Key terms and concepts.

Audience – viewers, listeners and readers of a media text. A lot of media studies is concerned with how audience use texts and the effects a text may have on them. Also identified in demographic  socio-economic categories.

Binary Opposites – the way opposites are used to create interest in media texts, such as good/bad, coward/hero, youth/age, black/white. By Barthes and Levi-Strauss who also noticed another important feature of these ‘binary opposites’: that one side of the binary pair is always seen by a particular society or culture as more valued over the other.Censorship – Control over the content of a media text – sometimes by the government, but usually by a regulatory body like the British Board of Film censors.

Context – time, place or mindset in which we consume media products.Conventions – the widely recognized way of doing things in particular genre.Denotation – the everyday or common sense meaning of a sign. Connotation – the secondary meaning that a sign carries in addition to it’s everyday meaning.

Diegetic Sound – Sound whose source is visible on the screen Non Diegetic sound – Sound effects, music or narration which is added afterwardsEnigma – A question in a text that is not immediately answered and creates interest for the audience – a puzzle that the audience has to solve.Feminism – the struggle by women to obtain equal rights in societyGaze – the idea that the way we look at something, and the way somebody looks at you, is structured by the way we view the world. Feminist Laura Mulvey suggests that looking involves power, specifically the look of men at women, implying that men have power over women.Genre – the type or category of a media text, according to its form, style and content.

Hegemony – Traditionally this describes the predominance of one social class over another, in media terms this is how the controllers of the media may on the one hand use the media to pursue their own political interest, but on the other hand the media is a place where people who are critical of the establishment can air their views.Ideology – A set of ideas or beliefs which are held to be acceptable by the creators of the media text, maybe in line with those of the dominant ruling social groups in society, or alternative ideologies such as feminist ideology.

Image – a visual representation of something.Institutions – The organisations which produce and control media texts such as the BBC, AOL Time Warner, News International.Media product – a text that has been designed to be consumed by an audience. E.G a film, radio show, newspaper etc.Mise en Scene – literally ‘what’s in the shot’ everything that appears on the screen in a single frame and how this helps the audience to decode what’s going on.

Montage – putting together of visual images to form a sequence. Made famous by Russian film maker Eisenstein in his famous film Battleship Potemkin.

Non-verbal communication – communication between people other than by speech.

Propaganda – the way ruling classes use the mass media to control or alter the attitudes of others.

Representation – The way in which the media ‘re-presents’ the world around us in the form of signs and codes for audiences to read.

Signified – the ‘thing’ that conveys the meaning, and the meaning conveyed. EG a red rose is a signifier, the signified is love

Sound Effects – additional sounds other than dialogue or music, designed to add realism or atmosphere.

Stereotype – representation of people or groups of people by a few characteristics eg hoodies, blondes

Still – static image.

Sub-genre – a genre within a genre.

close up – a shot which provides a very close view of a character or object.  Handy for showing expressions, or allowing the audience to read onscreen writing.

dolly – a device for moving a camera along on wheels.    Used for tracking shots.

establishing shot – a shot shown at the the start of a scene to establish the location.  This is often a wide angled shot, so as to reveal as much of the location as possible.