Terminology - Question 2

Aesthetic - Visual appearance.

Association - An advertising technique whereby products are linked to people, values and lifestyles depicted in adverts.

Audience - Recipient of information.

Avatar - An onscreen representation  of a player in a video game.

BBFC - Britist Board of Film Classification

Bollywood - Popular Indian cinema.

Brand Extension - Applying a brand name to other products.

Brand Equity - Money earned by a brand name.

Broadband - High speed internet, allowing quicker downloading of images, music, videos, games, etc.

Catharsis - Releasing emotions in order to 'cleanse'. Linked to violence in video games, which some argue are cathartic, as they allow the release of frustration.

Censorship - The 'cutting' or preventing access to media material.

Classification - Restricting access to media material on the grounds of age.

Commodity - A thing that has value when sold.

Compression - Transferring data into less space and sending it from one place to another.

Convergence - Hardware and software coming together, companies coming together. Blurs the distinction between different types of media.

Copyright - The ownership of ideas as creative or intellectual property.

Cut Scene - Cinematic, predetermined parts of video games which render players passive by taking away their control.

Demographics - Common characteristics used for population segmentations (e.g. age, gender).

Digital - Information broken down into binary (a language of 0's and 1's).

Discourse - A way of speaking, thinking and understanding that becomes powerful and appears natural. Michel Foucault is a key thinker in the area.

Download - Recieveing information from the internet/computer.

Effects - The idea that the media has influence over the pubic and can play a role in changing peoples behaivour.

Ethnography - Detailed research with a particular social group in its situated contexts.

Fad - A custom, style, etc. that becomes very popular for a short time.

Feminism - The idea that men and women should be equal. Feminists object to media texts with little, poor, or no representation of women. Linked to Mulvey's 'Male Gaze' theory.

Form - The basic shape or structure of a text or product.

Gatekeeping - A role played by producers, editors, owners and regulators in opening and closing the flow of media information, through selecting which information to provide and which information to withhold.

Globalisation - The distribution of media across the world.

Identity - The complex way that one has a representative sense of oneself. David Gauntlett is a key thinker in this area.

Immersion - Commonly used in analysis of video games. The senses are dominated (perceptual) and the player is drawn to the game in their imagination (psychological).

Interactive - Media texts which offer audiences the oppurtunity to choose, respond to or shape the text in some way.

Interpellation Althusser's idea that media products lead us to a false recognition of ourselves so that we get lost in an ideal image of ourselves that will never be possible.

Long Tail - Chris Anderson's idea that the large amount of niche markets are now worth as much as the smaller amount of big markets.

Male Gaze - Mulvey's analysis of media images which suggests that the camera represents a male perspective and, as such, casts men as subjects and women as objects.

Market Forces - This idea likens the 'natural' flow of competition, leading to consumer choice and selection and hence the survival of the fittest, to the laws of nature.

Marxist - All theory derived from the works of Marx, founded on a belief that the ruling classes at any time and place maintain their economic and systematic power through controlling not only the means of production, but also culture and ideology, including the media.

Media Access - The degree of ease with which citizens can be seen and/or heard in the media, and can respond to the media and be provided with a dialogue with institutions, and the amount of opputunities evident for people to produce media texts themselves and for them to be distributed.

Media Language - An umbrella term to describe the ways in which audiences read media texts through understanding formal and conventional structures (e.g. the grammar of film editing). Media literacy describes our ability to read and write in this extended sense of language.

Mediasphere - John Hartley describeed this as a 360-degree environment for media consumption in 2009. He says this fundamentally changes how we need to think about media audiences.

Meme - An idea or creative item passed virally from person to person, to the point where it becomes well-known.

Metalanguage - Stepping outside of language to analyse meaning rather than just using langauage to make meaning. An adavanced form of literacy.

MMORPG - Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (e.g. World of Warcraft).

Moral Panic - Exaggerated media response to something (often behaviour of individuals or groups). Coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972, this refers to overstated reactions to 'deviant' aspects of pop culture, usually mobilised by the mass media. Certain video games have been subject to this.

Multimedia - A cultural product produced using a variety of media (e.g. an iPhone is multimedia).

Myth - Roland Barthes' idea that dominant ideas in a culture take on the status of myth, thus appearing natural and neutral. In semiotics, symbols and signs combine to creates a system of myths.

News Values - The idea that editors choose and construct news within a framework influenced by corporate, cultural, political and commercial objectives.

Ofcom - Regulator of UK broadcasting and telecommunications industries.

Online Video - Televison, films or other such content viewed on the internet.

Paraphrase - When you make use of someone else's ideas without quoting them directly.

PCC - Press Complaints Commission.

Peer-to-Peer - Also known as p2p. The sharing of media material between two individuals/groups in an equal relationship.

Piracy - Distribution of media illegally (infringing copyright law).

Podcast - Uploading an MP3 file over the internet for others to access through subscription.

Popular Culture - Also known as pop culture. Texts which are consumed by a wide audience, rather than an 'elite', smaller audience. Often considered to have low cultural value.

Postmodern - An approach to culture which see all texts as intertextual and mediated rather than representative of a state of original reality. Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard are key thinkers in the area.

Promotion - An aspect of distribution that creates audience interest in a media product.

Regulation - The monitoring of media production and consumption - can lead to intervention.

Scheduling - The strategic positioning of media texts within broadcasting time. Digital television now offers the ability to record TV shows, along with catch up services, leading to a decline in the importance of scheduling.

Sociocultural - Considerations of how our experiences in society and cultural choices combine, and how meanings are constructed by audiences through experience as much as through any fixed, intended, preffered messages from producers' points of view.

Structuralism - The study of language and meaning as a system or network of meaning.

Synergy - Interconnected marketing and distribution of media products across a wide range of platforms and sectors.

Terrestrial - Analouge broadcasts from land-based transmitters as opposed to cable or satellite digital transmissions.

Transgressive - A practice transcending conventional approaches and either subverts these existing ways of working or challenges their value. Threatening the established 'order' of things.

Upload - Transferring material from a computer to an online network.

Viral - The spread of ideas from person to person.

We Media - Gilmor's idea. Ordinary people's desire and capability to create media through technologies such as blogging (e.g. Tumblr, Blogger) and video sites (e.g. YouTube).

Web 2.0 - Recognised as the second phase of the internet. The focus has shifted from people recieveing information and services via the internet to people creating and sharing original material. Arguably how Tim Berners-Lee originally envisaged. Examples are MySpace, YouTube, etc. This term is accredited to Tim O'Reilly.

Terminology - Question 1 a) and 1 b)

Antagonist - The character whose function is to oppose the protagonist. Straightforward hero journey stories may have the antagonist playing the role of villain, but in dramas, the antagonist may merely be someone who stands in the way of the protagonist and their goals.

Archetype - A universal type/model of character found in text and myths throughout the world (e.g. trickster, mentor, hero).

Audience - The recipients of a media text. People who are the intended target of a media text.

Binary Opposition - The contrast between two mutally exclusive things (e.g. good/evil, young/old). This creates conflict in media texts.

Censorship - Regulation and restriction of content in media texts.

CGI - Computer generated imagery used to enhance visual effects.

Code - A system of signs used to create meaning. Techinical codes (the way a text is constructed, e.g. camera angles), verbal codes (language, written or spoken) and symbolic codes (based in connotational meanings) are the vital areas to look at.

Connotation - Way in which meaning is created. Meaning by association, the deeper meaning (e.g. the red of the flower represents passion).

Demographic - Factual characteristics of a population sample (e.g. age, gender, nationality).

Denotation - Way in which meaning is created. The surface meaning (e.g. red is the colour of the flower).

Enigma - A question that is not immediately answered, thus drawing audiences in.

Genre - A way of categorising a media text according to form, style and content. This categorisation is useful for both producers and audiences.

Globalisation - Process by which cultures across the world have come to share the same media texts.

Ideology - A set of ideas or beliefs which are held to be acceptable by the creators of a media text. For example, if a text had a feminist ideology, it would promote the idea of gender equality.

Intertextuality - The influence media texts have on each other. Can be either direct cross referencing or indirect.

Narrative - The way a story, or sequence of events, is put together within a text. All media texts have some sort of narrative. The general summary of a narrative is: equilibrium - disequilibrium - new equilibrium.

POV (Point of View) - A first-person camera shot showing a scene from an individual character's view point.

Prefered Meaning - The meaning of a text which the producers intended. An aberrant reading is the opposite, such as when a person deliberately misinterprets a text to further their own agenda.

Protagonist - The character who drives the narrative forwards with their choices and actions.

Realism - The techniques by which a media text represents ideas and images that are held to have a true relationship with the actual world around us.

Representation - The way in which media texts represent the world through codes and signs.

Signs and Signification - A sign is a symbol understood to refer to or mean something other than itself. Signification is the process of reading signs.

Stereotype - A negative representation of a person or group based on preconcieved ideas.

Trope - A common or overused theme or device.

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