Media Test Notes

So I've been trying to revise for this media test that is in a couple of hours and I think the most useful way of doing this is writing it all down...and I guess typing applies to that theory.

Regulating media:
The Chicago School modal of regulation: 1 Law 2. Social Norms 3. Markets 4. Architecture These modalities differ in power. The law regulates piracy on the Internet.

Narrative

Vladimar Propp- he looked at folk culture and said that there are basic narrative units. And 8 basic narrative roles. The Hero and Villain etc. These narratives have a overcoming obstacle.

Todorov Structuralism
This is basically the idea that all texts follow the Equilibrium- Disequilibrium- Equilibrium sequence. This apples to news stories and soap operas.

Barthes believes the codes are more complicated and that some texts use Hermeneutic Enigma codes.
where audiences have to guess the ending.  Television and films are changing and are refusing to complete enigma resolution.

Culture and Taste

Pierre Bourdieu is a Marxist who challenged the idea that we are born with innate taste. Our taste is socially contructed.

Cultural capital is the hierarchies of values there is legitimate taste, middle brow taste and popular.

Stuart Hall argues that cultural artefact's can shift in high and low culture. For example Manet once shocked audiences and now it is seen as high class art. Values are not fixed.
The more people know about something the less cultural capital it has.

Art has become industrialised and has lost its authenticity.

Semiology

Saussure: Language is not just a way of classifying objects in an external world.
Words only have meaning as part of systems, languages.

A sign made up of three elements

• The signifier- sound/image
• The signified- the concept
• The referent- the real item

Signs are arbitrary there is no necessary relationship between a sign and the thing it signifies.

C.S. Pierce there are three types of signs

• Symbolic- red = stop
• Iconic eg the image of the queen on a coin.
• Indexical eg, Smoke indicates fire.

A paradigm is a list of possible signs connected together to make syntagms.
Coca cola's paradigms- age, nationality, young people not old.

Barthes cultural codes operates at a level of connotated. Signs are becoming naturalised.

Myths are naturalised codes taken for granted.

Genre
Audience Expectations

• Signifying system
• Producers share these ideas and know the audiences expectations
• Conventions

Audiences

Hall's Encoding and decoding theory, there are three ways audiences may react to a text

• Dominant reading, the audience accept the producers hegemony
• Negotiated reading, partly agrees with the preferred reading but reflects it on their own cultural capital.
• Oppositional

Mccomb and Shaw- News shapes public opinion, framing and priming.

Political Economy

You cannot understand media texts without looking into the wider social relationships. Who is in control?

Banksy's resistance, subverting local rules and the state power. The wall in Israel is highly political.
Doc martins- mods resistance and struggle against what they were made for.


Lets hope these notes were useful, I'm pretty sure there's lots of other stuff I haven't included. We only need 40% to pass, good luck everyone :)