certain elements of it as well.

Discourse

Addresses our relationship to knowledge, subject matter, behaviour and events as they are represented and constituted in our language use, declarations and statements, as well as through shared ideas as they exist socially; provides a framework through which to see, negotiate and interpret the social world around us.

Quality Television

Shows with sophisticated scripts, complex multi-layered narratives, and visually expressive cinematography, combined with its exploration of contemporary anxieties

Cultural Capital

Determined by the value that an individual holds in relation to culture, producing a value system that permits maintaining different, and even antagonistic, relations to culture depending on the social group or class to which an individual belongs.

Taste

Classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ and taste ‘is what brings together things and people that go together; a reflection of social power on the basis of cultural distinction

Ideology

Ideologies are not just a group of ideas normalized as common sense to a population through the dominant culture, but ideology works beneath the level of the conscious mind and persuades us to accept the values of our culture as if they were produced by nature.

Hypodermic Needle Theory

The hypodermic needle theory suggests that the media injects ideas

Spectatorship

Addresses the act of viewing itself, in which members of the audience respond to media and the cinema through the eyes of different cultures and sub-cultures.

Intertextuality

The insertion of allusions to other works of art or literature into a text; the relationships among texts.

Globalization

Refers to the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole.

Convergence

The merging of technologies, industries, and content, especially in the realms of computing, telecommunications, and media.

Cultural Hierarchy

Describes the difference between high and low culture, presupposing the existence of a hierarchical structure.

Standpoint Theory

A point of view that is informed by one’s social location.