Rutgers Intro To Media Final Exam Comprehensive Study Guide

Television Distribution and Specialized Programming

• CATV (Community Antenna Television): An early cable system that originated in areas where mountains or tall buildings blocked television signals. Due to early technical or regulatory limits, these systems contained only $12$ channels.
• Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS): A satellite-based service starting in $1994$ that distributes video programming directly to households. For a monthly fee, users can downlink hundreds of satellite channels and services.
• Narrowcasting: Refers to any specialized electronic programming or media channel that is aimed at a specific target audience.
• Pay-Per-View (PPV): A cable television service allowing customers to select a specific movie for a fee, or pay between $25.00$ and $40.00$ for a special one-time event.
• Video-on-Demand (VOD): Cable technology that enables viewers to instantly order and digitally deliver programming, such as movies, to their television sets.
• Cord-cutter: The act of canceling a pay-TV subscription to move to streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu.
• Cord-never: Individuals, usually millennials or the younger generation, who have never paid for a traditional TV subscription.
• Over-the-Top (OTT) Services: The delivery of film and television content via the Internet without requiring a subscription to traditional cable or satellite pay-TV services.

Legal Standards, Censorship, and Privacy Rights

• New York Times v. Sul livan (1964): A landmark libel case that established the "actual malice" standard. The courts decided that they must define whether a plaintiff is a private individual or a public official. The case originated from a $1960$ advertisement by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South; Montgomery City Commissioner LB Sul liven sued the NYT for defamation.
• Miller v. California (1973): This case established the three-part test of obscenity. It introduced the notion of "community standards," acknowledging that different regions have different standards for judging obscenity, and required the work to be judged as a whole.     * The Three-Part Test:         1. The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.         2. The work depicts or describes sexual conduct or excretory functions in an offensive way, as specifically defined by state law.         3. The work, as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
• Bollea (Hulk Hogan) v. Gawker (2016): A right to privacy case viewed as a possible threat to online freedom of expression because it prioritizes the interest of the celebrity over the public interest.
• Shield Laws: Laws designed to protect the confidentiality of key interview subjects and the rights of reporters to not reveal controversial sources used in news stories.
• Prior Restraint: The legal definition of censorship in the U.S., which prohibits courts and governments from blocking any publication or speech before it actually occurs.
• First Amendment: Explicitly states: "Congress shal l make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
• Unprotected Expression: Forms of expression not protected under the First Amendment include Sedition, Copyright infringement, Libel, and Obscenity.
• Sedition: Encouraging rebellion against the state or government, often associated with the Espionage Act of $1917$.
• Copyright Infringement: Violation of the legal rights of authors and producers to their published or unpublished works (writing, music, lyrics, TV, movies, graphic art). Includes concepts of the public domain and fair use.
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): Outlaws any technology or action that circumvents copyright protection systems.

Media Effects and Social Science Research Methodologies

• Survey Research: A method of collecting and measuring data taken from a group of respondents.
• Content Analysis: A method for studying and coding media programs and texts.
• Experiments: Mass media research that isolates specific aspects of content, suggests a hypothesis, and manipulates variables to discover the impact of a medium on attitudes, behavior, or emotions.
• Longitudinal Studies: Research conducted over long periods of time, often utilizing large academic and government survey databases.
• Media Effects Research: The mainstream tradition in mass communication research that attempts to understand, explain, and predict the impact of mass media on individuals and society.
• Cultural Studies: Approaches that try to understand how media and culture are tied to daily communication patterns; focuses on how people make meaning and order experience through symbols and stories.
• Textual Analysis: A cultural studies method for closely examining and interpreting meanings of culture, including architecture, fashion, books, and TV.
• Audience Studies: Also known as reader-response research, this focuses on how people use and interpret cultural content.

Key Media Theories and Models

• Hypodermic-Needle Model: Also called the "magic bullet" theory or direct effects model. Developed by Harold Laswel l, it suggests media shoot powerful effects into unsuspecting or weak audiences. An example is the reaction to a play about an alien in NJ, where people panicked thinking it was real.
• Minimal Effects Model: Proposed by Joseph Klapper ($1960$); it argues media have limited effects and reinforce existing behaviors and attitudes rather than changing them. Employs selective exposure and selective retention based on existing beliefs.
• Uses and Gratification Model: Proposed by Blumier and Katz ($1969$); argues people use media to satisfy emotional desires or intellectual needs (e.g., "Why do you watch your favorite TV show?").
• Social Learning Theory: Realized by Albert Bandura, suggesting a link between mass media and behavior via a $4$-step process: $1$) Attention, $2$) Retention, $3$) Motor Reproduction, and $4$) Motivation.
• Cultivation Effect Theory: Proposed by Gerbner and Gross; suggests heavy television viewing leads individuals to perceive reality consistently with TV portrayals (e.g., "mean world" syndrome). Considers resonance and time spent (heavy, medium, light viewers).
• Agenda-Setting Theory: Discussed by Lippmann ($1922$), Cohen ($1963$), and McCombs & Shaw ($1972$). Argues the media tells us not what to think, but what to think about by prioritizing specific issues.
• Spiral of Silence: Theoretically describes how people holding minority views on controversial issues tend to remain silent, creating a vocal minority and a silent majority.
• Third-Person Effect Theory: Developed by Phillips Davidson ($1983$). It suggests individuals believe media affects others more than themselves. Components include message desirability, cognitive distance (subjective competence), and social distance (I am not affected, you are a little, they are quite a bit).
• Encoding and Decoding: Stuart Hal l's theory on how audiences read media messages in three ways: dominant, negotiated, or resistant.

Information Flow and Communication Eras

• Linear Model of Mass Communication: Senders (authors, producers) transmit messages (texts, ads) through channels (newspapers, TV, internet) to receivers. Gatekeepers (editors, managers) act as filters. Problem: messages do not always move smoothly from point A to point Z.
• Cultural Model of Mass Communication: Audiences actively affirm, interpret, or reject messages based on their own cultural beliefs and values. Focuses on how meaning is produced rather than just transmitted.
• Oral and Written Eras: From roughly $1000 ext{ BCE}$ to the Industrial Revolution. Information passed by poets and storytellers; a vast gap existed between the literate ruling class and the illiterate workers.
• The Print Revolution: While starting in China ($100 ext{ CE}$ to $1045$), modern printing emerged in the mid-$15$th century with Gutenberg's movable metallic type and printing press, making books cheaper and easier to create.
• The Electronic Era: Began with the telegraph in the $1840$s, making information a commodity and messaging instantaneous. It led to the rise of film, radio in the $1920$s, and ended with the last telegraph sent in $2006$.
• The Digital Era: Digital communication converts images, texts, and sounds into electronic signals ($0$s and $1$s) to be reassembled as precise reproductions.

Internet Evolution, Technology, and Infrastructure

• ARPAnet: The original internet; a wired network system created for military and academic researchers to communicate using a distributed network.
• Packet Switching: The process of breaking messages into smaller pieces to route them through multiple paths before reassembling them.
• Microprocessors: Introduced in $1971$; miniature circuits that store and process electronic signals, paving the way for personal computers.
• World Wide Web (WWW): Developed in $1989$ by Tim Berners-Lee; established the use of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) so all computers could read the same code.
• First Web Browsers: Mosaic and Netscape, which brought the internet to mass audiences.
• Web 2.0: A shift from static HTML pages to dynamic and social media.
• Semantic Web: A proposed development where data is structured so machines can communicate with machines (e.g., Siri, Alexa, Sophia the robot).
• Moore's Law: Noted by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in $1965$; the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits doubles every year, a trend predicted to continue.
• Internet of Things (IoT): The interconnection of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, allowing them to send and receive data.

Data Ethics, Privacy, and Algorithms

• Data Mining: The unethical gathering of data by online purveyors of content and merchandise.
• Cookies: The means by which websites collect, store, and remember user information.
• Global Privacy Regulations: In the United States, websites can freely collect information without restrictions. In Europe, the "Cookie Law" requires websites to get visitor consent before storing or retrieving info.
• Cambridge Analytica: A political consulting firm that harvested Facebook profiles to create psychological profiles. While $270,000$ users consented, data from $87 ext{ billion}$ users was collected without consent. Facebook knew in $2015$ but failed to ensure data deletion.
• Filter Bubble: Intellectual isolation caused by algorithms selectively assuming what information a user wants to see.
• Emotional Contagion: When one person's emotions and behaviors trigger similar reactions in others.
• Technological Convergence: Consumers using multiple avenues to access media content as different systems evolve to perform similar tasks.
• Algorithms: Systems that control various aspects of life, from social media feeds to dating.
• Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986: Allows platforms to provide user data to the government via subpoena or court order.
• The Total Information Awareness Program (2003): An initiative to gather detailed info on individuals to prevent crimes; though defunded after criticism, its data mining software is still in use.
• September 11, 2001: Marked the beginning of intense online "big data" gathering.

Media Economics and Industry Structure

• The Big Five: Five companies control the majority of the internet market: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.
• Media Consolidation: A process where fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media.
• The Big Six (Ownership): Six companies currently own nearly all U.S. media: Comcast, Disney, Time-Warner, $21$st Century Fox, CBS, and Viacom.
• Telecommunications Act of 1996: Aimed at deregulation of broadcasting and telecom markets; it allowed for media cross-ownership and removed FCC regulation of premium cable rates.
• Media Cross-Ownership: When a single person or corporation owns multiple media businesses (radio, TV, newspaper, etc.).
• Net Neutrality: The principle that every user and website has the right to the same network speed and access.
• Propaganda Model: Includes filters such as ownership, political/business elite, advertisers, 'flak' (strong criticism), and anti-communism/terrorism.
• Targeted Advertising: Using sophisticated methods to target receptive audiences based on specific traits.

Cable and Broadcast Regulation

• Must-Carry: Broadcasters can demand cable companies carry their signal, though the broadcaster is not entitled to a fee.
• Retransmission Consent: Cable operators must obtain consent from broadcasters, and broadcasters can charge a fee for this.
• Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992: Required cable systems to carry local broadcast channels and prohibited charging broadcasters for this carriage.
• Basic Cable: Supplements subscriber fees with advertising revenue.
• Premium Cable: Lures customers with original series and films without ads (e.g., HBO, Showtime). Operators pay between $4.00$ and $6.00$ per subscriber but charge customers $10.00$ or more.

Radio and Public Media Systems

• Pirate Radio: Illegal, unlicensed transmissions by amateurs.
• Low Power FM (LPFM): Noncommercial educational broadcasting. The legal limit is $100 ext{ milliwatts}$, capable of reaching about $250 ext{ ft}$.
• Public Broadcasting Act of 1967: Established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), overseeing PBS and NPR.
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB): A private, nonprofit corporation that funnels federal funds to nonprofit media. $95\%$ of its appropriation goes to content/local stations; only $5\%$ goes to administrative costs.
• NPR (National Public Radio): Established in $1967$; stations produce nearly $40\%$ of their own programming, with the rest coming from NPR, PRI, and APM.
• Pacifica Foundation: Created by Lewis Kimbal l Hil l in $1949$ in Berkeley, CA; launched KPFA, the first nonprofit community radio station.
• C-SPAN: Private nonprofit company created in $1979$ by the cable industry; receive no government funding.
• Community Media: Usually run by volunteers to supplement or challenge dominant media (e.g., community radio, participatory video).
• Ethnic Media: Media produced for niche immigrant populations, often in their country of origin's language.

Immersive and Experiential Media

• Augmented Reality (AR): Layers digital content onto the real world via mobile/wearable devices (e.g., Snapchat filters).
• Virtual Reality (VR): Supplants the real world with a computer-mediated experience via a headset.
• Mixed Reality (MR): Merges real and virtual worlds where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time.
• Traditional vs. Experiential Model:     * Traditional: Linear, passive, static, episodic, $3$rd-person narrative.     * Experiential: Non-linear, interactive, multi-sensory, dynamic, $1$st-person point of view.
• Natural User Interface: Digital audio assistance like Amazon Echo (Alexa) using high-fidelity microphones and cloud control.
• Haptics: The use of touch/sensory feedback alongside sight and sound in multi-sensory environments.