1. an approach that suggests media reflect or “mirror” existing social values or relations

Where you take certain elements from one show and insert them into another.

Bricolage

(more with tangible objects) previously unconnected product that’s appropriated and given new meaning. Example: flannels were originally part of a southern/country style and culture, but when Grunge culture became prevalent, flannels were worn and repurposed as grunge style.

Clothing companies can co-opt flannels

Smaller communities. Individuals take into account the needs and interests of the group as much as, if not more than, their own self interest. Example: Amish communities.

Larger society. Describes associations in which, for the individual, the larger association never takes precedence over the individual's self interest. Emphasizes secondary relationships rather than familial or community ties, and there is generally less individual loyalty to society. Example: United States.

An approach to the study of media content which focuses on the generation of meaning through arrangements of signs.

• The signifier resembles the signified, for example thru appearnace or sound.
• EX: Your I.D is an Iconic sign of you. The Mcdonald’s golden arches. A stick figure with a triangle “dress” for the women’s restroom.  

• the signifier points to the signified.

• EX: Smoke = Fire. Dark clouds = Rain. Alarm = Time to wake up.

  
  

• Symbolic signs are arbitrary.

• EX: There is no meaning or reason behind the use of the letters K I T T Y, we have just all agreed that those letters spell kitty.

• the sound, image, or representation of the signified.

• A semiological term meaning the means by which a concept, or signified , is represented.

• the concept or idea. 
• A semiological term meaning the concept represented by a signifier .

• An approach to semiological analysis centred on developing an understanding of the relationship between different elements of a text in the construction of meaning.
• Dealing with the sequence of events or surface structure of the text. 
• syntagmatic analysis emphasizes the ways in which meaning can be influenced by the context into which individual components are placed. 
• EX: the book gives the example of a News organization telling a story and flashing a black and white photo of a person accused of a violent crime. They then flash a photo of a family in color. The use of captions and commentary are also examined.

• An approach to semiological analysis concerned with comparing each element of a text with paradigm of alternatives that might have been used in its place.  
• Concerned with the topics or ideas of the text. 
• Example: Fashion and beauty magazines analyzing its paradigmatic axis
• Text: “Paradigmatic axis  concerns the relationship of each individual signifier in a text with a set of alternative signifiers  that could have been used instead.  Paradigmatic analysis,  then, involves breaking up the text into its components and assessing the significance of each element by considering  how the meaning would have been different if alternative signifies had been used instead.”  ( pg 66)

• Having multiple meanings. 
• A semiological term referring to the capacity of a sign to have multiple meanings.

• Having multiple values.  
• "the fact that audiences routinely evaluate texts differently, assigning different values to different portions of a text and to the text itself."

• you might have a story in which it was perfectly clear what a given character did, but where different people could take this same character doing this same thing as acting heroically or villainously.

How we interpret media/ reading strategies.

A mix of both the dominant, literal reading and the oppositional reading. Negotiated is the most used reading strategy.

dominant reading strategy

Inventive. Takes work. What innuendo (if any) are being made?

• media audiences do not just receive information passively but are actively involved, often unconsciously, in making sense of the message within their personal and social contexts.
• emphasize that engagement with media consists of a two- way interaction between media and the existing social and cultural contexts of consumers, but if the latter are themselves inseparable from a myriad of previous media experiences then might the situation not be better described as an interaction of new media representations with the outcome of previous ones?
• Think about the media they are consuming and discuss it. Might engage in textual poaching or slashing.
• form of self-empowerment.

Power from the top down.

• The objectifying look of the heterosexual male voyeur to whom many representations of femininity are argued to be directed. 
• Associated with Laura Mulvey’s work on gender and cinema and widely adopted in other contexts.

• an emotionally distressing dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, and one message negates the other.
  
  
• This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other.

• Hegemonic- leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others.
•            Examples: America influencing other countries by hollywood entertainment industry and other various  aspects of American culture.
•            Text: “A neo- Marxist thinker influenced by the work of Antonio Gramsci , Hall also argues that these encoded meanings ' have the institutional political/ideological order imprinted in them' and are liable to reinforce this prevailing order by reinforcing dominant, or, hegemonic ideas ...”

•  intense feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order.
• The process of arousing social concern over an issue - usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media.