Unit 1 Why study the mass media?

The mass media control the information that we have about the world and so can influence our ideas. The media are a very important agency of socialisation.The mass media are forms of communication that reach a lot of people over any given period of time. Defining your terms. You should learn what the mass media are. They are forms of communication that reach a lot of people at a time.Create a brainstorm of all of the different forms of communication that make up the Mass Media. Why are the media more important now than they were in the past? In the past, news was spread very slowly and a traveller would be given hospitality in exchange for news about the world. Ideas spread very slowly. Few people could read and even fewer could write.The priest would tell them anything that was necessary for people to know in church on a Sunday. News of great national events such as a victory in battle or the death of a king would be spread by bonfires on hilltops known as beacons, or by the ringing of church bells. The arrival of the printing press and the availability of cheap paper meant that gradually newspapers developed.Exposure to the media One of the reasons why the mass media are so important in people's lives is because we are exposed to so much of what they are telling us. Almost everyone talks about what is happening on TV and for many people the media are their main hobby.Women watch approximately 31 hours a week of television and people in social classes 4 and 5 watch an average of 35 hours a week. To understand how much TV this is, you should remember that a working week is 40 hours.97% of the population have a TV set and 38% have a video recorder. 46% of the population listen to the radio every day and there were 53.3 million cinema visits made in 1984. Almost 75% of the population read a daily newspaper and the Sun sells 4,000,000 copies daily. Total newspaper sales are about 36,000,000 daily.You are a sociologist employed by a television company. You want to discover what kinds of programmes children like to watch on television. Your hypothesis is: Children enjoy a variety of different TV programmes.Think of different methods that you could use to study what children like to watch on television. Explain the advantages and disadvantages of each method you have suggested.Do a small survey to find out how many televisions people in this class have in their houses. Your conclusion explains what this shows about the importance of television in our lives. Understanding Mass Media Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies, including the Internet, television, newspapers, film and radio, which are used formass communications, and to the organizations which control these technologies.[1][2] Since the 1950s, in the countries that have reached a high level of industrialization, the mass media of cinema, radio and TV have a key role in political power.[3] Contemporary research demonstrates an increasing level of concentration of media ownership, with many media industries already highly concentrated and dominated by a very small number of firms.[4] The phrase "the media" began to be used in the 1920s, but referred to something that had its origins much further in the past.[5] The invention of the printing press in the late 15th century gave rise to some of the first forms of mass communication, by enabling the publication of books and newspapers on a scale much larger than was previously possible.[6][7][8] Newspapers Main article: History of newspapers and magazines

The first high-circulation newspapers arose in the eastern United States in the early 1800s, and were made possible by the invention of high-speed rotary steam printing presses, and railroads which allowed large-scale distribution over wide geographical areas. The increase in circulation, however, led to a decline in feedback and interactivity from the readership, making newspapers a more one-way medium.[9][10][11] Since the beginning, high-circulation newspapers have been a medium for conditioning public opinion.[12] Electrical telegraph Main article: Telegraphy In the 1840s, the first commercial electrical telegraph was developed, allowing to separate communications from transportation, enabling messages to be transmitted instantaneously over large distances.[7] Movies Main article: History of film Cinema began to be a large-scale entertainment industry in 1894, with the first commercial exhibition of film. Radio Main article: History of radio The first commercial broadcasts in the United States began in the 1920s. Television Main article: History of television The first television broadcasts for a mass audience began in 1936 Germany and UK.[13][14] Regular mass TV broadcasts in the United Statesonly began in 1948, with a show hosted by Arturo Toscanini and starring comedian Milton Berle. Political role in modern societies Since the '50s, when cinema, radio and TV began to be the primary or the only source of information for a larger and larger percentage of the population, these media began to be considered as central instruments of mass control.[15][16] Up to the point that it emerged the idea that when a country has reached a high level of industrialization, the country itself "belongs to the person who controls communications."[3] Mass media play a significant role in shaping public perceptions on a variety of important issues, both through the information that is dispensed through them, and through the interpretations they place upon this information.[15] They also play a large role in shaping modern culture, by selecting and portraying a particular set of beliefs, values, and traditions (an entire way of life), as reality. That is, by portraying a certain interpretation of reality, they shape reality to be more in line with that interpretation.[16] Characteristics of mass media

he term Mass is denoted as a great/large volume, range and extent (of people and production) and reception of messages. Communication is defined by Dental Dictionary as the technique of conveying thoughts or ideas between two people or groups of people. It refers to the giving and taking of meaning, the transmission and reception of messages; whereas; Mass Communication is seen as institutionalised production and generalized diffusion of symbolic goods via the fixation and transmission of information or symbolic content, it is explained as a communication which is directed to or reaches an appreciable fraction of the population Five characteristics of Mass Communication have been identified by Cambridge Universitys John Thompson which is explained below: 1. Firstly, it comprises both technical and institutional methods of production and distribution. 2. Secondly, it involves the commoditisation of symbolic forms as the production of materials relies on its ability to Manufacture and sell large quantities of the work. 3. Mass Communications third characteristic is the separate contexts between the production and reception of information. 4. The fourth is in its reach of those far removed in time and space in comparison to the producers. 5. Finally, Thompson notes fifth characteristics of Mass Communication which involves information distribution. This is a one of many form of communication whereby products are mass produced and disseminated to a great quantity of audiences. Mass Communication is rightly defined as a delivery of message to target audience utilising mass media such as national press and television. Whereas, Mass Media is a means of public communication reaching a large audience. It is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. Different types of Mass Media are Television, Radio, Cinema, Internet, Newspapers, Magazines, Journal, Other Print Media (like pamphlets, brochures and posters) and Outdoor Media (which includes bill boards, signs, flying billboards, skywriting and blimps). J.R. Finnegan Jr. and K. Viswanath (1997) have identified 3 effects, or functions of media: - a) The knowledge gap; b) The agenda setting; c) Cultivation of shared public perceptions. Thus, the term Mass Communication refers to a medium that appeal to a mass audience in terms of demographics and psychographics; using widely circulating media such as newspapers, magazines, television and radio to inform the general public.

We are to a large extent dependent on regular contact with the mass media for information, entertainment, ideas, opinion and many other things all of which are connected to our attempts to 'make sense' of who and what we are.

Our cultural experiences are affected by the development of systems of mass communication. A look at current research shows that we spend from 18 to 35 hours per week watching TV, for example. It is 'normal' to spend 3 - 4 hours per day in the company of a TV set. Large amounts of our time are spent in a range of media related activities.

To study 'media' is to study also how we define our own sense of who and what we are. What do we mean by 'culture'? How does a media text shape or construct or change cultural identity? What exactly is 'mass media' or 'mass communication'?

We all inhabit particular situations and things like our surroundings, family, friends; school, work, neighbourhood and so on shape our individual identities. In media-speak we refer to this aspect of our cultural identity as our situated culture. In other words, the small-scale communications and interactions we have on a day-to-day basis with the place we live in and the people around us. This kind of culture is primarily an oral one - it is passed on and formed largely by intimate word-of-mouth communication.

Since the mid 19th century, we have come to live not only in a situated culture, but in a culture of mediation. The press, film and cinema, television and radio and more recently, the Internet, have developed to supply larger scale means of public communication. So now our situated culture exists within a much wider mediated world. The introduction of the term 'global village' in the 1960's illustrates how much our world has changed and the change is due almost entirely to the development of mass communications.

So what do we mean by 'mass communication' or 'mass media'?

Think of it as the transmission (sending) and reception of 'messages' on a very large scale. Most communication is done on a direct face-to-face basis in a situated cultural context and it is a two-way process. The received message can be responded to instantly. There is 'feedback'.

With mass communication there are four main distinctive features, as follows:

1. There is a gap or an institutional break between the 'sender' of the message and the 'receiver'. The makers of the media texts, the 'senders' of the messages, do not have an obvious feedback relationship with the audience. (Shouting at the TV screen does not count as feedback!) Audience responses are rarely 'heard'. This means that mass-mediated culture tends to be a one-way process. Producers have to target imaginary, generalised or stereotypical audiences. They can (and do) 'shape' products accordingly. They also make assumptions about audiences that are based on conceptual ideas of what people are like, rather than how they really are. Look at any glamour magazine and you can see what the makers of the texts think men and women should look like, for example.

2. Specialised technologies, especially the internet, have begun to affect the one-way system of communication described above. In addition, these technologies have made it possible to 'capture' messages in a very physical form

(photographs, film, tape-recordings) which in turn has led to historical permanence or records. Our sense of 'history' is thus affected (and some would say, constructed.)

3. Media messages can be extended 'outwards', so that events taking place regionally or locally now have global coverage (9/11, for example) Audiences are frequently calculated in billions! This has major significance in terms of media institutions. Lots of profit to be made from selling syndicated rights to the whole world's media!

4. Media messages have therefore become a modern commodity - an industry - a product. Market forces thus have a definite impact on the production and distribution of media texts. It is argued that as mass media have become 'facts of life' and we have all become socially and culturally more dependent on them.

It is argued that the media now occupy a central role in defining and interpreting the very nature of the world according to certain values, cultural principles and ideologies. We inhabit an information and consumer society as a result and concerns are expressed about exactly what effects the media have on society.

Ideology - a set of ideas or a view of the world that is selective and gives a particular version of reality. Sometimes seen as deliberately constructed by powerful groups in order to maintain power and control.

There are three major areas of concern, as follows:

1. Mass media has a political and a persuasive power over us. Radio, TV, the press and film can manipulate whole societies. Political propaganda, advertising and the so-called 'mind-bending' power of the media are long-standing causes of debate and concern.

2. Since the 19th century there has been a mistrust of so-called 'popular culture', which is thought to debase or degrade cultural traditions and standards. The ongoing debate about the future of public service broadcasting in Britain in the 1990's is an example of this. What exactly is 'quality' and cultural value in broadcast output?

3. The most contentious issue concerns the effects of the mass media on social behaviour, in particular violence and delinquency. The media have regularly been accused of 'causing' outbreaks of unrest in society. Power and the role of mass media in Indian society Today, we are living in a world dominated by media. The mass media is increasingly occupying the central stage in our lives. The mass media has an iron grip on the imagination as well as thinking faculties of the society.

The programmes and features served by the mass media which instruct people not only what they should eat, drink and wear and groom them but also at times misguide them to commit heinous crimes. Mass media acts as an effective catalyst of change in society. Mass media which is also called the sword-arm of democracy, commands awe and respect of nation as well as individuals it is the most effective instrument which has the potential to bring about the downfall of the despot rulers of the world. It is the most powerful investigative machinery that exposes the injustice, oppression, partiality and misdeeds of society. In a materialist world of today in which everybody is hankering after power and prosperity and indulging in every kind of malpractices, it is media which brings all these things to notice and make public opinion against them. It creates public awareness. Today, when politicians are abusing their power and privileges and looting their countries, the evil nexus of mafia and crime syndicates is adding to human misery and where ordinary human beings have been reduced to such helplessness that they can do nothing except being silent spectators, the role of mass media assumes greater significance. It is when the media champions the cause of have-nots and acts as the supervisor of their rights and privileges. It is due to these roles of media that it has been called the fourth pillar of democracy. In a country like India where the percentage of poverty and illiteracy is high radio serves as the best means of mass media. It has unparalleled potential to educate, inform and condition peoples mind. Through this even the uneducated can have access to the world of knowledge and information. It is one of the means of mass media that is useful for both literate and illiterate. Being the cheapest means as well even a man of low income group can afford it. It has been found in remote areas of the country that a single radio set serves the entire village. The mass media serves the society by highlighting the prevalence of such ills as nepotism, cronyism and corruption in institutions and by carrying on relentless campaign against them. It has been instrumental in bringing an end to the oppressive regimes of cruel rulers. It has unearthed political scandals, kickbacks received by highly placed men. In India from Hawala to Nether case, role of mass media has been highly commendable. The heinous crimes of Nether could be exposed due to active role of media. It was the media which exposed the cruel face of the police in fake counter killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Rukhsana. Moreover, editors and writers of articles expose the excessive of men and power. Thus, they serve the society by ensuring justice to those victimised by the government machinery. In the course of ensuring the fairness and solemnity of their job, the upholders of justice and humanitarian causes have to bear the

brunt of humiliation, torture and imprisonment. Often they have to sacrifice their lucrative jobs to uphold certain cherished principles. The power of mass media, particularly the visual media is awful. No one, howsoever powerful he may be, can effectively combat it. This comment of renowned singer Michael Jackson aptly asserts the power of media the incredible, terrible mass media who after undergoing the humiliating ordeal of child molestation charges against him. Nobody can deny the power of media. Mass media, specially TV is a media so powerful that it can instantly mould public opinion, bring far-reaching policy reversals of governments and even push into seats of power little known personalities after boosting their election prospects with the most effective use of its image-making. But there is no denying the fact that media sometimes does much harm to international relations and harmony with its biased and motivated coverage. This potential for mischief of media is attributed to the fact that media is controlled by media barons, corporate giants, industrial houses and government wielding dictatorial powers. Often the media lords use the power of media to serve their own ends which are always at odds with humanitarian considerations, at times leading to fuel fires of hatred, strife and anarchy, instead of spreading the message of love and brotherhood. Those media men seeking short-cut to name and fame act for them, neglecting the sanctity of their profession. Sometimes media persons work hand in glove with political leadership, bureaucrats and other influential persons. Naturally, their write-ups and editorials are motivated. They through their write-ups justify all acts of mission and commission of their patrons and proteges. This is particularly discernible in the editorials of several newspapers. The media men, in fact, try to please their patrons and lords. The glamorous lifestyle of celebrities and pomp and show served by media, to name, TV and cinema, are causing great erosion in social norms and moral values. The younger generations being encouraged by the stunning luxuries of film villains and their varied methods of collecting wealth, resort to some evil methods, often fall prey to criminal tendencies and get increasingly brutalized. In their quest for such life they sometimes come into contact with anti-social and anti-national elements, thus, instead of doing well to society, they themselves are lost in darkness. In a way it causes loss of human resources to society as well. Furthermore, the portrayal of women in media, to some extent is responsible for increasing violence against them. The scenes of atrocities and torture against women are very common in film and TV. Here, the woman is atrociously portrayed as an object of entertainment, required to dance, sing, expose and vanish. Scenes of indecency on the part

of women are almost mandatory in films and this is pictures in such a manner that instead of generating pathos, they arouse the excitement in the viewers. Besides, scenes of gruesome killing and vulgar dialogues are integral part of fumes. All these are contributing to the moral downfall of society. In an age of commercialisation and consumerism, the media to some extent, has deviated from its path of avowed impartiality and clean journalism. They often indulge in petty means to gain material benefits, i.e. to boost their sales. At times, what most papers give their readers is simply sensation-creating stuff. They publish stories about the private life of celebrities and obscene photographs. There is a circulation war among various newspapers. To emerge as winner they involve in mean activities. Indeed media has lost its sense of moral responsibility. In the past, media was considered champion of the rights of the oppressed-of principles of morality and justice. They worked for some noble causes. Now newspapers give doctored news analysis to influence the minds of the readers. The1 editorials have so strong influence on the readers that they can make or mar the prospects of politicians. Thus, it is the need of the hour to provide fair judgement on issues covered in the newspapers. They should maintain their sanctity and social responsibility. The role of media is very significant in a democracy. It is the guardian of public interest. Thus, media should focus on performing the noble role of enlightening people, broadening their vision and making them vigilant towards the larger goal of creating a civilized and prosperous society. Mass media has a prominent role to play in modern society. It can bring about radical changes and improve social situation as it influences our social, civil, cultural, political, economic and aesthetic outlook. Modernization has converted media into an indispensable feature of human activity. However, factors like age, education, economic condition, personal needs and availability of proper components decide the quantum and frequency of media use. This is evident from the fact that most media centres are located in urban areas. The majority of consumers of media products are also concentrated in and around cities and towns. It is rightly said that media use is an index of development. The greater the use, the higher will be the level of education. As social beings, humans are sustained by mutual interactions, exchange of ideas, information and views with the fellow beings. Illiteracy, which is nothing but absence of education and information is a stumbling block for any aspect of development-social, economic, political, cultural and even spiritual. Media has become the harbinger of development through the removal of these roadblocks and the provision of information and knowledge. In a democratic country like India, the ultimate power lies with the people. But a democratic society needs vigilant and informed people who are able to see through the gimmicks of political parties and politicians. Media creates such valuable citizens.Besides, media has done much good to society by exposing various scams, scandals, frauds, embezzlements and many other cases of corruption leading to initiation of enquiries and other processes of prosecution against the perpetrators of these crimes. History is witness that press has been instrumental in putting an

end to atrocities and bringing the downfall of ruthless dictators. In India, vernacular press did the job of uniting people against the oppressive British rule and triggered its end in the country. However, media too suffers from some pitfalls, growing consumerism and materialism have adversely impacted our media. The partisan attitude, sectarian outlook and biased individualism in some sections of media are a testimony that media too is susceptible to harmful influences. Often, in fierce rivalries, ethics of journalism are thrown out of the window to settle old scores. Running after opportunistic gains is another malady our media suffers from. The incidents of throwing are against the ethics of media. Deliberately creating sensational stuff to attract with reality- is another tactic that media must avoid. Our world today is increasingly driven by a combination of information and entertainment values, and these are both promoted by the explosion of different means of communication, especially electronic communication such as satellite TV and Internet. This means the market for information is extremely competitive and is characterized by the following: 1. Overload on the audience: Most people today, even in many developing countries, have access to scores of information sources in their homes and offices, including television, radio, internet and others. The audience is over-loaded with options, so if you want to catch someone's attention via the mass media you have to produce quality material that is deemed appropriate to use by journalists and deemed worth reading or viewing by the audience. Overload on the mass media: Most journalists are flooded with sources of information, press releases, story ideas and requests for coverage. This means that if you want to attract a journalist's or editor's attention and get coverage in their publication or on their channel, you have to produce quality information and PR materials that are credible and that catch the press's attention. Overload on funders and advertisers: Those people who pay money to the mass media or to nongovernmental organizations - advertisers and funders - are also flooded with more requests than they can meet. So it is critically important for NGOs today to produce high quality work if they wish to attract funds from donors or support from companies that have the option to spend their money on direct advertising and promotion.

2.

3.

media effects media effects are used in media studies, psychology, communication theory and sociology to refer to the theories about the ways in which mass media affect how their audiences think and behave. Connecting the world to individuals and reproducing the self-image of society, critiques in the early-to-mid 20th century suggested that media weaken or delimit the individual's capacity to act autonomously sometimes being ascribed an influence reminiscent of the telescreens of the dystopian novel 1984. "Mid 20thcentury empirical studies, however, Current theories cultural and personal beliefs, as per the propaganda model. Mass media content created for newsworthy events and those stories that are not told all have Television broadcasting has a large amount of control over the content society watches and the times in which it is viewed. This is a distinguishing feature of traditional media which New media have challenged by altering the participation habits of the public. The internet creates a space for more diverse political opinions, social and cultural viewpoints and a heightened level of consumer participation. There have been suggestions that allowing consumers to produce information through the internet will lead to an overload of information.

[edit]Media influenced violence Many studies illustrate that consuming mass media does not lead to violence. However, this is a contentious issue. To explain the problem of violence in society, researchers should begin with that social violence and seek to explain it with reference, quite obviously, to those who engage in it: their identity, background, character and so on. Gauntlet goes on to criticize studies that focus on children by stating that they do not utilize adults as a control group, and that the studies are conducted primarily to further a "barely-concealed conservative ideology." He counters the premise of these studies with the concept that not all depictions of violence are even bad to witness. USC Professor Henry Jenkins, for instance, suggested in his speech to congress thatThe Basketball Diaries utilizes violence in a form of social commentary that provides clear social benefit.[1] Gauntlet explains further that objects defined as "violent" or "anti-social" may not be judged as such in the minds of the viewer and tend to be viewed in artificial circumstances. These objects are furthermore based on previous studies with flawed methodology, and are not grounded in theory. Additionally, he claims that the effects model hkiudukfyh attempt to understand the meanings of media.[2]  Historical criticisms situate the 'meta-narrative' of effects theory within a long history of distrust of new forms of media, dating as far back as Socrates's objections to the deleterious effects due to the written alphabet.  Political criticisms pose an alternative conception of humans as rational, critical subjects who are alert to genre norms and adept at interpreting and critiquing media representations, instead of passively absorbing them. Supporters of effects theory contend that commercials, advertising and voter campaigns prove that media influence behavior. In the 20th century, aggressive media attention and negative coverage of trials involving celebrities like Roscoe Fatty Ar buckle or Michael Jackson have influenced the general public's opinion, before the trials effectively started[3]. However, these critics do point out that while the media could have an effect on people's behavior this isn't necessarily always the case. Critics of the media effects theory point out that many copycat murders, suicides and other violent acts nearly always happen in abnormal upbringings. Violent, emotionally neglectful or aggressive environments influence behavior more than watching certain programs, films or listening to certain music. Most people who carry out these acts are also mentally unstable to begin with. Also there are other thinkers who criticize effects based research, such as Terry Flew and Sal Humphrey, Barker and Freedman.[4],[5], [6] -Martin Barker (2001)[7] criticised Elizabeth Newson who alleged link between media violence and real life violence in her report in 1994, Brooke (200307),for example talks about this in details.[8] [1], and the report gained media attention when it claimed the horror film Child's Play 3 had influenced two 10-year-old boys' behavior and led to the Murder of James Bulger in Feb. 1993. After examining and assessing Newsons report, it was apparent that there

was no clear link between the film and the crime. Critics pointed out that Newson's case studies were reliant on press accounts and opinions rather than independent research. However, Newson's report was influential, and has led to more censorship of videos and more concern from the British Board of Film classification on the psychological effects of media violence. The attention and question become whether they were watching violent media. But Barker (2001) [7] doesnt agree with Elizabeth Newson. He reject her claim about the connection between media violence and real life violence, in his argument he justifies his position, he indicates that there was not a scrap of evidence that the boys had seen the movie and Child's Play 3 is a moral film. He also criticized anti media campaigns and described them as ignorant and disguised political campaigns. He states that these claims are represented by media and most of people have no chance to check the credibility of them, he also points out that these films including Child's Play 3 are often attacked because they deal with political issues. Moreover, he lists real cases, for example a man takes a gun and shoots his entire family after watching the news, arrested and tried, he explains his actions on the basis that the world news was so bad there seemed no point in anyone going on living. Barker suggests that this case for example is no different than other putative cases of media a causing violence, Barker said that we should not always blindly blame the media because people are not copycats, instead we should be aware of someone's mental state and take other factors into account before making such claims. For example, in his case he states that the man's reaction was abnormal. Therefore, his behavior could not be explained by suggesting the effects of the news. There are other social and cultural factors in criminal acts in which the media are not the basic influence. Barker also suggests 'that we must look beyond a specific film to think about the specific context in which it has been consumed, and the wider social background of the people'.[9],according to Barker there is no such thing called violence in the media that either could or could not cause violence, we should rather pay attention to how social factors and background make some people consume media in specific way.[10], for instance, even the news also show lots of violence, so people should rather pay attention to how social factors and background make some people consume media in particular way. In addition Barker (2001) proposes further research, he suggests that the theory of media violence connection must be tested because identification with particular element in a film is not something can be seen. He also noted problem with campaigners treating delinquents as normal people who become influenced by the media. Therefore, he suggests further research on how these people understand and consume media. -Critics of effects research see no connection between exposure to media violence and real life violence, because humans are not copycats and can realize what is wrong and what is right. Although some research claims that heavy exposure to media violence can lead to more aggressive behavior, it has been suggested that exposure alone does not cause a child to commit crimes.[11] -Flew and Humphreys (2005) said that the assumptions of effects researchers are frequently flawed. According to Flew and Humphreys, Freedman (2001) and Goldstein (2001) the number of studies on games and violence is small and the research suffers from flawed methodologies which do very little to prove a direct link.[12] Terry Flew and Sal Humphreys also state that differing context of consumption will always mean we need to take account of the

particularities of players and how and why they play, effects researches often give insufficient account to the relevance of cultural contexts and the way in which media are actually implicated in the circulation of meanings in our cultures'.[13] -Freedman (2007) [14] is another thinker who rejects this idea, in reference to the FCC the Federal Communications Commission in US report that suggests link between media violence and real life violence, Freedman indicates the lack of discussion and states that the FCC does not make a sufficient distinction between peoples opinions, intuitions and musings on the one hand, and the hard scientific data on the other, and he indicates the lack of discussion of one of the strongest arguments against the idea that media violence causes aggression. According to Freedman the rate of violent crime in the United states increased sharply from 1965 to 1980 and some people blamed that increase on media. The rate of violent crime leveled off until about 1992, since that time, television continued to have violent programs, there was also more scenes and media showing more violence, if exposure to violent media cause real violence one would surely expect the rate of violent crime to have increased sharply, yet, since 1992 there has been a dramatic drop in violent crime, it seems clear that media violence did not cause the earlier increase. Therefore, it is widely accepted that there is no convincing evidence that prove that media violence cause violent crime or any type of real life violence. For example a recent long-term outcome study of youth found no long-term relationship between watching violent television and youth violence or bullying [15]

[edit]Political Certain groups tend to argue for media effects in an effort to promote a political cause. Demands for the banning of certain songs or the labeling of obscene albums came specifically from conservative political groups in the United States. However, Tipper Gore, the wife of Al Gore, was the founder of the Parents Music Resource Center, and was the main figure in pushing for warning labels on music although she does not fit into the conservative demographic. They argued that such material had simple and identifiable effects on children, and thus should be banned/labelled. Political factions use the media to influence possible members into joining their groups. [edit]Framing Main articles: Agenda-setting theory and Framing (social sciences) The agenda-setting process is an almost unavoidable part of news gathering by the large organizations which make up much of the mass media. (Just four main news agencies AP, UPI, Reuters and Agence-France-Presse claim together to provide 90% of the total news output of the worlds press, radio and television.[citation needed]) Stuart Hall points out that because some of the media produce material which often is good, impartial and serious, they are accorded a high degree of respect and authority. However, in practice the ethics of the press and television are closely related to that of the hegemonic establishment, providing vital support to the existing order. Independence

(e.g. of the BBC) is not a mere cover, it is central to the way power and ideology are mediated in societies like ours. The public is bribed with good radio, television and newspapers into an acceptance of the biased, the misleading, and the status quo. The media are not, according to this approach, crude agents of propaganda. They organize public understanding. However, the overall interpretations they provide in the long run are those most preferred by, and least challenging to, those with economic power. Greg Philo demonstrates this in his 1991 article, Seeing is Believing, in which he showed that recollections of the 1984 UK miners strike were strongly correlated with the media presentation of the event, including the perception of the picketing as largely violent when violence was rare, and the use by the public of phrases which had appeared originally in the media. McCombs and Shaw (1972) demonstrate the agenda-setting effect at work in a study conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA during the 1968 presidential elections. A representative sample of un-decided voters was asked to outline the key issues of the election as it perceived them. Concurrently, the mass media serving these subjects were collected and their content was analyzed. The results showed a definite correlation between the two accounts of predominant issues. "The evidence in this study that voters tend to share the media's composite definition of what is important strongly suggests an agenda-setting function of the mass media." (McCombs and Shaw),. [edit]New media Theorists such as Louis Wirth and Talcott Parsons have emphasized the importance of mass media as instruments of social control. In the 21st century, with the rise of the internet, the two-way relationship between mass media and public opinion is beginning to change, with the advent of new technologies such as blogging. Manders theory is related to Jean Baudrillards concept of hyperreality. We can take the 1994 O.J. Simpson trial as an example, where the reality reported on was merely the catalyst for the simulacra (images) created, which defined the trial as a global event and made the trial more than it was. Essentially, hyperreality is the concept that the media are not merely a window on to the world (as if a visiting alien were watching television), but are part of the reality they describe. Hence (although additionally there is the question of navel-gazing) the medias obsession with media-created events. It is this which led Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s to say that "the medium is the message", and to suggest that mass media are increasingly creating a "global village". For example, there is evidence that Western media influence in Asia is the driving force behind rapid social change: it is as if the 1960s and the 1990s were compressed together. A notable example is the recent introduction of television toBhutan, resulting in rapid Westernization. This raises questions of cultural imperialism (Schiller) the de facto imposition, through economic and political power and through the media, of Western (and in particular US) culture.

[edit]An instrument for social control Social scientists have made efforts to integrate the study of the mass media as an instrument of control into the study of political and economic developments in the Afro-Asian countries. David Lerner (1958) has emphasized the general pattern of increase in standard of living, urbanization, literacy and exposure to mass media during the transition from traditional to modern society. According to Lerner, while there is a heavy emphasis on the expansion of mass media in developing societies, the penetration of a central authority into the daily consciousness of the mass has to overcome profound resistance. [edit]Government and Mass Media They include licensing in advance; censorship of offending material before publication; seizure of offending material; injunctions against publication of a newspaper or book or of specified content; requirement of surety bonds against libel or other offense; compulsory disclosure of ownership and authority; post publication criminal penalties for objectionable matter; post publication collection of damages in a civil action; post publication correction of libel and other misstatements; discrimination in granting access to news source and facilities; discrimination and denial in the use of communications facilities for distribution; taxes; discriminatory subsidies; and interference with buying, reading and listening. [edit]The public sphere It is an objectionable matter that the Government always tries to harass the Printers, Editors as well as making many media laws, but sometimes it is needed. Now a question might arise, when?..... Nowadays, most of the Journalist are involved with politics and there report also made under there politic related. It is not finished every kinds of newspapers and others media is running under a political control. So where there is a political control there must be some of false and fabricated news will be publish. For a developing country there are five sectors must be neat and clean means they must work not for the politics but for the peoples of the country, which are; (1) Media:Media included all kinds of media namely; newspapers, TV, Radio, Internet, Books etc. (2) Education: It included all kinds of School, College and Universities students and also teachers. (3) Judicial: It included all the person related with judiciary namely; Judges, Lawyers etc. (4) Medical: It included all kinds of doctors Government or private. (5) Defence: It included all kinds of members appointed for the protection of a country internally or externally namely; Police, Army, Navy, Air etc. [edit]Mass Media in a free enterprise society Although a sizable portion of mass media offerings - particularly news, commentaries, documentaries, and other informational programmes - deal with highly controversial subjects, the major portion of mass media offerings are designed to serve an entertainment function. These programmes tend to avoid controversial issues and reflect beliefs

and values sanctified by mass audience. This course is followed by Television networks, whose investment and production costs are high. Jerry Manders work has highlighted this particular outlook. According to him, the atomized individuals of mass society lose their souls to the phantom delights of the film, the soap opera, and the variety show. They fall into a stupor, or apathetic hypnosis, that Lazarsfeld called the narcotizing dysfunction of exposure to mass media. Individuals become irrational victims of false wants - the wants which corporations have thrust upon them, and continue to thrust upon them, through both the advertising in the media (with its continual exhortation to consume) and through the individualist consumption culture it promulgates. Thus, according to the Frankfurt School, leisure has been industrialized. The production of culture had become standardized and dominated by the profit motive as in other industries. In a mass society leisure is constantly used to induce the appropriate values and motives in the public. The modern media train the young for consumption. Leisure had ceased to be the opposite of work, and had become a preparation for it. [edit]Mass media, mass culture and elite The relation of the mass media to contemporary popular culture is commonly conceived in terms of dissemination from the elite to the mass. The long-term consequences of this are significant in conjunction with the continuing concentration of ownership and control of the media, leading to accusations of a 'media elite' having a form of 'cultural dictatorship'. Thus the continuing debate about the influence of 'media barons' such as Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch. For example, the UK Observer (March 1, 1998) reported the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins' refusal to publish Chris Patten's East and West, because of the former Hong Kong Governor's description of the Chinese leadership as "faceless Stalinists" possibly being damaging to Murdoch's Chinese broadcasting interests. In this case, the author was able to have the book accepted by another publisher, but this type ofcensorship may point the way to the future. A related, but

Functions of mass media Functions of mass media Almost everyone gets his or her information about world, national, and local affairs from the mass media. This fact gives both print and electronic media important functions that include influencing public opinion, determining the political agenda, providing a link between the government and the people, affecting socialization, Entertainment, Educating the masses, and Mobilization as well. *Public opinion: The mass media not only report the results of public opinion surveys conducted by outside organizations but also

increasingly incorporate their own polls into their news coverage. More important, newspapers and television help shape public opinion as well. Research has shown that the positions people take on critical issues are influenced by the media, especially when the media air divergent views and provide in-depth analysis. *Political agenda: The term political agenda is broader in scope than the term public opinion, and it refers to the issues people think are the most important and that government needs to address. A person's perception of such matters as crime, civil rights, the economy, immigration, and welfare are affected by the manner and extent of media coverage. Studies indicate that a correlation exists between the significance people assign a problem and the frequency and amount of space or time newspapers, magazines, and television give to it. *Link between the government & the people: The mass media is the vehicle through which the government informs, explains, and tries to win support for its programs and policies. For example president Franklin Roosevelts fireside chats used radio in this manner. *Socialization: The mass media, most significantly through its news, reporting, and analysis, affects what and how we learn about politics and our own political views. Along with family, schools, and religious organizations, television also becomes part of the process by which people learn society's values and comes to understand what society expects from them.in this regard the impact comes primarily from entertainment programming. Televisions portrayal of minorities and women, family relations, and the place of religion in India life is considered to be a powerful influence in our attitudes. * Surveillance. The first function of mass communication is to serve as the eyes and ears for those of us seeking information about our world. When we want to find out the latest news about whats happening, we can turn on the television, surf the internet, or read a newspaper or magazine. We rely on mass communication for news and information about our daily lives such as the weather, stock reports, or the start time for a game. What was one of the first things you did after you heard about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center? More than likely, you were glued to the Internet or your television waiting for details about the disaster. In fact, your authors campus closed down to allow people to stay at home to collect information and be with loved ones, even though our campus is located on the other side of the country. * Correlation. Correlation addresses how the media present facts that we use to move through the world. The information we get through mass communication is not objective and without bias. The grandmother of a friend of your authors stated that the information she heard on the radio, had to be true because it was on the radio. This statement begs the question, how credible are the media? Can we consume media without questioning motive and agenda? Someone selects, arranges, interprets, edits, and critiques the information we see. A friend of your authors has a brother who edits for a major reality TV show. When asked if what we see if a fair representation of what really happens, the person who does the editing simply laughed and said no.

* Sensationalization. There is an old saying in the news industry-if it bleeds, it leads that highlights the idea of sensationalization. Unit 2 Audience Analysis Audience analysis emphasizes the diversity of responses to a given popular culture artifact by examining as directly as possible how given audiences actually understand and use popular culture texts. Three kinds of research make up most audience research: 1) broadsurveys and opinion polls (like the famous Nielsen TV ratings, but also those done by advertisers and by academic researchers) that cover a representative sample of many consumers; 2) small, representative focus groups brought in to react to and discuss a pop culture text; and 3) in-depth ethnographic participant observation of a given audience, in which, for example, a researcher actually lives with and observes the TV viewing habits of a household over a substantial period of time, or travels on the road with a rock band. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes more than one approach is used as a check on the others. Audience analysis tries to isolate variables like region, race, ethnicity, age, gender, and income in an effort to see how different social groups tend to construct different meanings for the same text. Audience analysis also includes looking at that special category of audience, fan subcultures, that have grown up around certain pop culture texts and celebrities (i.e., Britney Spears wannabees or the Trekkies devoted to Star Trek). Online fan cultures are a particularly appropriate and accessible audience research topic for an online list such as this. Thus, below I have listed a few fan links to get you started. But almost any pop culture celebrity, group, or text has a fan club of some kind, so follow your own interests, obsessions, or curiosities. Audience Analysis Audiences can be groups or individuals targeted by and often built by media industries. Audience can be active (constantly filtering or resisting content) or passive (complying and vulnerable).[9] Audience analysis emphasizes the diversity of responses to a given popular culture artifact by examining as directly as possible how given audiences actually understand and use popular culture texts. Three kinds of research make up most audience research: 1) broad surveys and opinion polls (like the famous Nielsen ratings, but also those done by advertisers and by academic researchers) that cover a representative sample of many consumers. 2) small, representative focus groups brought in to react to and discuss a pop culture text. 3) in-depth ethnographic participant observation of a given audience, in which, for example, a researcher actually lives with and observes the TV viewing habits of a household over a substantial period of time, or travels on the road with a rock band. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes more than one approach is used as a check on the others. Audience analysis tries to isolate variables like region, race, ethnicity, age, gender, and income in an effort to see how different social groups tend to construct different meanings for the same text.[10] In media studies, there are two models used to construct audience reception. These models are defined as (1) The effects model (Hypodermic Model) and (2) The uses and gratification model. The effects model focuses on what the media does to audiences, influences is based on the message conveyed within the media. The uses and gratification model emphasizes what the audience does with the media presented to them, here influence lies with the consumer.[11]

The ethnographic turn contributed to the maturing of the field as contexts of consumption are now recognized as having significant impact upon the processes of the interpretation of media. Sometimes characterized as the active audience approach, this paradigm has attracted criticism for the apparent jettisoning of the influence of cultural power, diminishing the authority of the text while elevating the influence of context. Nevertheless developments in this vein have deepened our understanding of the significant relationship between media texts and the production of identity. Repeatedly, audience studies and fan studies have recorded the ways in which media texts are utilized and often re-made in the creative production and reproduction of self-identity.[1 Theories of Audience analysis Hypodermic needle model The hypodermic needle model (also known as the hypodermic-syringe model, transmission-belt model, or magic bullet theory) is a model of communications suggesting that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver. The model is rooted in 1930s behaviorism and is largely considered obsolete today. Concept The "Magic Bullet" or "Hypodermic Needle Theory" of direct influence effects was not as widely accepted by scholars as many books on mass communication indicate. The magic bullet theory was not based on empirical findings from research but rather on assumptions of the time about human nature. People were assumed to be "uniformly controlled by their biologically based 'instincts' and that they react more or less uniformly to whatever 'stimuli' came along" (Lowery & De Fleur, 1995, p. 400). The "Magic Bullet" theory graphically assumes that the media's message is a bullet fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head" (Berger 1995). Similarly, the "Hypodermic Needle Model" uses the same idea of the "shooting" paradigm. It suggests that the media injects its messages straight into the passive audience (Croteau, Hoynes 1997). This passive audience is immediately affected by these messages. The public essentially cannot escape from the media's influence, and is therefore considered a "sitting duck" (Croteau, Hoynes 1997). Both models suggests that the public is vulnerable to the messages shot at them because of the limited communication tools and the studies of the media's effects on the masses at the time (Davis, Baron 1981). [edit]Later developments The phrasing "hypodermic needle" is meant to give a mental image of the direct, strategic, and planned infusion of a message into an individual. But as research methodology became more highly developed, it became apparent that the media had selective influences on people. The most famous incident often cited as an example for the hypodermic needle model was the 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds and the subsequent reaction of widespread panic among its American mass audience. However, this incident actually sparked the research movement, led by Paul Lazarsfeld and Herta Herzog, that would disprove

the magic bullet or hypodermic needle theory, as Hadley Cantrilmanaged to show that reactions to the broadcast were, in fact, diverse, and were largely determined by situational and attitudinal attributes of the listeners. Lazarsfeld disproved the "Magic Bullet" theory and "Hypodermic Needle Model Theory" through elections studies in "The People's Choice" (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, Gaudet 1944/1968). Lazarsfeld and colleagues executed the study by gathering research during the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. The study was conducted to determine voting patterns and the relationship between the media and political power. Lazarsfeld discovered that the majority of the public remained unfazed by propaganda surrounding Roosevelt's campaign. Instead, interpersonal outlets proved more influential than the media. Therefore, Lazarsfeld concluded that the effects of the campaign were not all powerful to the point where they completely persuaded "helpless audiences", a claim that the Magic Bullet, Hypodermic Needle Model, and Lasswell asserted. These new findings also suggested that the public can select which messages affect and don't affect them. Lazarsfeld's debunking of these models of communication provided the way for new ideas regarding the media's effects on the public. Lazarsfeld introduced the idea of the two step flow model [1] of communication in 1944. Elihu Katz contributed to the model in 1955 through studies and publications (Katz, Lazarsfeld 1955). The two step flow model assumes that ideas flow from the mass media to opinion leaders and then to the greater public (Katz, Lazarsfeld 1955). They believed the message of the media to be transferred to the masses via thisopinion leadership. Opinion leaders are categorized as individuals with the best understanding of media content and the most accessibility to the media as well. These leaders essentially take in the media's information, and explain and spread the media's messages to others (Katz, 1957). Thus, the two step flow model and other communication theories suggest that the media does not directly have an influence on viewers anymore. Instead, interpersonal connections and even selective exposure play a larger role in influencing the public in the modern age (Severin, Tankard 1979). Uses and gratifications theory With the rise of mass media in the last century, critics worried that its power could destroy freedom through manipulating consumers. Different approaches to the study of mass media offer support or fail to offer support for these fears. Uses and Gratifications Theory is a popular approach to understanding mass communication. The theory places more focus on the consumer, or audience, instead of the actual message itself by asking what people do with media rather than what media does to people (Katz, 1959) . It assumes that members of the audience are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. The theory also holds that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their needs. The approach suggests that people use the media to fulfill specific gratifications. This theory would then imply that the media compete against other information sources for viewers' gratification. (Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. 1974)

There are three main paradigms in media effects: hypodermic needle (i.e., direct, or strong effects), limited effects, and the powerful to limited effects. "Uses and Gratifications" falls under the second paradigm which reached its apex around 1940-1960, when studies helped realize that the first paradigm was inaccurate. Basic model The Uses and Gratifications Theory follows a basic model. It is an audience-centered approach. When an audience actively seeks out media, they are typically seeking it in order to gratify a need. For example, in social situations, people may feel more confident and knowledgeable when they have specific facts and stories from media to add to conversation. By seeking out media, a person fulfills a need to be informed. Social situations and psychological characteristics motivate the need for media, which motivates certain expectations of that media. This expectation leads one to be exposed to media that would seemingly fit expectations, leading to an ultimate gratification. The media dependency theory, has also been explored as an extension to the uses and gratifications approach to media, though there is a subtle difference between the two theories. People's dependency on media proves audience goals to be the origin of the dependency while the uses and gratifications approach focuses more on audience needs (Grant et al., 1998). Still, both theories agree that media use can lead to media dependency(Rubin, 1982). The media dependency theory states that the more dependent an individual is on the media to fulfill needs, the more significant the media becomes to that person. DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach (1976) illustrate dependency as the relationship between media content, the nature of society, and the behavior of audiences. Littlejohn (2002) also explained that people will become more dependent on media that meet a number of their needs than on media that touch only a few needs. Dependency on a certain medium is influenced by the number of sources open to an individual. Individuals are usually more dependent on available media if their access to media alternatives is limited. The more alternatives there are for an individual, the less is the dependency on, and influence of, a specific medium. The hypodermic needle model claims that consumers are strongly affected by media and have no say in how the media influences them. The main idea of the Uses and Gratifications model is that people are not helpless victims of all-powerful media, but use media to fulfill their various needs. These needs serve as motivations for using media. Reception Theory Reception theory emphasizes the reader's reception of a literary text or media. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. This means that a "text"be it a book, movie, or other creative workis not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader. A basic acceptance of the meaning of a specific text tends to occur when a group of readers have a shared cultural background and interpret the text in similar ways. It is likely that the less shared heritage a reader has with the artist, the less he/she will be able to recognize the artist's intended meaning, and it follows that if two readers have vastly different cultural and personal experiences, their reading of a text will vary greatly.

Active and passive audience Passive audiences just sit there, sipping their brewskis, or other "beverages", and shoveling down nachos, etc. Active audiences smash television sets, burn down newspaper offices, hack internet sites and verbally and physically attack candidates and/ or public officials in so-called democratic, open "town hall" meetings. Personally, I'd prefer a pacifistic active audience, one that was involved and, more importantly, informed. A passive audience sits back and observes while an active audience participates a passive audience just watches the performance while an active audience will participate in the performance by laughing, or answering questions, etc. Unit 3 Marxism Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th century by twoGerman philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism encompasses Marxian economic theory, a sociological theory and a revolutionary view of social change that has influenced socialistpolitical movements around the world. The Marxian analysis begins with an analysis of material conditions, taking at its starting point the necessary economic activities required by human society to provide for its material needs. The form of economic organization, or mode of production, is understood to be the basis from which the majority of other social phenomena including social relations, political and legal systems, morality and ideology arise (or at the least by which they are greatly influenced). These social relations form thesuperstructure, of which the economic system forms the base. As the forces of production, most notably technology, improve, existing forms of social organization become inefficient and stifle further progress. These inefficiencies manifest themselves as social contradictions in society in the form of class struggle. Under the capitalist mode of production, this struggle materializes between the minority who own the means of production (the bourgeoisie), and the vast majority of the population who produce goods and services (the proletariat). Taking the idea that social change occurs because of the struggle between different classes within society who are under contradiction against each other, the Marxist analysis leads to the conclusion that capitalism oppresses the proletariat, the inevitable result being aproletarian revolution. Marxism views the socialist system as being prepared by the historical development of capitalism. According to Marxism, Socialism is a historical necessity (but not an inevitability [1]). In a socialist society private property in the means of production would be superseded by co-operative ownership. The socialist system would succeed capitalism as humanity's mode of production through worker's revolution. Capitalism according to Marxist theory can no longer sustain the living standards of the population due to its need to compensate for falling rates of profit

by driving down wages, cutting social benefits and pursuing military aggression. A socialist economy would not base production on the accumulation of capital, but would instead base production and economic activity on the criteria of satisfying human needs - that is,production would be carried out directly for use. Eventually, socialism would give way to a communist stage of history: a classless, stateless system based on common ownership and free-access, superabundance and maximum freedom for individuals to develop their own capacities and talents. As a political movement, Marxism advocates for the creation of such a society. A Marxist understanding of history and of society has been adopted by academics studying in a wide range of disciplines, includingarchaeology, anthropology,[2] media studies,[3] political science, theater, history, sociological theory, art history and theory, cultural studies,education, economics, geography, literary criticism, aesthetics, critical psychology, and philosophy.[4]

Marxist Media Theory Introduction In Britain and Europe, neo-Marxist approaches were common amongst media theorists from the late '60s until around the early '80s, and Marxist influences, though less dominant, remain widespread. So it is important to be aware of key Marxist concepts in analysing the mass media. However, there is no single Marxist school of thought, and the jargon often seems impenetrable to the uninitiated. These notes are intended to provide a guide to some key concepts. Marxist theorists tend to emphasize the role of the mass media in the reproduction of the status quo, in contrast to liberal pluralists who emphasize the role of the media in promoting freedom of speech. The rise of neo-Marxism in social science represented in part a reaction against 'functionalist' models of society. Functionalists seek to explain social institutions in terms of their cohesive functions within an inter-connected, socio-cultural system. Functionalism did not account for social conflict, whereas Marxism offered useful insights into class conflict. As the time of the European ascendancy of neo-Marxism in media theory (primarily in the 1970s and early 1980s), the main non-Marxist tradition was that of liberal pluralism (which had been the dominant perspective in the United States since the 1940s) (see Hall 1982: 56-65). As Gurevitch et al. put it: Pluralists see society as a complex of competing groups and interests, none of them predominant all of the time. Media organizations are seen as bounded organizational systems, enjoying an important degree of autonomy from the state, political parties and institutionalized pressure groups. Control of the media is said to be in the hands of an autonomous managerial elite who allow a considerable degree of flexibility to media professionals. A basic symmetry is seen to exist between media institutions and their audiences, since in McQuail's words the 'relationship is generally entered into voluntarily and on apparently equal terms'... and audiences are seen as capable of manipulating the media in an infinite variety of ways according to their prior needs and dispositions, and as having access to what Halloran calls 'the plural values of society' enabling them to 'conform, accommodate, challenge or reject'. (Gurevitch et al. 1982: 1) In contrast, they continue:

Marxists view capitalist society as being one of class domination; the media are seen as part of an ideological arena in which various class views are fought out, although within the context of the dominance of certain classes; ultimate control is increasingly concentrated in monopoly capital; media professionals, while enjoying the illusion of autonomy, are socialized into and internalize the norms of the dominant culture; the media taken as a whole, relay interpretive frameworks consonant with the interests of the dominant classes, and media audiences, while sometimes negotiating and contesting these frameworks, lack ready access to alternative meaning systems that would enable them to reject the definitions offered by the media in favour of consistently oppositional definitions. (ibid.) Strengths of Marxist analysis Unlike many approaches to the mass media Marxism acknowledges the importance of explicit theory. Marxist 'critical theory' exposes the myth of 'value-free' social science. Marxist perspectives draw our attention to the issue of political and economic interests in the mass media and highlight social inequalities in media representations. Marxism helps to situate media texts within the larger social formation. Its focus on the nature of ideology helps us to deconstruct taken-for-granted values. Ideological analysis helps us to expose whose reality we are being offered in a media text. Whilst Althusserian Marxism helps to undermine the myth of the autonomous individual, other neo-Marxist stances see the mass media as a 'site of struggle' for ideological meaning, opening up the possibility of oppositional readings. Marxist theory emphasizes the importance of social class in relation to both media ownership and audience interpretation of media texts: this remains an important factor in media analysis. Whilst content analysis and semiotics may shed light on media content, marxist theory highlights the material conditions of media production and reception. 'Critical political economists' study the ownership and control of the media and the influence of media ownership on media content cannot be ignored. It also remains important to consider such issues as differential access and modes of interpretation which are shaped by socio-economic groupings. Marxist media research includes the analysis of representation in the mass media (e.g. political coverage or social groups) in order to reveal underlying ideologies. We still need such analyses: however oppositional it may sometimes be, audience interpretation continues to operate in relation to such content. Because of the distribution of power in society, some versions of reality have more influence than others. Limitations of Marxist analysis Critics argue that Marxism is just another ideology (despite claims by some that historical materialism is an objective science). Some Marxists are accused of being 'too doctrinaire' (see Berger 1982). Fundamentalist Marxism is crudely deterministic, and also reductionist in its 'materialism', allowing little scope for human agency and subjectivity. Marxism is often seen as 'grand theory', eschewing empirical research. However, research in the Marxist 'political economy' tradition in particular does employ empirical methods. And the analysis of media representations does include close studies of particular texts. The orthodox Marxist notion of 'false consciousness' misleadingly suggests the existence of a reality 'undistorted' by mediation. The associated notion that such consciousness is irresistibly induced in mass audiences does not allow for oppositional readings. Marxist perpectives should not lead us to ignore the various ways in which audiences use the mass media. Neo-Marxist stances have in fact sought to avoid these pitfalls. The primary Marxist emphasis on class needs to be (and had increasingly been) related to other divisions, such as gender and ethnicity.

Semiotics Introduction If you go into a bookshop and ask them where to find a book on semiotics you are likely to meet with a blank look. Even worse, you might be asked to define what semiotics is - which would be a bit tricky if you were looking for a beginner's guide. It's worse still if you do know a bit about semiotics, because it can be hard to offer a simple definition which is of much use in the bookshop. If you've ever been in such a situation, you'll probably agree that it's wise not to ask. Semiotics could be anywhere. The shortest definition is that it is the study of signs. But that doesn't leave enquirers much wiser. 'What do you mean by a sign?' people usually ask next. The kinds of signs that are likely to spring immediately to mind are those which we routinely refer to as 'signs' in everyday life, such as road signs, pub signs and star signs. If you were to agree with them that semiotics can include the study of all these and more, people will probably assume that semiotics is about 'visual signs'. You would confirm their hunch if you said that signs can also be drawings, paintings and photographs, and by now they'd be keen to direct you to the art and photography sections. But if you are thick-skinned and tell them that it also includes words, sounds and 'body language' they may reasonably wonder what all these things have in common and how anyone could possibly study such disparate phenomena. If you get this far they've probably already 'read the signs' which suggest that you are either eccentric or insane and communication may have ceased. Assuming that you are not one of those annoying people who keeps everyone waiting with your awkward question, if you are searching for books on semiotics you could do worse than by starting off in the linguistics section. It is... possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call itsemiology (from the Greek semeon, 'sign'). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge. (Saussure 1983, 15-16; Saussure 1974, 16)

Thus wrote the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a founder not only of linguistics but also of what is now more usually referred to as semiotics (in his Course in General Linguistics, 1916). Other than Saussure (the usual abbreviation), key figures in the early development of semiotics were the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce(sic, pronounced 'purse') (1839-1914) and later Charles William Morris (1901-1979), who developed a behaviouristsemiotics. Leading modern semiotic theorists include Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Algirdas Greimas (1917-1992), Yuri Lotman (1922-1993), Christian Metz (1931-1993), Umberto Eco (b 1932) and Julia Kristeva (b 1941). A number of linguists other than Saussure have worked within a semiotic framework, such as Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1966) andRoman Jakobson (1896-1982). It is difficult to disentangle European semiotics from structuralism in its origins; major structuralists include not only Saussure but also Claude Lvi-Strauss (b. 1908) in anthropology (who saw his subject as a branch of semiotics) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) in psychoanalysis. Structuralism is an analytical method which has been employed by many semioticians and which is based on Saussure's linguistic model. Structuralists seek to describe the overall organization of sign systems as 'languages' - as with Lvi-Strauss and myth, kinship rules and totemism, Lacan and the unconscious and Barthes and Greimas and the 'grammar' of narrative. They engage in a search for 'deep structures' underlying the 'surface features' of phenomena. However, contemporary social semiotics has moved beyond the structuralist concern with the internal relations of parts within a self-contained system, seeking to explore the use of signs in specific social situations. Modern semiotic theory is also sometimes allied with a Marxist approach which stresses the role of ideology.

Semiotics began to become a major approach to cultural studies in the late 1960s, partly as a result of the work of Roland Barthes. The translation into English of his popular essays in a collection entitled Mythologies (Barthes 1957), followed in the 1970s and 1980s by many of his other writings, greatly increased scholarly awareness of this approach. Writing in 1964, Barthes declared that 'semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all of these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification' (Barthes 1967, 9). The adoption of semiotics in Britain was influenced by its prominence in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham whilst the centre was under the direction of the neo-Marxist sociologist Stuart Hall (director 1969-79). Although semiotics may be less central now within cultural and media studies (at least in its earlier, more structuralist form), it remains essential for anyone in the field to understand it. What individual scholars have to assess, of course, is whether and how semiotics may be useful in shedding light on any aspect of their concerns. Note that Saussure's term, 'semiology' is sometimes used to refer to the Saussurean tradition, whilst 'semiotics' sometimes refers to the Peircean tradition, but that nowadays the term 'semiotics' is more likely to be used as an umbrella term to embrace the whole field (Nth 1990, 14). Semiotics is not widely institutionalized as an academic discipline. It is a field of study involving many different theoretical stances and methodological tools. One of the broadest definitions is that of Umberto Eco, who states that 'semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign' (Eco 1976, 7). Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as 'signs' in everyday speech, but of anything which 'stands for' something else. In a semiotic sense, signs take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. Whilst for the linguist Saussure, 'semiology' was 'a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life', for the philosopher Charles Peirce 'semiotic' was the 'formal doctrine of signs' which was closely related to Logic (Peirce 1931-58, 2.227). For him, 'a sign... is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.228). He declared that 'every thought is a sign' (Peirce 1931-58, 1.538; cf. 5.250ff, 5.283ff). Contemporary semioticians study signs not in isolation but as part of semiotic 'sign systems' (such as a medium or genre). They study how meanings are made: as such, being concerned not only with communication but also with the construction and maintenance of reality. Semiotics and that branch of linguistics known as semantics have a common concern with the meaning of signs, but John Sturrock argues that whereas semantics focuses on what words mean, semiotics is concerned with how signs mean (Sturrock 1986, 22). For C W Morris (deriving this threefold classification from Peirce), semiotics embraced semantics, along with the other traditional branches of linguistics: o o o semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for; syntactics (or syntax): the formal or structural relations between signs; pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters (Morris 1938, 6-7).

Semiotics is often employed in the analysis of texts (although it is far more than just a mode of textual analysis). Here it should perhaps be noted that a 'text' can exist in any medium and may be verbal, nonverbal, or both, despite the logocentric bias of this distinction. The termtext usually refers to a message which has been recorded in some way (e.g. writing, audio- and video-recording) so that it is physically independent of its sender or receiver. A text is an assemblage of signs (such as words, images, sounds and/or gestures) constructed (and interpreted) with reference to the conventions associated with a genre and in a particular medium of communication. The term 'medium' is used in a variety of ways by different theorists, and may include such broad categories as speech and writing or print and broadcasting or relate to specific technical forms within the mass media (radio, television, newspapers, magazines, books, photographs, films and records) or the media of interpersonal communication(telephone, letter, fax, e-mail, video-conferencing, computerbased chat systems). Some theorists classify media according to the 'channels' involved (visual, auditory, tactile and so on) (Nth 1995, 175). Human experience is inherently multisensory, and every representation of experience is subject to the constraints and affordances of the medium involved. Every medium is constrained by the channels which it utilizes. For instance, even in the very flexible medium of language

'words fail us' in attempting to represent some experiences, and we have no way at all of representing smell or touch with conventional media. Different media and genres provide different frameworks for representing experience, facilitating some forms of expression and inhibiting others. The differences between media lead Emile Benveniste to argue that the 'first principle' of semiotic systems is that they are not 'synonymous': 'we are not able to say "the same thing"' in systems based on different units (in Innis 1986, 235) in contrast to Hjelmslev, who asserted that 'in practice, language is a semiotic into which all other semiotics may be translated' (cited in Genosko 1994, 62). The everyday use of a medium by someone who knows how to use it typically passes unquestioned as unproblematic and 'neutral': this is hardly surprising since media evolve as a means of accomplishing purposes in which they are usually intended to be incidental. And the more frequently and fluently a medium is used, the more 'transparent' or 'invisible' to its users it tends to become. For most routine purposes, awareness of a medium may hamper its effectiveness as a means to an end. Indeed, it is typically when the medium acquires transparency that its potential to fulfil its primary function is greatest. The selectivity of any medium leads to its use having influences of which the user may not always be conscious, and which may not have been part of the purpose in using it. We can be so familiar with the medium that we are 'anaesthetized' to the mediation it involves: we 'don't know what we're missing'. Insofar as we are numbed to the processes involved we cannot be said to be exercising 'choices' in its use. In this way the means we use may modify our ends. Amongst the phenomena enhanced or reduced by media selectivity are the ends for which a medium was used. In some cases, our 'purposes' may be subtly (and perhaps invisibly), redefined by our use of a particular medium. This is the opposite of the pragmatic and rationalistic stance, according to which the means are chosen to suit the user's ends, and are entirely under the user's control. An awareness of this phenomenon of transformation by media has often led media theorists to argue deterministically that our technical means and systems always and inevitably become 'ends in themselves' (a common interpretation of Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism, 'the medium is the message'), and has even led some to present media as wholly autonomous entities with 'purposes' (as opposed to functions) of their own. However, one need not adopt such extreme stances in acknowledging the transformations involved in processes of mediation. When we use a medium for any purpose, its use becomes part of that purpose. Travelling is an unavoidable part of getting somewhere; it may even become a primary goal. Travelling by one particular method of transport rather than another is part of the experience. So too with writing rather than speaking, or using a word processor rather than a pen. In using any medium, to some extent we serve its 'purposes' as well as it serving ours. When we engage with media we both act and are acted upon, use and are used. Where a medium has a variety of functions it may be impossible to choose to use it for only one of these functions in isolation. The making of meanings with such media must involve some degree of compromise. Complete identity between any specific purpose and the functionality of a medium is likely to be rare, although the degree of match may on most occasions be accepted as adequate. I am reminded here of an observation by the anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss that in the case of what he calledbricolage, the process of creating something is not a matter of the calculated choice and use of whatever materials are technically best-adapted to a clearly predetermined purpose, but rather it involves a 'dialogue with the materials and means of execution' (Lvi-Strauss 1974, 29). In such a dialogue, the materials which are ready-to-hand may (as we say) 'suggest' adaptive courses of action, and the initial aim may be modified. Consequently, such acts of creation are not purely instrumental: the bricoleur '"speaks" not only with things... but also through the medium of things' (ibid., 21): the use of the medium can be expressive. The context of Lvi-Strauss's point was a discussion of 'mythical thought', but I would argue that bricolage can be involved in the use of any medium, for any purpose. The act of writing, for instance, may be shaped not only by the writer's conscious purposes but also by features of the media involved - such as the kind of language and writing tools used - as well as by the social and psychological processes of mediation involved. Any 'resistance' offered by the writer's materials can be an intrinsic part of the process of writing. However, not every writer acts or feels like a bricoleur. Individuals differ strikingly in their responses to the notion of media transformation. They range from those who insist that they are in total

control of the media which they 'use' to those who experience a profound sense of being shaped by the media which 'use' them (Chandler 1995). Norman Fairclough comments on the importance of the differences between the various mass media in the channels and technologies they draw upon. The press uses a visual channel, its language is written, and it draws upon technologies of photographic reproduction, graphic design, and printing. Radio, by contrast, uses an oral channel and spoken language and relies on technologies of sound recording and broadcasting, whilst television combines technologies of sound- and image-recording and broadcasting... These differences in channel and technology have significant wider implications in terms of the meaning potential of the different media. For instance, print is in an important sense less personal than radio or television. Radio begins to allow individuality and personality to be foregrounded through transmitting individual qualities of voice. Television takes the process much further by making people visually available, and not in the frozen modality of newspaper photographs, but in movement and action. (Fairclough 1995, 38-9) Whilst technological determinists emphasize that semiotic ecologies are influenced by the fundamental design features of different media, it is important to recognize the importance of socio-cultural and historical factors in shaping how different media are used and their (ever-shifting) status within particular cultural contexts. For instance, many contemporary cultural theorists have remarked on the growth of the importance of visual media compared with linguistic media in contemporary society and the associated shifts in the communicative functions of such media. Thinking in 'ecological' terms about the interaction of different semiotic structures and languages led the Russian cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman to coin the term 'semiosphere' to refer to 'the whole semiotic space of the culture in question' (Lotman 1990, 124-125). The concept is related to ecologists' references to 'the biosphere' and perhaps to cultural theorists' references to the public and private spheres, but most reminiscent of Teilhard de Chardin's notion (dating back to 1949) of the 'noosphere' - the domain in which mind is exercised. Whilst Lotman referred to such semiospheres as governing the functioning of languages within cultures, John Hartley comments that 'there is more than one level at which one might identify a semiosphere - at the level of a single national or linguistic culture, for instance, or of a larger unity such as "the West", right up to "the species"'; we might similarly characterize the semiosphere of a particular historical period(Hartley 1996, 106). This conception of a semiosphere may make semioticians seem territorially imperialistic to their critics, but it offers a more unified and dynamic vision of semiosis than the study of a specific medium as if each existed in a vacuum. There are, of course, other approaches to textual analysis apart from semiotics - notably rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis and 'content analysis'. In the field of media and communication studies content analysis is a prominent rival to semiotics as a method of textual analysis. Whereas semiotics is now closely associated with cultural studies, content analysis is well-established within the mainstream tradition of social science research. Whilst content analysis involves a quantitative approach to the analysis of the manifest 'content' of media texts, semiotics seeks to analyse media texts as structured wholes and investigates latent, connotative meanings. Semiotics is rarely quantitative, and often involves a rejection of such approaches. Just because an item occurs frequently in a text does not make it significant. The structuralist semiotician is more concerned with the relation of elements to each other. A social semiotician would also emphasize the importance of the significance which readers attach to the signs within a text. Whereas content analysisfocuses on explicit content and tends to suggest that this represents a single, fixed meaning, semiotic studies focus on the system of rules governing the 'discourse' involved in media texts, stressing the role of semiotic context in shaping meaning. However, some researchers have combined semiotic analysis and content analysis (e.g. Glasgow University Media Group 1980; Leiss et al. 1990; McQuarrie & Mick 1992). Some commentators adopt C W Morris's definition of semiotics (in the spirit of Saussure) as 'the science of signs'(Morris 1938, 1-2). The term 'science' is misleading. As yet semiotics involves no widely-agreed

theoretical assumptions, models or empirical methodologies. Semiotics has tended to be largely theoretical, many of its theorists seeking to establish its scope and general principles. Peirce and Saussure, for instance, were both concerned with the fundamental definition of the sign. Peirce developed elaborate logical taxonomies of types of signs. Subsequent semioticians have sought to identify and categorize the codes or conventions according to which signs are organized. Clearly there is a need to establish a firm theoretical foundation for a subject which is currently characterized by a host of competing theoretical assumptions. As for methodologies, Saussure's theories constituted a starting point for the development of various structuralist methodologies for analysing texts and social practices. These have been very widely employed in the analysis of a host of cultural phenomena. However, such methods are not universally accepted: socially-oriented theorists have criticized their exclusive focus on structure, and no alternative methodologies have as yet been widely adopted. Some semiotic research is empirically-oriented, applying and testing semiotic principles. Bob Hodge and David Tripp employed empirical methods in their classic study of Children and Television (Hodge & Tripp 1986). But there is at present little sense of semiotics as a unified enterprise building on cumulative research findings. Semiotics represents a range of studies in art, literature, anthropology and the mass media rather than an independent academic discipline. Those involved in semiotics include linguists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, literary, aesthetic and media theorists, psychoanalysts and educationalists. Beyond the most basic definition, there is considerable variation amongst leading semioticians as to what semiotics involves. It is not only concerned with (intentional) communication but also with our ascription of significance to anything in the world. Semiotics has changed over time, since semioticians have sought to remedy weaknesses in early semiotic approaches. Even with the most basic semiotic terms there are multiple definitions. Consequently, anyone attempting semiotic analysis would be wise to make clear which definitions are being applied and, if a particular semiotician's approach is being adopted, what its source is. There are two divergent traditions in semiotics stemming respectively from Saussure and Peirce. The work of Louis Hjelmslev, Roland Barthes, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Julia Kristeva, Christian Metz and Jean Baudrillard (b 1929) follows in the 'semiological' tradition of Saussure whilst that of Charles W Morris, Ivor A Richards (1893-1979), Charles K Ogden (1989-1957) and Thomas Sebeok (b 1920) is in the 'semiotic' tradition of Peirce. The leading semiotician bridging these two traditions is the celebrated Italian author Umberto Eco, who as the author of the bestseller The Name of the Rose (novel 1980, film 1986) is probably the only semiotician whose film rights are of any value (Eco 1980). Saussure argued that 'nothing is more appropriate than the study of languages to bring out the nature of the semiological problem' (Saussure 1983, 16; Saussure 1974, 16). Semiotics draws heavily on linguistic concepts, partly because of the influence of Saussure and because linguistics is a more established discipline than the study of other sign systems. Structuralists adopted language as their model in exploring a much wider range of social phenomena: Lvi-Strauss for myth, kinship rules and totemism; Lacan for the unconscious; Barthes and Greimas for the 'grammar' of narrative. Julia Kristeva declared that 'what semiotics has discovered... is that the law governing or, if one prefers, themajor constraint affecting any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e. that it is articulated like a language' (cited in Hawkes 1977, 125). Saussure referred to language (his model being speech) as 'the most important' of all of the systems of signs (Saussure 1983, 15; Saussure 1974, 16). Language is almost unvariably regarded as the most powerful communication system by far. For instance, Marvin Harris observes that 'human languages are unique among communication systems in possessing semantic universality... A communication system that has semantic universality can convey information about all aspects, domains, properties, places, or events in the past, present or future, whether actual or possible, real or imaginary' (cited in Wilden 1987, 138). Perhaps language is indeed fundamental: Emile Benveniste observed that 'language is the interpreting system of all other systems, linguistic and non-linguistic' (in Innis 1986, 239), whilst Claude Lvi-Strauss noted that 'language is the semiotic system par excellence; it cannot but signify, and exists only through signification'(Lvi-Strauss 1972, 48). Saussure saw linguistics as a branch of 'semiology': Linguistics is only one branch of this general science [of semiology]. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics... As far as we are concerned... the linguistic

problem is first and foremost semiological... If one wishes to discover the true nature of language systems, one must first consider what they have in common with all other systems of the same kind... In this way, light will be thrown not only upon the linguistic problem. By considering rites, customs etc. as signs, it will be possible, we believe, to see them in a new perspective. The need will be felt to consider them as semiological phenomena and to explain them in terms of the laws of semiology. (Saussure 1983, 16-17; Saussure 1974, 16-17) Whilst Roland Barthes declared that 'perhaps we must invert Saussure's formulation and assert that semiology is a branch of linguistics', others have accepted Saussure's location of linguistics within semiotics (Barthes 1985, xi). Other than himself, Jean-Marie Floch instances Hjelmslev and Greimas (Floch 2000, 93). However, even if we theoretically locate linguistics within semiotics it is difficult to avoid adopting the linguistic model in exploring other sign systems.Semioticians commonly refer to films, television and radio programmes, advertising posters and so on as 'texts', and to 'reading television' (Fiske and Hartley 1978). Media such as television and film are regarded by some semioticians as being in some respects like 'languages'. The issue tends to revolve around whether film is closer to what we treat as 'reality' in the everyday world of our own experience or whether it has more in common with a symbolic system like writing. Some refer to the 'grammar' of media other than language. For James Monaco, 'film has no grammar', and he offers a useful critique of glib analogies between film techniques and the grammar of natural language (ibid., 129). There is a danger of trying to force all media into a linguistic framework. With regard to photography (though one might say the same for film and television), Victor Burgin insists that: 'There is no 'language' of photography, no single signifying system (as opposed to technical apparatus) upon which all photographs depend (in the sense in which all texts in English depend upon the English language); there is, rather, a heterogeneous complex of codes upon which photography may draw' (Burgin 1982b, 143). We will shortly examine Saussure's model of the sign, but before doing so it is important to understand something about the general framework within which he situated it. Saussure made what is now a famous distinction between langue(language) and parole (speech). Langue refers to the system of rules and conventions which is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users; parole refers to its use in particular instances. Applying the notion to semiotic systems in general rather than simply to language, the distinction is one between between code and message, structure and event or systemand usage (in specific texts or contexts). According to the Saussurean distinction, in a semiotic system such as cinema, 'any specific film is the speech of that underlying system of cinema language' (Langholz Leymore 1975, 3). Saussure focused on langue rather than parole. To the traditional, Saussurean semiotician, what matters most are the underlying structures and rules of a semiotic system as a whole rather than specific performances or practices which are merely instances of its use. Saussure's approach was to study the system 'synchronically' if it were frozen in time (like a photograph) - rather than 'diachronically' - in terms of its evolution over time (like a film). Structuralist cultural theorists subsequently adopted this Saussurean priority, focusing on the functions of social and cultural phenomena within semiotic systems. Theorists differ over whether the system precedes and determines usage (structural determinism) or whether usage precedes and determines the system (social determinism) (although note that most structuralists argue that the system constrains rather than completely determines usage). The structuralist dichotomy between usage and system has been criticized for its rigidity, splitting process from product, subject from structure (Coward & Ellis 1977, 4, 14). The prioritization of structure over usage fails to account for changes in structure. Marxist theorists have been particularly critical of this. In the late 1920s, Valentin Volosinov (1884/5-1936) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) criticized Saussure's synchronic approach and his emphasis on internal relations within the system of language (Voloshinov 1973; Morris 1994). Volosinov reversed the Saussurean priority oflangue over parole: 'The sign is part of organized social intercourse and cannot exist, as such, outside it, reverting to a mere physical artifact' (Voloshinov 1973, 21). The meaning of a sign is not in its relationship to other signs within the language system but rather in the social context of its use. Saussure was criticized for ignoring historicity (ibid., 61). The Prague school linguists Roman Jakobson and Yuri Tynyanov declared in 1927 that 'pure synchronism now proves to be an illusion', adding that 'every synchronic system has its past and

its future as inseparable structural elements of the system' (cited in Voloshinov 1973, 166). Writing in 1929, Volosinov observed that 'there is no real moment in time when a synchronic system of language could be constructed... A synchronic system may be said to exist only from the point of view of the subjective consciousness of an individual speaker belonging to some particular language group at some particular moment of historical time' (Voloshinov 1973, 66). Whilst the French structuralist Claude LviStrauss applied a synchronic approach in the domain of anthropology, most contemporary semioticians have sought to reprioritize historicity and social context. Language is seldom treated as a static, closed and stable system which is inherited from preceding generations but as constantly changing. The sign, as Voloshinov put it, is 'an arena of the class struggle' (ibid., 23). Seeking to establish a wholeheartedly 'social semiotics', Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress declare that 'the social dimensions of semiotic systems are so intrinsic to their nature and function that the systems cannot be studied in isolation' (Hodge & Kress 1988, 1). Whilst Saussure may be hailed as a founder of semiotics, semiotics has become increasingly less Saussurean. Teresa de Lauretis describes the movement away from structuralist semiotics which began in the 1970s: In the last decade or so, semiotics has undergone a shift of its theoretical gears: a shift away from the classification of sign systems - their basic units, their levels of structural organization - and towards the exploration of the modes of production of signs and meanings, the ways in which systems and codes are used, transformed or transgressed in social practice. While formerly the emphasis was on studying sign systems (language, literature, cinema, architecture, music, etc.), conceived of as mechanisms that generate messages, what is now being examined is the work performed through them. It is this work or activity which constitutes and/or transforms the codes, at the same time as it constitutes and transforms the individuals using the codes, performing the work; the individuals who are, therefore, the subjects of semiosis. 'Semiosis', a term borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce, is expanded by Eco to designate the process by which a culture produces signs and/or attributes meaning to signs. Although for Eco meaning production or semiosis is a social activity, he allows that subjective factors are involved in each individual act of semiosis. The notion then might be pertinent to the two main emphases of current, or poststructuralist, semiotic theory. One is a semiotics focused on the subjective aspects of signification and strongly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, where meaning is construed as a subject-effect (the subject being an effect of the signifier). The other is a semiotics concerned to stress the social aspect of signification, its practical, aesthetic, or ideological use in interpersonal communication; there, meaning is construed as semantic value produced through culturally shared codes. (de Lauretis 1984, 167) This text outlines some of the key concepts in semiotics, together with relevant critiques, beginning with the most fundamental concept of the sign itself. I hope it will prove to be a useful companion to the reader in finding their own path through the subject. But before launching on an exploration of this intriguing but demanding subject let us consider why we should bother: why should we study semiotics? This is a pressing question in part because the writings of semioticians have a reputation for being dense with jargon: Justin Lewis notes that 'its advocates have written in a style that ranges from the obscure to the incomprehensible' (Lewis 1991, 25); another critic wittily remarked that 'semiotics tells us things we already know in a language we will never understand' (Paddy Whannel, cited in Seiter 1992, 1). The semiotic establishment is a very exclusive club but, as David Sless remarks, 'semiotics is far too important an enterprise to be left to semioticians' (Sless 1986, 1). Semiotics is important because it can help us not to take 'reality' for granted as something having a purely objective existence which is independent of human interpretation. It teaches us that reality is a system of signs. Studying semiotics can assist us to become more aware of reality as a construction and of the roles played by ourselves and others in constructing it. It can help us to realize that information or meaning is not

'contained' in the world or in books, computers or audio-visual media. Meaning is not 'transmitted' to us we actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes or conventions of which we are normally unaware. Becoming aware of such codes is both inherently fascinating and intellectually empowering. We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized. Through the study of semiotics we become aware that these signs and codes are normally transparent and disguise our task in 'reading' them. Living in a world of increasingly visual signs, we need to learn that even the most 'realistic' signs are not what they appear to be. By making more explicit the codes by which signs are interpreted we may perform the valuable semiotic function of 'denaturalizing' signs. In defining realities signs serve ideological functions. Deconstructing and contesting the realities of signs can reveal whose realities are privileged and whose are suppressed. The study of signs is the study of the construction and maintenance of reality. To decline such a study is to leave to others the control of the world of meanings which we inhabit. Strengths of Semiotic Analysis Semiotics can help to denaturalize theoretical assumptions in academia just as in everyday life; it can thus raise new theoretical issues (Culler 1985, 102; Douglas 1982, 199). Whilst this means that many scholars who encounter semiotics find it unsettling, others find it exciting. Semiotic techniques 'in which the analogy of language as a system is extended to culture as a whole' can be seen as representing 'a substantial break from the positivist and empirical traditions which had limited much previous cultural theory' (Franklin et al. 1996, 263). Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress argue that unlike many academic disciplines, 'semiotics offers the promise of a systematic, comprehensive and coherent study of communications phenomena as a whole, not just instances of it' (Hodge & Kress 1988, 1). Semiotics provides us with a potentially unifying conceptual framework and a set of methods and terms for use across the full range of signifying practices, which include gesture, posture, dress, writing, speech, photography, film, television and radio. Semiotics may not itself be a discipline but it is at least a focus of enquiry, with a central concern for meaning-making practices which conventional academic disciplines treat as peripheral. As David Sless notes, 'we consult linguists to find out about language, art historians or critics to find out about paintings, and anthropologists to find out how people in different societies signal to each other through gesture, dress or decoration. But if we want to know what all these different things have in common then we need to find someone with a semiotic point of view, a vantage point from which to survey our world' (Sless 1986, 1). David Mick suggests, for instance, that 'no discipline concerns itself with representation as strictly as semiotics does' (Mick 1988, 20; my emphasis). Semiotics foregrounds and problematizes the process of representation. Traditional structural semiotics was primarily applied to textual analysis but it is misleading to identify contemporary semiotics with structuralism. The turn to social semiotics has been reflected in an increasing concern with the role of the reader. In either form, semiotics is invaluable if we wish to look beyond the manifest content of texts. Structuralist semiotics seeks to look behind or beneath the surface of the observed in order to discover the underlying organization of phenomena. The more obvious the structural organization of a text or code may seem to be, the more difficult it may be to see beyond such surface features (Langholz Leymore 1975, 9). Searching for what is 'hidden' beneath the 'obvious' can lead to fruitful insights. Semiotics is also well adapted to exploring connotative meanings. Social semiotics alerts us to how the same text may generate different meanings for different readers. Semiotics can also help us to realise that whatever assertions seem to us to be 'obvious', 'natural', universal, given, permanent and incontrovertible are generated by the ways in which sign systems operate in our discourse communities. Art historian Keith Mosley comments that: Semiotics makes us aware that the cultural values with which we make sense of the world are a tissue of conventions that have been handed down from generation to generation by the members of the culture of which we are a part. It reminds us that there is nothing 'natural' about our values; they are social constructs that not only vary enormously in the course of time but differ radically from culture to culture. (cited in Schroeder 1998, 225)

Whereas both 'common-sense' and positivist realism insist that reality is independent of the signs which refer to it, semiotics emphasizes the role of sign systems in the construction of reality. Although things may exist independently of signs we know them only through the mediation of signs. We see only what our sign systems allow us to see. Whilst Saussurean semioticians have sometimes been criticized for seeking to impose verbal language as a model on media which are non-verbal or not solely or primarily verbal, the virtue of adopting a linguistic model lies in treating all signs as being to some extent arbitrary and conventional - thus fostering an awareness of the ideological forces that seek to naturalize signs(Culler 1985, 92). Semioticians argue that signs are related to their signifieds by social conventions which we learn. We become so used to such conventions in our use of various media that they seem 'natural', and it can be difficult for us to realize the conventional nature of such relationships. When we take these relationships for granted we treat the signified as unmediated or 'transparent', as when we interpret television or photography as 'a window on the world'. Semiotics demonstrates that the 'transparency' of the 'medium' is illusory. Semiotics can help to make us aware of what we take for granted in representing the world, reminding us that we are always dealing with signs, not with an unmediated objective reality, and that sign systems are involved in theconstruction of meaning. This is an ideological issue, since, as Victor Burgin notes, 'an ideology is the sum of taken-for-granted realities of everyday life' (Burgin 1982a, 46). Valentin Voloshinov declared: 'Whenever a sign is present, ideology is present too' (Voloshinov 1973, 10). There are no ideologically 'neutral' sign systems: signs function to persuade as well as to refer. Sign systems help to naturalize and reinforce particular framings of 'the way things are', although the operation of ideology in signifying practices is typically masked. Consequently, semiotic analysis always involves ideological analysis. If signs do not merely reflect reality but are involved in its construction then those who control the sign systems control the construction of reality. However, 'commonsense' involves incoherences, ambiguities, inconsistencies, contradictions, omissions, gaps and silences which offer leverage points for potential social change. The role of ideology is to suppress these in the interests of dominant groups. Consequently, reality construction occurs on 'sites of struggle'. As John Hartley comments, 'contending social forces seek to "fix" the meaning-potential of each sign with an evaluative accent conducive to their particular interests' and at the same time try to present evaluative differences as differences in fact (Hartley 1982, 23, 24). For Roland Barthes various codes contribute to reproducing bourgeois ideology, making it seem natural, proper and inevitable. One need not be a Marxist to appreciate that it can be liberating to become aware of whose view of reality is being privileged in the process. Many semioticians see their primary task as being to denaturalize signs, texts and codes. Semiotics can thus show ideology at work and demonstrate that 'reality' can be challenged. Whilst processes of mediation tend to retreat to transparency in our routine everyday practices, adopting a semiotic approach can help us to attend to what Catherine Belsey calls 'the construction of the process of signification' in analysing specific texts (Belsey 1980, 47). This has made it a particularly attractive approach for media educators. In the study of the mass media, semiotic approaches can draw our attention to such taken-for-granted practices as the classic Hollywood convention of 'invisible editing' which is still the dominant editing style in popular cinema and television. Semiotic treatments can make us aware that this is a manipulative convention which we have learned to accept as 'natural' in film and television. More broadly, Pierre Guiraud argued that 'it is doubtless one of the main tasks of semiology to establish the existence of systems in apparently a-systematic modes of signification' (Guiraud 1975, 30). In relation to the mass media, semiotics has made distinctive theoretical contributions. In association with psychoanalysis, semiotics also introduced the theory of 'the positioning of the subject' (the spectator) in relation to the filmic text. Whilst this structuralist stance may have reinforced the myth of the irresistibility of media influence, the emphasis of social semioticians on diversity of interpretation (within social parameters) has countered the earlier tendency to equate 'content' with meaning and to translate this directly to 'media effects'. As an approach to communication which focuses on meaning and interpretation, semiotics challenges the reductivetransmission model which equates meaning with 'message' (or content). Signs do not just 'convey' meanings, but constitute a medium in which meanings are constructed. Semiotics helps us to realise that

meaning is not passively absorbed but arises only in the active process of interpretation. In relation to printed advertisements, William Leiss and his colleagues note: The semiological approach... suggests that the meaning of an ad does not float on the surface just waiting to be internalized by the viewer, but is built up out of the ways that different signs are organized and related to each other, both within the ad and through external references to wider belief systems. More specifically, for advertising to create meaning, the reader or the viewer has to do some 'work'. Because the meaning is not lying there on the page, one has to make an effort to grasp it. (Leiss et al. 1990, 201-2) Much the same could be said of texts in other genres and media. The meanings generated by a single sign are multiple. Semiotics highlights 'the infinite richness of interpretation which... signs are open to' (Sturrock 1986, 101). Voloshinov referred to the multi-accentuality of the sign - the potential for diverse interpretations of the same sign according to particular social and historical contexts (Voloshinov 1973, 23). The romantic mythology of individual creativity and of the 'originality' of 'the author' (e.g. the auteur in film) has been undermined by various strands in semiotics: by the structuralist emphasis on the primacy of the semiotic system and of ourselves as produced by language; by the social semiotic emphasis on the role of the interpreters of a text; and by the post-structuralist semiotic notion of intertextuality (highlighting what texts owe to other texts). Individuals are not unconstrained in their construction of meanings. As Stuart Hall puts it, our 'systems of signs... speak us as much as we speak in and through them' (Hall 1977, 328). 'Common-sense' suggests that 'I' am a unique individual with a stable, unified identity and ideas of my own. Semiotics can help us to realise that such notions are created and maintained by our engagement with sign systems: our sense of identity is established through signs. We derive a sense of 'self' from drawing upon conventional, pre-existing repertoires of signs and codes which we did not ourselves create. We are thus the subjects of our sign systems rather than being simply instrumental 'users' who are fully in control of them. Whilst we are not determined by semiotic processes we are shaped by them far more than we realise. Pierre Guiraud goes further: 'Man [sic] is the vehicle and the substance of the sign, he is both the signifier and the signified; in fact, he is a sign and therefore a convention' (Guiraud 1975, 83). The postmodernist notion of fragmented and shifting identities may provide a useful corrective to the myth of the unified self. But unlike those postmodernist stances which simply celebrate radical relativism, semiotics can help us to focus on how we make sense of ourselves, whilst social semiotics anchors us to the study of situated practices in the construction of identities and the part that our engagement with sign systems plays in such processes. Justin Lewis notes that 'we are part of a prearranged semiological world. From the cradle to the grave, we are encouraged by the shape of our environment to engage with the world of signifiers in particular ways' (Lewis 1991, 30). Guy Cook argues that 'forty years ago, the method was a revolutionary one, and justly captured the intellectual imagination, not only for the added complexity it could bring to analysis but also for its political and philosophical implications. Its visions of cultures and cultural artefacts, no matter how superficially different, as fundamentally similar was a powerful weapon against racism and cultural chauvinism, and held out hope of the discovery of abstract structures universal in human culture' (Cook 1992, 70-71). Feminist theorists note that structuralist semiotics has been important for feminists as a tool for critiques of reductionism and essentialism and has 'facilitated the analysis of contradictory meanings and identities' (Franklin et al. 1996, 263). Semiotics has sought to study cultural artifacts and practices of whatever kind on the basis of unified principles, at its best bringing some coherence to media and cultural studies. Whilst semiotic analysis has been widely applied to the literary, artistic and musical canon, it has been applied to the 'decoding' of a wide variety of popular cultural phenomena. It has thus helped to stimulate the serious study of popular culture. Anthony Wilden has observed that 'all language is communication but very little communication is language' (Wilden 1987, 137). In an increasingly visual age, an important contribution of semiotics from Roland Barthes onwards has been a concern with imagistic as well as linguistic signs, particularly in the

context of advertising, photography and audio-visual media. Semiotics may encourage us not to dismiss a particular medium as of less worth than another: literary and film critics often regard television as of less worth than prose fiction or 'artistic' film. To litist literary critics, of course, this would be a weakness of semiotics. Potentially, semiotics could help us to realize differences as well as similarities between various media. It could help us to avoid the routine privileging of one semiotic mode over another, such as the spoken over the written or the verbal over the non-verbal. We need to recognize, as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen note, that 'different semiotic modes - the visual, the verbal, the gestural... have their potentialities, and their limitations' (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 31). Such a realization could lead to the recognition of the importance of new literacies in a changing semiotic ecology. At present, 'with regard to images, most people in most societies are mostly confined to the role of spectator of other people's productions' (Messaris 1994, 121). Most people feel unable to draw or paint, and even amongst those who own video-cameras not everyone knows how to make effective use of them. This is a legacy of an educational system which still focuses almost exclusively on the acquisition of one kind of symbolic literacy (that of verbal language) at the expense of most other semiotic modes (in particular the iconic mode). This institutional bias disempowers people not only by excluding many from engaging in those representational practices which are not purely linguistic but by handicapping them as critical readers of the majority of texts to which they are routinely exposed throughout their lives. A working understanding of key concepts in semiotics - including their practical application - can be seen as essential for everyone who wants to understand the complex and dynamic communication ecologies within which we live. Those who cannot understand such environments are in the greatest danger of being manipulated by those who can. For Peirce, 'the universe... is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs' (Peirce 193158, 5.449n). There is no escape from signs. As Bill Nichols puts it, 'As long as signs are produced, we will be obliged to understand them. This is a matter of nothing less than survival' (Nichols 1981, 8). Sociology Sociology is the study of society.[1] It is a social sciencea term with which it is sometimes synonymouswhich uses various methods of empirical investigation[2] and critical analysis[3] to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social activity. For many sociologists the goal is to conduct research which may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, whilst others produce purely academic theory closer to that of philosophy. Subject matter ranges from the micro level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and the social structure.[4] Sociology is both topically and methodologically a very broad discipline. Its traditional focuses have included social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularisation, law, and deviance. As all spheres of human activity are sculpted by social structure and individual agency, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to further subjects, such as health, medical, military and penalinstitutions, the Internet, and even the role of social activity in the development of scientific knowledge. The range of social scientific methods has also broadly expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches to the analysis of society. Conversely, recent decades have seen the rise of new analytically, mathematically andcomputationally rigorous techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network analysis.[5][6]Sociology should not be confused with various general social studies courses which bear little relation to sociological theory or social science research methodology.

The Role and Influence of Mass Media Mass media is communicationwhether written, broadcast, or spokenthat reaches a large audience. This includes television, radio, advertising, movies, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, and so forth. ass media is a significant force in modern culture, particularly in America. Sociologists refer to this as a mediated culture where media reflects and creates the culture. Communities and individuals are bombarded constantly with messages from a multitude of sources including TV, billboards, and magazines, to name a few. These messages promote not only products, but moods, attitudes, and a sense of what is and is not important. Mass media makes possible the concept of celebrity: without the ability of movies, magazines, and news media to reach across thousands of miles, people could not become famous. In fact, only political and business leaders, as well as the few notorious outlaws, were famous in the past. Only in recent times have actors, singers, and other social elites become celebrities or stars. The current level of media saturation has not always existed. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, television, for example, consisted of primarily three networks, public broadcasting, and a few local independent stations. These channels aimed their programming primarily at two-parent, middle-class families. Even so, some middle-class households did not even own a television. Today, one can find a television in the poorest of homes, and multiple TVs in most middle-class homes. Not only has availability increased, but programming is increasingly diverse with shows aimed to please all ages, incomes, backgrounds, and attitudes. This widespread availability and exposure makes television the primary focus of most mass-media discussions. More recently, the Internet has increased its role exponentially as more businesses and households sign on. Although TV and the Internet have dominated the mass media, movies and magazinesparticularly those lining the aisles at grocery checkout standsalso play a powerful role in culture, as do other forms of media. What role does mass media play? Legislatures, media executives, local school officials, and sociologists have all debated this controversial question. While opinions vary as to the extent and type of influence the mass media wields, all sides agree that mass media is a permanent part of modern culture. Three main sociological perspectives on the role of media exist: the limited-effects theory, the class-dominant theory, and the culturalist theory. Limited-effects theory The limited-effects theory argues that because people generally choose what to watch or read based on what they already believe, media exerts a negligible influence. This theory originated and was tested in the 1940s and 1950s. Studies that examined the ability of media to influence voting found that well-informed people relied more on personal experience, prior knowledge, and their own reasoning. However, media experts more likely swayed those who were less informed. Critics point to two problems with this perspective. First, they claim that limited-effects theory ignores the media's role in framing and limiting the discussion and debate of issues. How media frames the debate and what questions members of the media ask change the outcome of the discussion and the possible conclusions people may draw. Second, this theory came into existence when the availability and dominance of media was far less widespread. Class-dominant theory The class-dominant theory argues that the media reflects and projects the view of a minority elite, which controls it. Those people who own and control the corporations that produce media comprise this elite. Advocates of this

view concern themselves particularly with massive corporate mergers of media organizations, which limit competition and put big business at the reins of mediaespecially news media. Their concern is that when ownership is restricted, a few people then have the ability to manipulate what people can see or hear. For example, owners can easily avoid or silence stories that expose unethical corporate behavior or hold corporations responsible for their actions. The issue of sponsorship adds to this problem. Advertising dollars fund most media. Networks aim programming at the largest possible audience because the broader the appeal, the greater the potential purchasing audience and the easier selling air time to advertisers becomes. Thus, news organizations may shy away from negative stories about corporations (especially parent corporations) that finance large advertising campaigns in their newspaper or on their stations. Television networks receiving millions of dollars in advertising from companies like Nike and other textile manufacturers were slow to run stories on their news shows about possible human-rights violations by these companies in foreign countries. Media watchers identify the same problem at the local level where city newspapers will not give new cars poor reviews or run stories on selling a home without an agent because the majority of their funding comes from auto and real estate advertising. This influence also extends to programming. In the 1990s a network cancelled a short-run drama with clear religious sentiments, Christy, because, although highly popular and beloved in rural America, the program did not rate well among young city dwellers that advertisers were targeting in ads. Critics of this theory counter these arguments by saying that local control of news media largely lies beyond the reach of large corporate offices elsewhere, and that the quality of news depends upon good journalists. They contend that those less powerful and not in control of media have often received full media coverage and subsequent support. As examples they name numerous environmental causes, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, and the pro-Gulf War movement. While most people argue that a corporate elite controls media, a variation on this approach argues that a politically liberal elite controls media. They point to the fact that journalists, being more highly educated than the general population, hold more liberal political views, consider themselves left of center, and are more likely to register as Democrats. They further point to examples from the media itself and the statistical reality that the media more often labels conservative commentators or politicians as conservative than liberals as liberal. Media language can be revealing, too. Media uses the terms arch or ultra conservative, but rarely or never the terms arch or ultra liberal. Those who argue that a political elite controls media also point out that the movements that have gained media attentionthe environment, anti-nuclear, and anti-Vietnamgenerally support liberal political issues. Predominantly conservative political issues have yet to gain prominent media attention, or have been opposed by the media. Advocates of this view point to the Strategic Arms Initiative of the 1980s Reagan administration. Media quickly characterized the defense program as Star Wars, linking it to an expensive fantasy. The public failed to support it, and the program did not get funding or congressional support. Culturalist theory The culturalist theory, developed in the 1980s and 1990s, combines the other two theories and claims that people interact with media to create their own meanings out of the images and messages they receive. This theory sees audiences as playing an active rather than passive role in relation to mass media. One strand of research focuses on

the audiences and how they interact with media; the other strand of research focuses on those who produce the media, particularly the news. Theorists emphasize that audiences choose what to watch among a wide range of options, choose how much to watch, and may choose the mute button or the VCR remote over the programming selected by the network or cable station. Studies of mass media done by sociologists parallel text-reading and interpretation research completed by linguists (people who study language). Both groups of researchers find that when people approach material, whether written text or media images and messages, they interpret that material based on their own knowledge and experience. Thus, when researchers ask different groups to explain the meaning of a particular song or video, the groups produce widely divergent interpretations based on age, gender, race, ethnicity, and religious background. Therefore, culturalist theorists claim that, while a few elite in large corporations may exert significant control over what information media produces and distributes, personal perspective plays a more powerful role in how the audience members interpret those messages. Psycho analysis Many of us have experienced what is commonly referred to as a Freudian slip. These misstatements are believed to reveal underlying, unconscious thoughts or feelings. Consider this example:James has just started a new relationship with a woman he met at school. While talking to her one afternoon, he accidentally calls her by his ex-girlfriend's name.If you were in this situation, how would you explain this mistake? Many of us might blame the slip on distraction or describe it as a simple accident. However, a psychoanalytic theorist might tell you that this is much more than a random accident. The psychoanalytic view holds that there are inner forces outside of your awareness that are directing your behavior. For example, a psychoanalyst might say that James misspoke due to unresolved feelings for his ex or perhaps because of misgivings about his new relationship.The founder of psychoanalytic theory was Sigmund Freud. While his theories were considered shocking at the time and continue to create debate and controversy, his work had a profound influence on a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, and art. The term psychoanalysis is used to refer to many aspects of Freuds work and research, including Freudian therapy and the research methodology he used to develop his theories. Freud relied heavily upon his observations and case studies of his patients when he formed his theory of personality development.Before we can understand Freud's theory of personality, we must first understand his view of how the mind is organized.

According to Freud, the mind can be divided into two main parts:1. The conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. A part of this includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily at any time and brought into our awareness. Freud called this ordinary memory thepreconscious.

2. The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying influences. According to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality, personality is composed of three elements. These three elements of personality--known as the id, the ego and the superego--work together to create complex human behaviors. The Id The id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. This aspect of personality is entirely unconscious and includes of the instinctive and primitive behaviors. According to Freud, the id is the source of all psychic energy, making it the primary component of personality.The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state anxiety or tension. For example, an increase in hunger or thirst should produce an immediate attempt to eat or drink. The id is very important early in life, because it ensures that an infants needs are met. If the infant is hungry or uncomfortable, he or she will cry until the demands of the id are met.However, immediately satisfying these needs is not always realistic or even possible. If we were ruled entirely by the pleasure principle, we might find ourselves grabbing things we want out of other people's hands to satisfy our own cravings. This sort of behavior would be both disruptive and socially unacceptable. According to Freud, the id tries to resolve the tension created by the pleasure principle through the primary process, which involves forming a mental image of the desired object as a way of satisfying the need. The Ego The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality. According to Freud, the ego develops from the id and ensures that the impulses of the id can be expressed in a manner acceptable in the real world. The ego functions in both the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind.The ego operates based on the reality principle, which strives to satisfy the id's desires in realistic and socially appropriate ways. The reality principle weighs the costs and benefits of an action before deciding to act upon or abandon impulses. In many cases, the id's impulses can be satisfied through a process of delayed gratification--the ego will eventually allow the behavior, but only in the appropriate time and place.The ego also discharges tension created by unmet impulses through the secondary process, in which the ego tries to find an object in the real world that matches the mental image created by the id's primary process. The Superego

The last component of personality to develop is the superego. The superego is the aspect of personality that holds all of our internalized moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both parents and society--our sense of right and wrong. The superego provides guidelines for making judgments. According to Freud, the superego begins to emerge at around age five.

There are two parts of the superego: 1. The ego ideal includes the rules and standards for good behaviors. These behaviors include those which are approved of by parental and other authority figures. Obeying these rules leads to feelings of pride, value, and accomplishment. 2. The conscience includes information about things that are viewed as bad by parents and society. These behaviors are often forbidden and lead to bad consequences, punishments, or feelings of guilt and remorse.The superego acts to perfect and civilize our behavior. It works to suppress all unacceptable urges of the id and struggles to make the ego act upon idealistic standards rather that upon realistic principles. The superego is present in the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The Interaction of the Id, Ego, and Superego With so many competing forces, it is easy to see how conflict might arise between the id, ego, and superego. Freud used the term ego strength to refer to the ego's ability to function despite these dueling forces. A person with good ego strength is able to effectively manage these pressures, while those with too much or too little ego strength can becometoo unyielding or too disrupting.According to Freud, the key to a healthy personality is a balance between the id, the ego, and the superego.

Representation and Realism (Reality TV/news/documentary etc.) What do we mean by realism in Media Studies? A difficult concept, but we may start by considering the subject from the point of view of the audience. An audience needs to recognise and identify with a media text so that connections can be made with their own lives and the world they live in. If the connection is made, then the audience will get that elusive thing called pleasure of the text. Of course, though, it is not a simple idea, because we need to ask ourselves exactly what is media reality. Reality is almost always SUBJECTIVE, because the maker of the text and the recipient (the audience) imposes a kind of filtering process the maker while representing or encoding the text and the recipient while decoding the text. So inevitably reality is, to a greater or lesser extent, controversial. Assessing media texts in terms of reality is therefore very difficult, partly because of the above point, but also because there are many different kinds of reality. Here they are: y Surface realism also known as getting the details right or making it look real. You can look at texts in terms of locations, or setting, or costumes and props, or even the right accent spoken by a character. It looks right, it sounds right so it must BE right. Right? "Ooh! I get pleasure of the text!"

Inner or emotional realism of characters. The audience knows the character and identifies with him or her because the character behaves in a realistic way or says the right thing, or shows an identifiable response or emotion. Plausibility of the narrative or plot. What happens in the text is credible could happen in real life. (If the plot is too far-fetched or out of character then the audience wont accept it. (Interesting idea here is to look at the Harry Potter films and ask yourself exactly why the ludicrous events succeed in capturing the audiences imagination. Harry Potters world is utterly unreal, but its made to seem to be real How is this done?) Technical codes and symbols corresponding with what is expected and recognised by the audience. (look at things like background music, canned laughter, computer SFX, Dolby surround sound) If it sounds right, its real, even if it isnt. (Have a look at the Lord of the Rings film and see how realistic that Orc army sounds and looks!)

Depending on the form or the genre, the audience will apply something called a MODALITY JUDGEMENT, which is Media-speak for is this the right or wrong way of representing reality in this text. For example, in the Simpson cartoon series, the audience makes such a judgement and suspends disbelief because the codes used in this text are so recognisable. Its a cartoon, but it becomes real because it is encoded in such a realistic way. Another interesting thing is the postmodern trend of re-working conventional genres, so that they become real through irony or paradox. Look at Edna Everage or the Mrs Merton character, or perhaps even The League of Gentlemen series. News and documentary realism There is most credibility from audiences towards broadcast news and documentaries. Traditionally, British broadcasters in this medium are supposed to be impartial and non-biased. They provide an authoritative and truthful news service. This can be seen in the way that news and documentary programmes occupy prime-time slots on TV. Documentaries, too, are regarded as high-status programmes that represent truth. In the 1930s documentaries provided information, education and propaganda to the audience. From the 1950s the development of cinma verit (cinema truth) in France moved the representation of reality on to the cinema screen. In the 1960s the TV became the principal medium for documentaries. The genre was (and to an extent, still is), typified by certain well-defined codes. y y y y An authoritative presenter The use of voice-over commentaries Recorded interviews Visual evidence via location shots or archive film

These things created (and still create) a sense of truth or authenticity, but it must also be noted that editorial choices and values are still at work in the creation of the news or documentary texts. What looks like truth will almost certainly have been filtered or massaged or manipulated or (to use a current term) spun by the editorial process. From the 1980s came the fly-on-the-wall type of documentary, which has well-defined rules: y y y Events are filmed exactly as they happen Subjects agree in advance to be filmed Participants are shown edited versions of the filming

Sounds fair but is it, really? The editorial process still happens and heavy editorial control is applied in postproduction. Reality TV (The main staple of most of the output today, it seems!) This works in a number of ways: y y y y By allowing subjects to appear as themselves, for example the camera tracks professionals doing their jobs, perhaps with dramatic reconstructions of events or real video action sequences. The participants become subjects of humour or entertainment (programmes like Youve been Framed and so on) Participants are subjects within a fly-onthe-wall or verit programme (Big Brother) Participants are amateur directors themselves, with personal documentaries of events. Media Text: The media text is any media product we wish to examine. Every description or representation of the world, fictional or otherwise, is an attempt to describe or define reality, and is in some way a construct of reality, a text. A text is any media product we wish to examine, whether it is a television program, a book, a poster, a popular song, the latest fashion, etc. We can discuss with students what the type of text iscartoon, rock video, fairy tale, police drama, etc.and how it differs from other types of text. We can identify its denotative meaning and discuss such features as narrative structure, how meanings are communicated, values implicit in the text, and connections with other texts. The central concept of the model is the idea that all communication, all discourse, is a construct of reality. Every description or representation of the world, fictional or otherwise, is an attempt to describe or define reality, and is in some way a constructiona selection and ordering of details to communicate aspects of the creator's view of reality. There are no neutral, value-free descriptions of realityin print, in word, in visual form. An understanding of this concept is the starting point for a critical relationship to the media. This concept leads to three broad areas within which we can raise questions that will help students to "deconstruct" the media: text, audience and production. more in Representation Anyone who receives a media text, whether it is a book read alone or a film viewed in a theatre, is a member of an audience. It is important for children to be able to identify the audience(s) of a text. Texts are frequently designed to produce audiences, which are then sold to advertisers. Modern communication theory teaches that audiences "negotiate" meaning. That is to say, each individual reader of a text will draw from its range of possible meanings a particular reading that reflects that individual's gender, race or cultural background, skill in reading, age, etc. Thus the "meaning" of a text is not something determined by critics, teachers or even authors, but is determined in a dynamic and changeable relationship between the reader and the text. The role of the teacher is to assist students in developing skills which will allow them to negotiate active readingsreadings which recognize the range of possible meanings in a text, the values and biases implicit in those meanings, and which involve conscious choices rather than the unconscious acceptance of "preferred" readings. Children who can choose meaning are empowered. more in Audience Institution and Production refer to everything that goes into the making of a media textthe technology, the ownership and economics, the institutions involved, the legal issues, the use of common codes and practices, the roles in the production process. Students are often fascinated by the details and "tricks" of production. It is important that the teacher keep in focus the relationship between the various aspects of production, and the other two broad areas of text and audience. What is the relationship between story content and commercial priorities? How are values related to ownership and control? How does technology determine what we will see? How does the cost of

technology determine who can make media productions? Often, understanding in these areas is best developed through the students involvement in their own production work. more in Institution andTechnology Unit 4 Consciousness Industry The Consciousness Industry is a term coined by author and theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, which identifies the mechanisms through which the human mind is reproduced as a social product. Foremost among these mechanisms are the institutions of mass media andeducation. According to Enzensberger, the mind industry does not produce anything specific; rather, its main business is to perpetuate the existing order of man's domination over man. Hans Haacke elaborates on the consciousness industry as it applies to the arts in a wider system of production, distribution, and consumption.[1] Haacke specifically implicates museums as manufacturers of aesthetic perception that fail to acknowledge their intellectual, political, and moral authority: "rather than sponsoring intelligent, critical awareness, museums thus tend to foster appeasement." The mind industry does not produce anything specific, rather its main business is to perpetuate the existing order of mans dominance over man. To see in this perspective, I will quote from his book, The Consciousness Industry, the mind industry is actually a product of say some last 100 years. It has developed at such a pace, and assumed such varied forms, that it has outgrown our understanding and our control. The current discussion of media also seems to suffer from theoretical limitations as we are failing to understand the phenomenon as a whole. Every new branch of industry is cropping up with ideas/theories, but how many really understand the phenomenonthe industrialization of the human mind. This cannot be understood by examining the machine as such. It is much deeper. He goes on to say, Equally inadequate is the term cultural industry, which has become common usage in Europe after World War II. It reflects, more than the scope of the phenomenon itself, the social status of those who have tried to analyze it: university professors and academic writers, people whom the power elite has relegated to the reservations of what passes as cultural life and who consequently have resigned themselves to bear the unfortunate name of cultural critics. In other words, they are certified harmless; they are suppose to think in terms ofKultur (German civilization and culture (sometimes used derogatorily to suggest elements of racism, authoritarianism, or militarism) and not in terms of power. He adds, the term serves to remind us of a paradox inherent in all media work. Consciousness, however false, can be induced and reproduced by industrial means, but it cannot be industrially produced. It is a social product made up by the people; its origin is the dialog. No industrial process can replace the persons who generate it. In the first section of the essay, Enzensberger comments on how the consciousness industry is capable of bringing about a radical change, with the development of the electronic media, as it infiltrates into all sectors of production. It is capable of determining the standards of the prevailing technologies. There are several forms of media which

have come up in the past few years. He says that when the new forms of media merge/connects with the existing forms, they become capable of forming universal systems. When such universal systems are produces, the contradiction between the productive forces and the productive relationships also augments. Productive force is a central idea in Marxism and historical materialism. It refers to the combination of the means of labor with human labor power. All those forces that are applied by people in the production processes are encompassed by this concept. To sum up, human knowledge can also be a productive force. Per the Marxian Class Theory, class consciousness within the production process precedes the formation of productive relationships. Marx sought to define class as embedded in productive relationships rather than social status.4 Enzensberger says that the socialist media theory needs to work outside on the boundaries of a monopoly capitalism. It is only then the media can be productive. Being attentive to all this is good, but not enough. For the media to be productive, we need to exploit the emancipatory potential of the new media. This potential lies in the fact of opening up the media, encouraging reciprocity of information between the transmitter and the receiver, and encouraging feedback. All these thoughts leads us to the fact that it is important to mobilize the media, which in itself is an important concept. According to Enzensberger, anyone who thinks of the masses only as object of politics cannot mobilize them. It is for the first time in the history that media is making participation possible. To put this possibility into action, one requires the development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium, which is technically plausible. However, due to politics, this is not achieved, and thus the technical distinctions between the receiver and the transmitter always persists. This clearly reflects the social division of the labor the consumers and the producers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of political importance. This structural analogy can be worked out through an organized effort, however, minimum activity on part of the voter/viewer is desired. Typically, any feedback given by the masses is reduced to some indices, as part of some election agenda. All these activities are reducing the power of media into the hands of the bourgeois, which is surely not a place medias true potential resides. Enzensberger quotes from Theory of Radio building on the thought presented above: Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication. Radio would be the most wonderful means of communication imaginable in public life, a huge linked systemthat is to say, it would be such if it were capable not only of transmitting but of receiving of allowing the listener not only to hear but to speak and did not isolate him but brought him into contact. Unrealizable in this social system, reliable in another these proposals, which are after all, only the natural consequences of technical development help towards the propagation and shaping of that other system.5 MEDIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY What does media construct reality mean?From an ontological to an empirical understanding of construction.it has very quickly become textbook wisdom: media construct reality. Butwhat does that mean? Did they always do that? Or are they doing it more andmore? Or even both of those? Which level are we talking about? Does

realityconstruction mean a factual statement within a theory of knowledge? Or aconscious strategy? Is it simply that we (journalists as well as percipients)cannot not construct or can one decide for or against the construction of reality?The discussion about reality construction has become, in the meantime, inflated 2 and not only throughout the entire arts, social and cultural sciences but also in disciplines such as mathematics, biology, physics or architecture. It appears as if it is a central discovery of postmodern science that more or less everything is constructed space and time as well as xenophobia; sex and gender as much as the reality of mass media.One can only understand the fascination of the catchword reality construction when one realises which thoughts are meant to be replaced by it in the first place: reality so-called. By and large it concerns a new version of the discourse in Western philosophy which has been going on for the last two thousand years as to whether the world out there really isthere or is only constructed by us. In the history of philosophy there are many isms which are connected with this discussion: essentialism and nominalism, materialism and idealism, and of course recently, realism and constructivism. In all of these schools though the concern is with the basic question whether an agent or unit X (this can be a person, an observer, a brain, a social system in various forms, the entire culture, the whole society, the media as a whole etc.) that believes that it knows reality has created it or only depicted it.Realism starts from the position that it is more likely that it is reality or it is only reality which has an effect on the agent (and not the reverse); while constructivism asserts that it is more likely or only the agent that, in the act of perceiving reality, creates it.The differing agents that generate realities are bound up with the different currents of constructivism:for brain researcher Gerhard Roth it appears indisputable that the brain is the mother of all reality construction: even the imagination and reflection on (self)consciousness or self is a constructive product of the brain, as neural labelling as it were. (cf. Roth 1996, 44 et. seq.) 3Other thinkers either focus on primary communication, culture or media as the reality generating agent while only advanced constructivism in the variation propounded by Seigfried J. Schmidt attempts to observe all agents equally in a closed circuit.Most variations of modern constructivism, especially those developed within the German speaking scientific discourse, consider themselves to be a counter position to realism (whether in the guise of nave, moderate or even radical constructivism) which is still the dominating intellectual model in scientific work, to the mimetic way of thinking and speaking or, as the case may be, to the paradigm of reality depiction whichconstructivism allegesis either latently or manifestly advocated by the majority of scientists. Accordingly, the constructivist way of thought reads as the antipode of the realistic field of terminology. And the classic questions between realism and constructivism are thus: Is reality a discovery or an invention? Do media reflect reality (exactly or distortedly) or do they construct it in the first place? Is the world a projection or a design? Do we represent something or are we (and always have been) constructs? Do we depict reality or build it up? One does not have to be an expert in constructivist discourse to understand that the majority of constructivist have become involved in these philosophically crucial questions and have reacted to the realist generalisationeverything is depictionwith a constructivist generalisationeverything is construction. The majority of constructivists nowadays (unfortunately) propose that the constructive nature of our reality and world is the condition sine qua non of knowing. In other words: Man cannot not construct, one always has done that, we always come too late and cant decide for or against construction as a precondition and mode of knowing. I would like to call this form of constructivismwhich is to be persistently found in all the above-mentioned variations of constructivist thoughontological constructivism. At first that sounds as if it would be a contradiction in terms because how can constructivism as a theory of the active processes of knowing ever be ontological, that is claim the unalterable existence of a fact? The assertion everything is construction becomes caught in the well-known logical dilemma of the infinite regression: if everything is construction, then this sentence is also etc. etc. but what knowledge of value does the sentence contain in addition? If I take the constructor of reality out of the constructed reality in order to avoid exactly that contradiction ( as Gerhard Roth does), then I land in another paradoxical ontology again in that the brain is the constructor of reality outside of the constructed reality, that is, it sits out there in the real world. But how can we ever know if reality is constructed by the brain? Who has ever seen (and with what) brains in a (non-constructed, real) reality? One might object that an ontological constructivism which regards the constructed nature of the world as an unalterable fact is almost never proposed. A few quotations from the literature will serve as a refutation. Thus Gebhard Rusch, for example, in his critical discussion of my variation of constructivism wrote that one cannot compare realistic procedures and processes with constructivist ones as if within the framework of a constructivist approach there was an

alternative to cognitive-social constructiveness (Rusch 1999, 9). If there is no alternative to cognitive-social constructiveness, then at least more (or less) constructiveness? It is not difficult to realise that every attempt at gradual empiricism is repulsed. Often the fact of constructiveness is not represented as a result but rather as a pre-condition. The journalism researcher, Alexander Grke, who is oriented on systems theory, writes in an article with the subtitle On the Reality of Mass Media with the following as the first sentence: Ttalk about the functional system of mass media is based on the observation that also mass media and journalism too [...] construct reality sui generis. For theoretical considerations of the system this raises the question of how this specific form of creating social order is possible and that means how the mass media system distinguishes itself from its surroundings. (Grke 2001, 55). Here, too, the observation of the constructiveness precedes theory formation; the assumption of the construction of a different reality by each social system becomes the presupposition of the debate on how systems differentiate themselves from their surroundings. Any further examination of this reality sui generic or with the terminology of constructing which is used does not take place. A third example comes from Siegfried J. Schmidt himself. He writes: Reality construction of actors are subject-bound but not subjective in the sense of arbitrary, intentional or relativistic. And that is because in the construction of reality individuals [...]are always too late. Everything which becomes conscious first assumes the unattainable neuronal activity of consciousness; everything which is said presumes an already unconsciously acquired mastery of language; how things will be talked about and with what effect. All of this pre-supposes socially regulated and culturally programmed discourses within the social system. In this respect these processes organise the reality construction of themselves and thus create their own ordering of realit(y)ies. (Schmidt 2000, 47 ff.) Once again constructivism appears as an ontological theory offering no alternatives: constructiveness was always there, whether one wants it or not.6 Why is there this notorious disregard of conscious will as an instrument of reality construction? The answer is right in front of our eyes: German language constructivism was always concerned with removing the term construction from any connotation of planningintentional or strategic production 7 and move it towards an unconscious, unintentional, arbitrary production of reality. In the process it is forgotten that there is no logically compelling reason why constructivism should not observe both 8. Here the unconscious, non-arbitrary construction of reality (in a neuronal sense and well as in the sense of our pre-existing systems of inherited abilities, socialisation and [native] language, that is to say, those constructions which we cannot control actively and consciously or if, then only partially) and there the conscious, arbitrary construction (in the sense of a conscious construction of the world as, for example, in tabloid journalism through the power of the imagination, by using certain linguistic techniques and styles of discussion etc.). To recapitulate more precisely and to apply it to the media complex: the statement media construct reality can be understood as media construct reality per se and always have because it is not possible to do anything else, because the relationship of world and media is, in itself, constructive. This is the position of so-called radical constructivism that, in my critical revision, is really an ontological constructivism. It leads to the old philosophical stalemate between realism and constructivism and to the well-known question as to whether the person who has just had a blow delivered to the head is in real or constructive pain. May the philosophers take one position or another and argue it for the next two thousand years as well! Whoever proposes a radical i.e. ontological constructivism on the level of knowledge theory does not, a priori, deny the possibility that there could be another constructivism but in general it is the philosophical all-encompassing generalisation of constructionism itself which is advocated. The statement media construct reality can, however, also be supplemented by: more and more or less and less. This would be a processual or empirical variation of constructivism that would appear substantially more plausible. The objection of the orthodox, ontological constructivists is that an observation like this is logically incompatible with constructivism and leads back to realism. And in point of fact, the statement that media construct reality more and more, more frequently or more often more in keeping with realism since

construction is more likely to be understood as a conscious strategy. Would the possibility of differentiating between construction (as an ontological pre-condition of knowing) and constructiveness (as an empirical +- trend) offer a way out of the dilemma? Theoretically this would be possible though it is, however, almost impossible to maintain looked at from a pragmatic linguistic standpoint. It appears to me to make more sense not to bind processual or empirical constructivismas I understand itepistemologically either on realism or on constructivism but rather on an alternative to both these currents of epistemology: on nondualistic philosophy, that wants to leave the question of depiction or construction behind it. One might see a trend to this non-dualistic way of thought in the development of Siegfried J. Schmidts constructivism (cf. Schmidt 2002) although Schmidt starting out from non-dualism only to land even more definitively in an (at least remainder of) ontological constructivism. 9 Empirical constructivism is thus concerned with constructiveness as an empirically measurable trend on the basis of a non-dualistic epistemology. But what does that mean? Non-dualism (according to Mitterer 1992 and 2001 as well as its use in Webers media theory 1996) reconstructs realism and constructivism as the results of a particular philosophical technique of argumentation, viz a dualistic way of speaking: only when there is a difference between the observer (subject, instance...) and the observed (world, reality) in the first place can the question as to which of the two parts is more weighty be asked. Is it the agent that creates the world (= constructivism) or is it the world that affects the instance (= realism)? Non-dualistic philosophy in the version of the Austrian philosopher Josef Mitterer means in the first place only the critical analysis of this discourse in philosophy. Dualism is to be made transparent in to arrive, in a second step, at an epistemological theory which does not depend on differentiating observer and observed (in my terminology; according to Mitterers it would be called description and object). Applied to media it means nothing more than not to assume the dualism of media (as a reality generating and/or depicting agent) and reality (as the product and/or precondition for media reporting) without questioning it i.e. to ontologise it. Let us look at the example of the reporting of the terrorism of 11.9. Of course I can assert that the camera pictures per se construct reality and so at this level I can argue an ontological constructivism. At the same time I can also determine that increasing chronological distance to the events meant increasing construction therefore processual or empirical constructivism! What has to be taken into account simply that both levels (here the epistemological-generalising theory; there the practical-empirical) have to be separated from each other in the discourse, without that leading to entrenched dualism once again. In my view empirical constructivism allows one to break talk about constructivity down to the praxis of current media communication. Constructivity 10 is no longer simply a conflictual term or an empty empirical place-keeper but a concrete trend that might be thought of as embedded in other macro-trends of increasing media permeation such as the process of transforming everything into entertainment or fiction, acceleration, commercialisation/economisation etc. Revealed forgeries such as Kujaus Hitler diaries, Michael Borns feature film fakes or Tom Kummers invented interviews under the faction journalism label are, however, only the tip of the iceberg within the framework of a trend towards more and more constructivity. I am thinking here about the increasingly broad interpenetration of journalism and entertainment (most recently militainment is making a name for itself i.e. reality TV in Hollywood guise live from the campaign theatre of operations 11) or about the construction of reality in real life soaps. The good old quote from Walter Benjamin seems more pertinent than ever: ... in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign body of the equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. (Benjamin 1963, 35). As can be seen here with little difficulty, Benjamin is also proposing an empirical constructivism although from the quote itself the epistemological origins from which the observation took place are not clear. The idea that the alleged real reality appearing to us on

the screen is as unfiltered and unvarnished as possible and requires the highest degree of mechanical artificiality in order to appear real, stilland repeatedlyseems important to me. The other way round: less, more amateur or low-tech use of media is one of the factors which increases the impression of the images being constructed. 12 All of these observations, however, are only possible within an empirical understanding of constructivity. Particularly the last-mention reversal (the clearer real reality is suggested the more constructivity there is behind it) offers enormous potential for media criticism and media education. Of course this theory should not be ontologically transformed (in the sense of in reality there is more constructivity behind it). But the self-relativisation in a discourse cannot be overemphasised. In an era of info-tainment, edu-tainment and also milit-ainment, of real life soaps, docudramas, faction journalism and extreme TV, of gender-swapping and avatars it would appear that an empirical constructivism which considers constructivity as a trend towards more fictionalisation is more necessary than ever. I would like to emphasise once again that I am not suggesting a culturally critical pessimism in the sense of a loss of the reality out there or a distancing from one reality and proposing a reality of nasty (post)modern media hybrids. It is much more that the question about the reality, the truth or reality in itself are revealed as philosophical detritus, as systematically misleading and therefore as wrongly framed. At the level of empirical media praxis it concerns the observation of the process and, therefore, the modalities of reality construction which are becoming increasingly more refined, technically advanced and economically motivated. So what is interesting is both the aspect of the reversal of classical reality ascriptions (fictionalisation and dramatisation of journalism vs. the increase in virtual reality depiction in entertainment, cf. Weber 2001) as well as the tendency to hybridisation which questions dualist differentiations (infotainment as the intersection between information and entertainment, faction journalism as a balancing act between fact and fiction, infomercials as the intersection between journalism and advertising and not forgetting PR journalism in the disguise of journalism). In other words: numerous phenomena in current media communication (from reconstructed scenes in reality TV to PR screeds in daily newspapers the latter camouflaged under such captions as reader services) offer examples for analysis in the light of empirical constructivism. The concluding systematology attempts to give a overview of current as well as classical phenomena, genres and forms in degrees. Table 3 Current modalities of reality construction in the (primarily audiovisual) mass media distinguished by reference to reality (proximity to reality decreases from 1 to 8) 1. Reality TV / Realtime TV / Eyewitness News (real deployment of firemen, ambulance, police etc. with accompanying camera, with live broadcasting when possible). 2. Classical information journalism ( world events with only a short time lapse, usually almost no reconstructed scenes as well as almost no direct media intervention in events) [this too is becoming increasingly doubtful!] 3. Narrative Reality Television ( real events are reconstructed as in Aktenzeichen XY, Emergency etc. programmes. 4. Entertainment and tabloid journalism (increase in media staged and constructed stories as well as an increase in conscious media agenda-setting) 5. PR journalism (conscious and intentional image and brand bias of the reporting, increasing lack of labelling) 6. Performative Reality Television ( actors in the context of staged action and thus within the paradigm game. Examples: Big Brother, Taxi Orange, Outback etc. 7. Faction Journalism, Journalistic (feature)film fakes, inter alia, escalation of the constructive principle in journalism. (Michael Born, Tom Kummer etc.) 8. Classical Entertainment formats (Daily soaps, feature films etc.) and Advertising. I want to mention once again the media influence of supposedly real reality can definitely be observed constructively. In this area there are already tendencies to be seen in conscious constructivism such as when police, firemen etc. or journalists orient themselves on the camera teams and intentionally exaggerate events. 14 Finally, a general assumption of constructivism understood as a situational, critical reading methodology that is always aware of the media observer is appropriate at this stage. But constructivism, as enunciated above, should not limit itself to generalising. Apart from that, it is worth noting that the proposed gradual continuum of reality construction unifies journalistic and entertainment

forms of representation. This was unusual in communication sciences up till now. Empirical work that started from the proposed system would be able to prove that with its help a better understanding of current media-generated reality construction would be possible. A CULTURAL STUDIES APPROACH Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural anthropology and ethnic studies in both objective and methodology. Researchers concentrate on how a particular medium or message relates to matters of ideology, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or gender.[1] Cultural studies approaches subjects holistically, combining feminist theory, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Thus, cultural studies seeks to understand the ways in which meaning is generated, disseminated, and produced through various practices, beliefs, institutions, and political, economic, or social structures within a given culture.

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field's inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies was developed in the 1950s and 1960s mainly under the influence first of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as 'capitalist' mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy. In contrast, "cultural studies was grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition" in the United States (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002,p. 60).The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom. The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded. In Canada, cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society, continuing the emphasis in the work of Marshall McLuhan and others. In Australia, there has sometimes been a special emphasis on cultural policy. In South Africa, human rights and Third World issues are among the topics treated. There were a number of exchanges between Birmingham and Italy, resulting in work on Italian leftism, and theories of postmodernism. On the other hand, there is a debate in Latin America about the relevance of cultural studies, with some researchers

calling for more action-oriented research. Cultural Studies is relatively undeveloped in France, where there is a stronger tradition of semiotics, as in the writings of Roland Barthes. Also in Germany it is undeveloped, probably due to the continued influence of theFrankfurt School, which has developed a body of writing on such topics as mass culture, modern art and music. Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production (the economic base) essentially control a culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view is best exemplified by the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and art historian Griselda Pollockcontributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva was an influential voice in the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism. Ultimately, this perspective criticizes the traditional view assuming a passive consumer, particularly by underlining the different ways peopleread, receive, and interpret cultural texts. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively reject, or challenge the meaning of a product. These different approaches have shifted the focus away from the production of items. Instead, they argue that consumption plays an equally important role, since the way consumers consume a product gives meaning to an item. Some closely link the act of consuming with cultural identity. Stuart Hall and John Fiske have become influential in these developments. In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not only includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a cultural studies researcher not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups)[4] and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach iscomparative cultural studies, based on the discipline of comparative literature and cultural studies.

Audience Positioning

A theory that tries to explain the relationship between media content and audiences. In some ways this falls between the two positions above. The argument is that media texts are structured in ways that position audiences to adopt a particular perspective or point of view. This can include holdingcertain value systems and is obviously concerned with Mode of Address. Critical Autonomy The ability of an individual to discover their own meaning in a media text.Critical Autonomy has become one of the prime orthodoxies of media education. With their love of all things media, high school students have a lot to offer in a discussion about the latest TV craze or packaged celebrity.Wilson calls it giving students "critical autonomy." It is important to teach students the skills they need to be autonomous when looking at the world, so that as citizens they can bring a critical eye to everything that's presented to them.In this context, critical does not mean negative. Her work in media education emphasizes the importance of active involvement with the media, connecting it to democratic rights, active citizenship, and technological literacy. "I see my work in Media Studies and Canadian and World Issues as a kind of gateway to understanding a number of issues central to our lives as global citizens today." Classroom dialogue leads the students to think about the stories they would like to tell themselves, and how media and technology can be used to give youth a voice and convey the messages that are important to them. Through their own news articles and video productions, some of which have won awards and have been used by local media, students learn about how the media operate, how they construct meaning, how they can be used, and how to evaluate the information they present. Popular culture Popular culture (or "pop culture") refers to the cultural meaning systems and cultural practices employed by the majority of classes in a society. The movies with the biggest weekend gross box office total, the top songs on the Billboard charts, the most widely read books and the highest ranking television shows in the Nielsen ratings are important elements of U.S. popular culture. Popular culture is often discussed in contrast to high culture. Subculture In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture(whether distinct or hidden) which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong Personality as brand name The inherent upside of attaching a celebrity to a brand is that the brand literally has a face, name and personality that immediately projects an image of a living, breathing, credible person as opposed to a faceless corporate entity. The downside is that individuals are not as stable or as easily controllable as corporate entities. As fame comes and goes, so goes the brand. But when the star is ascending, the idea is to capitalize on the glamour of celebrity by selling a piece of the dream. Jennifer Lopez sells music, movies, clothes and perfume bearing her name. Cline Dion sells music, Las Vegas shows and perfume. The brands are aspirational and literally sell the fairy-tale like qualities of the celebrity and his/her life. What is a celebrity but a projected image? To use that projected image to sell products and brands that are consistent with whom they want to project is a very smart thing, says Rita Tateel, who has worked with celebrities for over twenty years as president of the Celebrity Source in Beverly Hills. Smart indeed and revenue is the proof. Legend has it that Tommy Hilfigers clothing brand enjoyed a US$ 100 million sales climb over a one year period after rapper Snoop Dogg appeared clothed in a Hilfiger logo rugby shirt on television program Saturday Night Live." The dramatic sales coup and successful partnership with music celebrities was largely attributed to Tommy Hilfigers brother, Andy Hilfiger. In 2001, Andy Hilfiger went on to

work with celebrities who wanted to create fashion companies based on their own image. First recruit? None other than Jennifer Lopez. For those who havent heard, Jennifer Lopez, also known as J. Lo, has earned unprecedented success as a music and acting phenom, including a debut album that went five times platinum and a commanding salary of over $12 million a film. She is easily one of the most talked, photographed and written about celebrities for fashion trends in the US. J. Los first perfume Glow by J. Lo, released in 2002, was an instant hit among 15 to 21 year old females the same group who buy her albums. While no exact figures are public, in early January 2003, industry observers estimated that her fragrance sales totaled $44 million in the scents first four months. As of March 2004, Britney Spears and cosmetics maker Elizabeth Arden Inc. are hoping to repeat similar success with a fragrance from Spears that will, like J. Lo, be linked to the pop princess name. The planned fragrance marks Britney Spears debut in the fragrance/cosmetics category. Of course the inherent downside to a celebrity-name brand is that when the name is no longer the publics darling or encounters personal problems and/or scandals, the brand has a much tougher time convincing the public that the "name's" current problems do not reflect on the brand's name itself. Martha Stewarts empire knows this problem all too well. On March 5, American guru of all things household Martha Stewart was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and two counts of making false statements in connection with the sale of her shares of ImClone Systems in 2001. She has been the target of much negative publicity and jokes since the allegations first appeared in 2002. Now she faces jail time, heavy fines, or both. Not only are consumer sales down, advertisers abandoned Marthas flagship magazine, some television affiliates have dropped her television show, which is based on the magazine, and the future relationship between Martha Stewart products and Kmart is highly uncertain due to royalty disputes and her conviction. Last fall Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, already struggling with huge revenue losses, launched a new food magazine called Everyday Food. It features no traces of the Martha Stewart name or her image. The strategy illustrates Omnimedia's efforts to lessen its dependence on Stewart's name and face to power the company's magazines, books and TV shows. But survival of the brand is highly questionable. If your brand isnt trusted youve got [a] problem. No amount of niceness will change the fact that you dont trust someone, says a spokesperson at CMM, a celebrity booking and crisis management agency based in the UK. Time and again products and companies have been re-branded when there is a lack of trust [or some other issue involved]; you forget the original problem. With the Martha Stewart brand, thats not possible. I feel very strongly that its not just dishonesty [thats a problem], its lack of information and making the appearance that youre hiding something. I think thats the worst thing you can do if youre in the public eye: youre accused of something and dont immediately respond. That was one of the worst things with Martha Stewart, being advised to keep quiet and not say anything, adds Celebrity Sources Tateel. According to press reports, Omnimedia recognized from the start of its brand that there were risks in being linked to one personality. In its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, one of its "risk factors" listed for the company as it went public read: "Our business would be adversely affected if [...] Martha Stewart's public image or

reputation were to be tarnished." The company also took out a $ 67 million insurance policy on her life (Washington Post, March 7, 2004). But is it impossible to save a brand if the personality is sinking? In some cases a tarnished and even violent past hasnt impacted the brand at all it may even add to the mystique. A slew of hip hop artists from 50 Cent to Eve have or are turning their urban images into lifestyle brands. P. Diddy (a.k.a., Sean Combs), saw his five-year-old Sean John fashion label bring in $400 million in retail sales in 2003. A women's collection and fragrance are also planned. At Federated, one of the biggest department store chains in the US, Sean John occupies 153,000 square feet of floor space -- making it the store's third-largest player in menswear, behind Polo and Tommy Hilfiger. Not bad considering Combs was arrested in 1999 for assaulting a record executive, and tried in 2001 on gun possession and bribery charges related to a 1999 shooting at a Manhattan nightclub (where he'd been with thengirlfriend J. Lo). He was acquitted of the gun and bribery charges after a highly publicized trial. Since then, he and his team have worked hard to tame his bad boy image by tying his name respectably to the business community and engaging in philanthropic works, including running the New York City Marathon to raise money for the city's public schools. As long as the brand fits the demographic of what your target market is. If youre a bad girl or a bad boy, as long as the brand or service is trying to attract that core demographic, youre in business, commented CMMs spokesperson. Theres the old saying that there is no bad publicity as long as they spell your name right, and to a certain degree I think that is true, adds Tateel. Such as the Janet Jackson situation where Jacksons breast display during the American Superbowl halftime caused a burst of publicity while there was such negative press about it, the reality is it did exactly what it set out to do which was it sold records. It got extra publicity for her. There was evidence after the Super Bowl incident that hits on the website and on album sites and the number of albums sold increased. (Jacksons new CD, Damita Jo, wasnt yet released at press time. However, on February 5, it was reported by Rankforsales.com that Jackson and the event became the most searched-for event in Lycos history. According to Google, users searched for Janet Jackson almost 10 times more the day after the Super Bowl than the previous day.) The price of fame may be high for celebrities turned brands, but they still have what both Wall Street and the everyday Joe want: attention, power and a star sizzle. How long the money keeps rolling in before the star falls is anyones guess. HEGEMONY: A concept developed by gramsci in the 1930s and taken up in cultural studies, where it refers principally to the ability in certain historical periods of the dominant classes to exercise social and cultural leadership, and by these means rather than by direct coercion of subordinate classes to maintain their power over the economic, political and cultural direction of the nation. The crucial aspect of the notion of hegemony is not that it operates by forcing people against their conscious will or better judgment to concede power to the already-powerful, but that it describes a situation whereby our consent is actively sought for those ways of making sense of the world which happen to fit in with the interests of the hegemonic alliance of classes, or power. Hence our active participation in understanding ourselves, our social relations and the world at large results in our complicity in our own subordination.Once youve grasped that hegemony describes the winning of consent to unequal class relations, you will need to take the concept further: to understand that it is being

used in cultural analysis. This may include attention to those cultural forms, like propaganda or advertising for instance, whose avowed intention is to promote a certain party or product. But such deliberate manipulations of images and meanings might in fact be taken as evidence that successful hegemony has not been achieved, since there is clearly some felt need to explain the doings of the Powerful in terms not readily available to the people at whom the propaganda is aimed. In cultural studies, therefore, the concept of hegemony is more often to tbe found in those studies which seek to show how everyday meanings, representations and activities are organized and made sense of in such a way as to render the class interest of the dominant bloc into an apparently natural, inevitable, eternal and hence unarguable general interest, with a claim on everybody.Thus studies which concentrate on the hegemonic aspect of culture will focus on those forms and institutions which are usually taken to be impartial or neutral: representative of everybody without apparent reference to class, race or gender. Such institutions are the state, the law, the educational system, the media and family. These institutions are prolific producers of sense, knowledges and meanings they are cultural agencies whose importance lies just as much in their role as organizers and producers of individual and social consciousness as in their more obvious stated functions. Although they are relatively autonomous from one another, people by different personnel with different professional skills and ideologies, nevertheless these cultural agencies collectively form t site on which hegemony can be established and exercised. They can, in short, be captured or colonized by a power bloc which consists of not only the dominant economic class but also its allies and subaltern classes, from professionals and managers to intellectuals of various kinds and subordinate class fractions who perceive their interests as congruent to or identical with those of the dominant group itself.It follows that hegemony operates in the realm of consciousness and representations; its success is most likely when the totality of social, cultural and individual experience is capable of being made sense of in terms that are defined, established and put into circulation by the power bloc. In short, hegemony naturalizes what is historically a class ideology, and renders it into the form of common sense. The upshot is that power can be exercised not as force but as authority and cultural aspect of life are de-politicized.Those strategies for making sense of ones self and the world that are most easily available and officially encouraged appear not as strategies but as natural properties of human nature. Alternative strategies based on oppositional politic or counter- hegemonic consciousness not only appear as unofficial in this context, but also are likely to be represented as literally non-sense; impossible to imagine, incapable of being represented.However the continuing conflicts of interest between classes, production cannot help but continuously reporude, ensure that hegemony can never be total. There are always emergent forms of consciousness and representation which may be mobilized in opposition to the hegemonic order. This mean that a lot of work, called ideological labour, goes into the struggle between hegemic and counterhegemonic forms. And whats at stake in the long term in this struggle can be political and economic power itself. Rhetoric: The practice of using language to persuade or influence others and the language that results from this practice. The formal study of oratory, exposition, persuasion.Rhetoric was a formal branch of learning in dedieval Europe: onw of the seven liberal arts or sciences, the others being frammar, logic(dialectics), then arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. It fell into serious disrepute and did not survive the reformation.Rhetorical figures have survived have survived, however along with certain rhetorical terms (metaphor, for example) which have achieved the status of ordinary language.There is a noticeable revival of interest in rhetoric There are two good reasons for this. First rhetoric as a branch of learning requires us to attend to the sign system itself (whether verbal or visual) and to concentrate on the devices and strategies that operate in texts themselves it offers a well established and elaborate set of terms and classifications we can use to see how sense is made, not by reference to imponderables like authorial intentions or truth to life but

by reference to actual discourses.Second, if rhetoric didnt already exists it would no doubt have to be invented, since so many of the various forms of cultural production were surrounded by are themselves highly rhetorical. Publicity, advertising, newspapers, television, academic books, government statements, and so on, all exploit rhetorical figures to tempt us to see things their way. If we have available a means to unpick these strategies we can begin to take a more critical and less intimidated stance towards them.No doubt all the visual elements which appear in the media intend to persuade us in many ways. Stereo typing The social classification of particular groups and people as often highly simplified and generalized signs, which implicitly or explicitly represent a set of values, judgments and assumptions concerning their behaviour, Characteristic or history initially introduced from the language of printing into that of the social sciences by Lippmann, the concept has been developed particularly in social psychology, occupying a central place in the study of cognitive process, attitudes and prejudice.Stereotyping in much of this work has been defined as a particular extension of the fundamental cognitive process of categorization, whereby we impose structure and make sense of events, objects and experience. This process in itself requires the phenomena into general, labeled categories. In so doing attention is focused on certain similar identifying characteristics or distinctive features, as opposed to many other differences. Stereotypes, however, not only identify general categories of people: national Populations ( the Irish) races(the latin race) classes( the working cals) genders(men or women) occupations(accountants) and deviant groups(drug-takers) etc. they are distinctive in th way that they carry undifferentiated judgments about their referents. They may vary widely in terms of their emotions appeal and intensity, they generally represent underlying power relations, tensions or conflicts( the stupid Irish, the excitable Latins, the cloth cap image, the dumb blonde, the boring accountant, the evil junkie and so on). In short, they operate to define and identify groups of people as generally alike in certain ways as committed to particular values, motivated by similar goals, having a common personality, make-up and so on. In this way stereo types encourage and intuitive belief in their own underlying assumptions, and play a central role in organizing common sense discourse.The degree to which they are believed in, tacitly accepted or rejected and countered, has promoted a great deal of research in social psychology. Recent work in cultural studies has turned to their social and political circulation and significance in the mass media, notably in the context of media representations of race, women, political and industrial relations, and forms of deviance. Such studies have, for example, pointed to the ways in which the conventions and codes of news production encourage particular forms of stereotyping as a logical outcome of their orientation within a particular institutional context and set of professional news values. The search for extraordinariness( cited as the primary or cardinal news value)and subsequent tendencies towards exaggeration and dramatization are capable not only of generating stereotypes, but also of giving or denying legitimacy to those commonly in circulation. bourgeois heroes A lot of media analysis involves dealing with heroic gures men, women, animals, robots who have different functions in lms, television dramas, comic books, commercials and other dramatic formats. For some important characters in dramas and other story forms, heroes and heroines including villains are symptoms of their age and society. For others heroes "shape" their age and help transform societies. In addition, heroes offer models of identity to imitate. At times these models are "deviant," so some heroes and heroines disrupt whatever equilibrium society has obtained.For Marxists, the function of bourgeois heroes and heroines is to maintain the status quo by "peddling" capitalist ideology in disguise and by helping keep consumer lust at a high pitch. One of the ideas bourgeois heroes sell is individualism the self-made man, the

American dream, the me generation etc. but always connected to alienation (though few see the connection). In Studies in a Dying Culture, Christopher Caudwell discusses T. E.Lawrence:If any culture produced heroes, it should surely be bourgeois culture. For the hero is an outstanding individual and bourgeoisdom is the creed of individualism.... Indeed, bourgeois history, for bourgeois schools, is simply the struggles of heroes with their antagonists anddifculties. (Caudwell, 1971: 21) So Caudwell feels that this view of heroism is naive, because it does not recognize that heroes are connected, intimately, to their societies and social and economic phenomena. He continues:What is it that constitutes heroism? Personality? No; men with the attest and simplest personalities have become heroes. Is it courage? A man can do no more than risk and perhaps lose his life, and millions did that in the Great War. Is it success the utilization of events to fulll a purpose, something brilliant and dazzling in the execution, akind of luring and forcing Fortune to obey one, as with that type of all heroes, Julius Caesar?Heroism, as Caudwell sees it, is independent of personal motive and based on "social signicance" of acts. The heroes we celebrate are what Caudwell calls "charlatans" who "have power over men but not over matter." Charlatans are alienated and alienating curiosities. "Society," writes Marx, "is not merely an aggregate of individuals; it is the sum of the relations in which these individuals stand to one another" (1964: 96). Thus a hero, for the Marxist, is the man or woman who understands this and ghts for a new social order, in which the bourgeois values of individualism,consumerism, and class domination are smashed. Agenda setting - the committee of, say, the local union branch will set the agenda for the next branch meeting. The agenda shows the order in which items are to be discussed and anything not on the agenda is not discussed. In a similar way, the media are said to perform an agenda-setting rle,both determining what is a matter for public debate and determining the order of importance of such matters. Further, the media are said to set the framework for debate on current issues.construction of reality - in media studies,this idea emphasizes that there is no single 'reality', rather a range of definitions of 'reality'. Reality as presented by the mass media is therefore not a picture or reflection of 'reality', but, rather, a constructed interpretation of reality. In the view of 'radical' critics of the media in particular, the mass media play a crucial rle in 'constructing reality' for the rest of us. In the view of many representatives of post-structuralism and post-modernism, just about every aspect of reality seems to be considered a social construction. copycat effect - also referred to as contagion effect or imitation effect - the supposed power of the media to create an 'epidemic' of behaviour based on that witnesses in the media. The idea is by no means new; the eighteenth century novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther by the great German writer Goethe, was accused of having led to a wave of suicides amongst the young. More recently, the media have been blamed for the 1981 riots which hit British cities; later in the eighties, for a spate of prison rioting; in the early nineties, police in Wales asked the media not to report details of suicidesinvolving carbon monoxide poisoning from exhaust fumes because they believed that suicides were imitating the suicides in press reports; in 1999, doctors researching the effect of medical soaps reported that after a 1996 episode of Casualty portraying with a paracetamol overdose actual cases rose by 20% and doubled amongst people who had seen the episode (source British Medical Journal, reported in The Guardian, April 9 1999. It seems to be generally agreed amongst media researchers that it is very difficult to find any clear evidence for the copycat effect, but the doctors in the BMA study were firmly convinced. One of them , Christopher Bulstrode, Professor of Orthopaedics at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, commented: "We were expecting a fall in overdoses because it was a horrid scene. What we got was a 20% increase, and we were gobsmacked. One of the reasons we have been so slow in publishing was we didn't believe it. We have gone back over and over and over again. It really happened." cultural imperialism or media imperialism is the thesis that 'Western' (especially American) cultural values are being forced on non-Western societies, to which they are spread most especially by the mass media. Herbert Schiller argues forcefully that the US-inspired spread of 'free trade' and 'freespeech' since the Second World War has, in view of the imbalance of economic power, worked to the advantage of the US. He quotes a number of official sources which make it clear that the establishment of US economic, military and cultural hegemony was deliberate US policy, which would depend crucially on US dominance of global communications. Schiller argues that the

(mostly US-based) transnational media and communications corporations which now span the globe have reached the point where they pose a distinct threat to the sovereignty of the weaker nation-states. Clearly the US are dominant in the export of media products, as well as in the control of news agencies, and, even where the US originals are not purchased, the genres of US TV are closely copied. However, recent reception studies suggest that we cannot simply deduce the acceptance of American values fromthe prevalence of US media products. desensitization - some theorists argue that the constant media diet of violence desensitizes audiences (makes them less sensitive) to real human suffering. It is hard to find proof for the theory, though the practice of systematic desensitization in behaviour modification may lend incidental support to the theory.Belson's 1978 study of over 1500 teenage boys did not find any support at all for the desesitization hypothesis. The effect of the 'distant violence' presented in the news was virtually nill and the effect of directly experienced violence was even slightly negative, which, if anything, suggests increased sensitization to real-world violence. gatekeeping - the selection or rejection of events in the 'real' world. For example, an editor decides on what's going to be covered, an organizer briefs the camera crews, the reporter decides what 'angle' the story will be covered from and so on. These people are all gatekeepers. The concept of gatekeeping tends to be related to rather mechanistic models of communication processes. Though it may serve to remind us of the operation of a selection process in the representation of news, it is essentially too simplistic to be a great deal of use.Uses and Gratifications Approaches to the media emphasize the active use made of media by audience members to seek gratification of a variety of needs. The standard adage is that, where effects research asks 'what do the media do to audiences?', the uses and gratifications approach asks 'what do audiences do with the media?'. Audiences are said to use the media to gratify needs. The needs most commonly identified are: surveillance (i.e. monitoring what's going on in the world), personal relationships, personal identity and diversion (i.e. entertainment and escapism). glossary

Critical Thinking A set of skills that allows one to rationally assess their experiences for truthfullness and value. TMS promotes critical thinking as it relates to the consumption of media. Cultural Studies Cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed, and that the study of culture is thus intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics. (Definition by Douglas Kellner) Culture The matter produced by society and people; what a society cultivates, i.e. history, scholarship, philosophy, and media. Empowerment To give skills and tools to a person or group of people in the interest of increasing self-determination. TMS' most important goal is to empower the student-communities we work with. Encoding/Decoding Messages are created, or 'encoded', by media producers with a preferred meaning in mind, and then consumed, or 'decoded', by a receiver or audience. There are always multiple ways of decoding media messages: accepting the preferred meaning; understanding the preferred meaning and adapting it to fit a certain world view; directly opposing the preferrred meaning. (Definition by Stuart Hall) Mass Media

The TV broadcast networks, major newspapers, widely distributed Films, commercial radio; those organizations whose intent it is to distribute popular media messages to as large an audience as possible in order to draw advertising dollars. Media Marshall McLuhan defined "media" as any human technology. We limit the scope of the term to mean technologies of communication. For example: books; photographs; film; radio and digital audio; television and video; and personal computers. Media Determinism The idea that media at some level determine how we think about and see our surroundings. When a new medium is introduced it will have effects on society that are separate from its creators' intentions; you cannot control these effects once the medium is 'turned on'. According to this view, the content communicated through a medium is not as important the underlying nature of the medium itself. (Definition by Lewis Mumford) Media Humanism The theory that we as a society have the power to make decisions on how we use the institutions of media and culture, and should dictate our needs to the producers of media from the bottom up. Media Literacy A 21st century approach to education. It provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages in a variety of forms from print to video to the Internet. Media literacy builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy. (Definition by the Center for Media Literacy) Society The body of institutions and relationships within which a relatively large group of people live; a system of common life. Spiral Curriculum The basic method of media studies. A concept developed by educator Jerome Bruner. The fundamental principle of this method is that the key concepts of any discipline can be taught in some form to students at any level. Thus, concepts initially introduced in simple form at the elementary level are, in successive years, explored, developed, and extended in increasingly sophisticated ways as the student matures and develops. (Definition by the Ontario Ministry of Education) agenda setting theory: that argues that media may not tell us what to think but that media tell us what to think about attitude change theory: that explains how peoples attitudes are formed, shaped, and changed and how those attitudes influence behaviortheory

critical cultural theory: idea that media operate primarily to justify and support the status quo at the expense of ordinary people cultivation analysis: idea that television cultivates or constructs a reality of the world that, although possibly inaccurate, becomes the accepted reality simply because we as a culture believe it to be the reality cultural theory: the idea that meaning and therefore effects are negotiated by media and audiences as they interact in the culture

dependency theory: idea that medias power is a function of audience membership dependency on the media and their content disinhibitory effects:in social learning theory, seeing a model rewarded for prohibited or threatening behavior increases the likelihood that the observer will perform that behavior

dissonance theory:argues that people, when confronted by new information, experience a kind of mental discomfort, a dissonance; as a result, they consciously and subconsciously work to limit or reduce that discomfort through the selective processes grand theory:a theory designed to describe and explain all aspects of a given phenomenon hypodermic needle theory: idea that media are a dangerous drug that can directly enter a persons system identification in social learning theory, a special form of imitation where observers do not exactly copy what they have seen but make a more generalized but related response imitation in social learning theory, the direct replication of an observed behavior

inhibitory effects: in social learning theory, seeing a model punished for a behavior reduces the likelihood that the observer will perform that behavior limited effects theory: medias' influence is limited by peoples individual differences, social categories, and personal relationships magic bullet theory: the mass society theory idea that media are a powerful killing force that directly penetrates a persons' system mainstreaming in cultivation analysis, televisions ability to move people toward a common understanding of how things are mass explanations and predictions of social phenomena relating mass communication to various aspects of our personal and cultural lives or social systems communication theories: mass society theory: the idea that media are corrupting influences; they undermine the social order, and average people are defenseless against their influence modeling in social learning theory, learning through imitation and identification neo-Marxist theory: the theory that people are oppressed by those who control the culture, the superstructure, as opposed to the base Frankfurt School media theory, centered in neo-Marxism, that valued serious art, viewing its consumption as a means to elevate all people toward a better life; typical media fare was seen as pacifying ordinary people while repressing them news production research: the study of how economic and other influences on the way news is produced distort and bias news coverage toward those in power observational learning: in social learning theory, observers can acquire (learn) new behaviors simply by seeing those behaviors performed opinion followers: people who receive opinion leadership interpretations of media content; from two-step flow theory opinion leaders: people who initially consume media content, interpret it in light of their own values and beliefs, and then pass it on to opinion followers; from two-step flow theory

reinforcement theory: Joseph Klapper's idea that if media have any impact at all it is in the direction of reinforcement selective attention: see selective exposure selective exposure: the idea that people expose themselves or attend to those messages that are consistent with their preexisting attitudes and beliefs selective perception: idea that people interpret messages in a manner consistent with their preexisting attitudes and beliefs selective processes: people expose themselves to, remember best and longest, and reinterpret messages that are consistent with their preexisting attitudes and beliefs selective retention: assumes that people remember best and longest those messages that are consistent with their existing attitudes and beliefs signs: in social construction of reality, things that have subjective meaning in social construction of reality, things that have subjective meaning social cognitive: the idea that people learn by observation theory

social theory: for explaining how cultures construct and maintain their realities using signs and symbols; argues that people learn to behave in their social world through interaction construction of reality with it symbolic interaction: the idea that people give meaning to symbols and then those symbols control peoples' behavior in their presence symbols: in social construction of reality, things that have objective meaning two-step flow theory: the idea that medias influence on peoples behavior is limited by opinion leaders, people who initially consume media content, interpret it in light of their own values and beliefs, and then pass it on to opinion followers who have less frequent contact with media typification schemes:in social construction of reality, collections of meanings people have assigned to some phenomenon or situation uses and gratifications approach:the idea that media don't do things to people; people do things with media