MEDIA LANGUAGE

THEORY LANGUAGE

Representation – Refers to the construction in nay medium (Especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and distract concepts.

Hegemony – Cultural – Hegemonic norm – Leading Ideas – “Given” – Things you don't think about – Norms & Values.

Hyperbole – Exaggerating something – “Hyper”

Ideology – Study of ideas – An ideology is a belief system that is constructed and presented by a media text. Examples – Capitalism, Marriage, Male superiority.

Hegemonic Values- The police are always right, men are better drivers than women.

Stereotypes – Stereo types in media text are “types "Rather than complex people – stereotypes are often defined by their role, such as “bad cop” or “nice old lady”

SELECTED & CONSTRUCTED

The Idea of the Gaze – The gaze can be characterised by who is doing the looking.

Extra digetic Gaze – Where the person is depicted in the text & looks at the spectator such as an aside or an acknowledgement of the “fourth wall”.

The cameras gaze – Which is the gaze of the camera, and is often equated to the directors gaze.

Intra – digetic gaze – Bart & Lisa watching itchy & Scratchy.

Intertextual references – A reference from another text e.g. Simpsons taking the Mick of “friends”

Semiotics – study of science & symbols

Zeitgeist – “spirit of the age”

SEMIOTICS

Semiotics – The study of signs. Three Types:

Iconic – these signifiers always resemble what the signify – ‘A window of the World’

Indexical – these signifiers act as evidence: smoke means fire; sweat proof of effort.

Symbolic – these are visual signs that arbitrarily linked to references.

SEMIOTIC TERMS

Binary opposites/oppositions: sets of opposite values said to reveal the structure of media texts. These define through their opposites and choose a lesser & greater position e.g. Man/woman, Weak/strong.

Conventions: ‘un-written rules’ in the production of main-stream texts. Dominant codings in any media.

Polysemic: literally ‘many sings’ an image which there are several possible meanings depending on ways it constituent signs are read.

Metonymy: literally ‘substitute naming’ a figure of speech in which an associated detail or notion is used to invoke an idea or represent an object.

Synecdoche: the idea that ‘part’ of a person, an object, a machine, ect, can be used to represent the ‘whole’ and work ad an emotive or suggestive short hand for the viewer, who invests the ‘part’ with symbolic associations.