A

Active Audience: the idea that the audience is fully aware of media messages and makes informed decisions about how to interact with media and process messages

Advertising: A form of persuasive communication designed to encourage an audience to take some kind of action – most commonly associated with consumerism.

Agency: The study of agency is to investigate where the influential action is in media studies. Agency refers to the active participant in media and that can be human, technological, software or something else.

Agenda setting: The theoretical arguments that consider that media can and does have a strong effect on what people think about. By highlighting and listing certain events repeatedly, they create a sense of urgency about those issues even though this is not always an accurate reflection of reality.

Analog technology: Technologies that rely on or record a continuous signal (for example, a continuous sound wave).  When a copy is made of an analog recording, information is lost resulting in an imperfect duplicate.

Audience: This is one of the terms employed to describe an aggregate of receivers of media texts. These can also be described in demographic terms such as location TV channel choice or age etc. Audience commodity refers to the attentive capacities of audiences as paying consumers of media texts. See also receivers and users.

Audience commodity: The idea raised by Dallas Smythe that the primary economic driver of media industries is access to audiences sold to advertisers rather than the content itself.

Audience fragmentation: The concern that the proliferation of media technologies and channels – particularly the Internet and other “new media” technologies – help audiences consume and process information in ways which results in them getting information that is both tailored to their specific interests but that also reinforces their existing beliefs while filtering out other perspectives.

B

Base/Superstructure: Marxist idea that the material experience and production of commodities serve as the fundamental determinant of society (the base), while other things like cultural content, communication and media, emerge and respond to changes in the base as the superstructure

Behaviourism: The psychological movement that regards human behavior as something that can be manipulated.

Bias: To show favor or prejudice against one thing, person, group, idea, etc. that is considered unfair.  This might be intentional and conscious or not.

Biotechnology: When not merely augmenting bodies through technologies, but instead modifying and mediating them at the design stage – as the word suggests an amalgam of biology and technology.

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC): The broadcasting system in Great Britain which is often uses to contrast U.S. broadcast regulations.  In Great Britain, broadcast has traditionally been managed by the government and funded through license fees.

Broadcast media: Media technologies, such as television and radio, which send out signals through the air utilizing portions of the electromagnentic spectrum (called the broadcast spectrum).  In the U.S., broadcast media are regulated differently than cable and internet media.

C

Censorship: Suppression or removal of speech or messages deemed objectionable.

Class: An often hierarchical category of distinction within a society in which people are understood in terms of shared social or economic status.  Examples include the working class, blue-collar, and upper class among others.

Codes: Codes are systems of meanings.

Commodity: A good or service which can be bought or sold.  In Marxist theory, a commodity is the form products and services take when production is organized around exchange.

Commons: Types of assets held in collective or communal ownership rather than as private commodities. Assets in this context does not necessarily mean tangible commodities but can include assets like internet/cyber spaces where media can be commonly shared.

Communication: At its most simplistic, communication is the exchange of information and meaning. Communication, through its repetition, enables the dissemination and development of culture.

Conglomeration: When one institution joins with other institutions, typically across industries.  For example, a company that produces video games might join with a company that creates films, resulting in a conglomerate.

Consumer: In the context of media it refers to receivers and audiences as economic participants.

Consumer cultures: Refers to a theory according to which human society is strongly subjected to the learned behaviors and schemas of consumerism.

Consumption: The flip side of production is consumption – see also consumer cultures.

Content Analysis: Quantitative method that attempts to measure the occurrence of an idea or representation in media.

Convergence: Convergence is a feature of recent media environments where texts cross multiple media platforms and audiences travel between them with ease or when technologies take on multiple functions as when cellphones are used not just to talk and text but to listen to music, watch videos and play games.

Copyright: A form of intellectual property that grants an exclusive legal right to publish, reproduce, sell, or distribute a creative work.  The exclusive right is usually for a limited time and differs from one country to another.

Creative Commons: A movement devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to legally build upon and share.

Critical theory: An approach which builds on Marxist theory and the work of the Frankfurt school to focus which emphasizes both socio-historical context, an emancipatory agenda, and reflexivity. Critical thought seeks to be practical, explanatory, normative, and self-reflexive.

Critical model: A critical model of communication studies views any theoretical perspectives as open to challenge.

Cultivation: Theoretical perspective advanced by Gerbner that exposure to media influences how we perceive reality.  Over time or with heavy exposure, it may result in an illusory perception of reality.

Culture: Cultures are defined by the learned behaviors and schemas that distinguish one group of people from another.

Cultural imperialism: The idea that a dominant culture might result in changes to another culture’s social institutions and values.  This might occur by pressure from the dominant culture, attraction by the culture being changed, or even by force or bribes.  Cultural imperialism is often seen as a key part in the process of globalization.

Cultural industries: Adaptation of Frankfurt School’s culture industry that imagines multiple industries rather than a single, monolithic industry involved in the manufacture of culture that compete for the time, attention, and resources of audiences and consumers.  Media industries make up many but not all of the cultural industries.

Cultural studies: Research perspective which draws on the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of thought that seeks to understand the interplay of texts and practices in everyday life.  It emerges in response to criticisms of the audience as passive and of popular culture as inferior and problematic.

Cultural superstructure: Within Marxist theory there is a base as well as a superstructure. The base comprises the functional economic and material activities. The ideological and cultural superstructure exists because the base activities are fulfilled, nevertheless, the superstructure may influence the base.

Culture industry: Structural organization proposed by the Frankfurt School that argued that there were profound ideological consequences on the increased reliance on mass produced cultural products.

Cybernetics: The mechanics and flow of information.

D

Decoding: In semiotics decoding is reading the text by unpacking the signs it is made of.

Demographics: The measurement of a population with regard to particular traits, for example, age, location, wealth, media habits and so on.

Denotation/denotics: In semiotics, refers to that aspect of the sign that has a direct relationship with something real (the referent).

Deregulation: State action to remove laws and other controls, typically on industry with the idea that market forces will provide sufficient control.  Deregulation is a key component of neo-liberal practices.

Determinism (technological): When particular technologies have specific impacts which directly result of their form –and so is thought to directly determine society. See also economic determination.

Digital: technologies That rely on or record a binary sampling of a signal  When a copy is made of a digital recording, no information is lost and a perfect duplicate results.

Digital democracy: The use of online tools to engage citizens in civic and government action.

Digital divide: The gulf between those who have access and/or knowledge about computers, the Internet, and related tools and those who do not.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): U.S. law passed in 1998 that emerged in response to concerns over digital piracy which prohibits individuals from circumventing access-control technologies (such as encryption) or selling devices or technologies that help circumvent such technologies.

Discourse: A form of communication, including visual, which conforms to the rules, as well as reflects, a particular social practice or ideological position.

Distributed network: Technology that spreads programming, software, data, and communication across a series of interconnected computers.  The Internet is an example of this.

Distribution: In Economics and Political Economy, the way in which goods and services are delivered or shared among individuals and institutions.  For example, television channels and movie theaters are alternate ways of distributing films, while the money earned from a film is distributed unevenly to those involved in its production.

Dramaturgy: A sociological perspective on identity that employs a theatrical metaphor to explore issues of identity formation, reformation and performance, and as such, assumes a place, a moment, and an audience to whom the identity is being presented.

E

Economic determination: Is the theory of history that looks for economic conditions to explain society and culture. In Marxist terms that means that owners, capitalist, workers, proletariats and so on form the economic foundation over which the social and political superstructure is constructed.

Economics: Economics is the social science that studies how individuals, groups, organizations and societies manage resources.

Encoding/decoding model: Any piece of information can be encoded in multiple ways, and every message has more than one meaning – meaning-making is not in nature but is cultural.

Encryption: The process of converting information or communication into a coded, secure form to prevent unauthorized access.

Ethnography: Research method that seeks to describe and understand the customs of people and cultures.   This might be accomplished through interviews or participant observation among other techniques.

F

Fan/Fandom: A fan (from ‘fanatic’) is someone who is attached to a particular media text. Fandom, then, can be the collective social world that fans ‘inhabit’.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC): U.S. government agency founded in 1934 which is responsible for regulating radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable communication in the United States.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC): U.S. government agency founded in 1914 which is responsible for enforcing antitrust law and promoting consumer protection.

Focus Groups: Research method that seeks to understand responses to media via  group dynamic similar to some forms of media consumption.

Fourth Estate: Most commonly refers to the news media. More recently this has developed to include new media under titles such as ‘Networked Fourth Estate’, which differs from the traditional ‘press’ to include the internet and involves a diverse set of participants, potentially everyone, in a many-to-many scenario.

Framing: The production and dissemination of messages and texts highlight, emphasize or obscure some aspects of the message over others. Episodic framing is where an issue is approached in terms of a specific event or episode. Thematic framing approaches an issue as part of a continuing topic or theme, rooted within wide social trends or functions.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS): Movement focused on developing computer software that is free and which allows the programming itself to be accessed and altered by users in order to develop and improve it

Freedom of speech: The idea that one should be able to express an opinions or ideas without censorship or restraint.  In the U.S., free speech is part of the guarantee of the First Amendment and its limits have been reinterpreted over the history of the U.S.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): U.S. law passed in 1967 that requires full or partial disclosure of federal government information upon request.  There are nine possible exemptions that allow FOIA requests to be denied.

G

Gatekeepers: People who determine which media messages, particularly but not just news stories, are made available for public consumption.

Gender: Gender refers to socio-cultural constructs that lead us to think of men and women in a particular way. It is not the biological sex of the person and so is a cultural construct.

Globalization: The organization of economic, social, and cultural activities on a global scale.  It involves interdependence and often these activities are in real time, and are heavily reliant on communication technologies for the capability and reach.

H

Hegemony: Idea introduced by Gramsci suggesting the domination of one class over another through ideological and political means.  This tends to involve a combination of coercion by the dominant class and consent by the dominated class(es).

Horizontal integration: Economic process where an institution acquires others in the same sector.  For example, a radio station buying a second station or a video game production company merging with a second production company.

Hypodermic needle model (sometimes known as the “magic bullet” model): The theoretical model where the mass audience is regarded as passive recipients of the message that was injected (or shot) by the media. This theoretical perspective holds that by this means audiences can be manipulated to react in a predictable, unthinking and conditioned manner.

I

Identity: Refers to how meaning is internalized by the receiver or audience, or more broadly an identity is constructed out of the characteristics that a receiver regards as important to their self image/understanding.

Ideology: The system of attitudes, beliefs, opinions, practices and values that serve as an interpretive frame of reference.  Ideologies may be shared by a culture or sub-culture or contested.

Immersion: The degree of one’s attention is absorbed by and focused on a media text.

Impressions management: Impressions management refers to the overt and the unconscious strategies we, as social individuals, deploy to try and influence how others perceive us. See also Identity.

Index/indexical: In semiotics it is the sign that stands in for the real object.

Industry: An economic grouping of all the institutions and economic activities involved in a particular area of production.

Infotainment: A useful word when information and entertainment becomes the same thing. A news programs can be regarded as infotainment if you consider that the news is presented as entertainment.

Institutions: Social, cultural, and political structures, called institutions, are created as a way to govern and maintain society – they are structures that hold together social life. Each institution reflects and supports the values of the society in which it is located.

Internet: The global computer network that provides a range of information and communication facilities, which is made up of a distributed network of computers using standardized protocols.

Intertext/intertextual: The multiplatform context where different media texts and technologies interact with each other.

Internet Protocol (IP) address: Unique numerical label that identifies each computer on the Internet.

J

K

L

Labor theory of value: The idea that suggests the value of goods and services is directly related to the amount of labor needed to produce it.

Libel: Defamation of a person’s reputation involving some form of publication.

Liberal Democracy: A form of government in which representative democracy serves the liberal principles protecting the rights of minorities and the individual. Neo-liberal variations tend to emphasise the individual.

Looking-glass-self: The looking-glass-model considers the self as constantly reworking itself through a three-step process of imagining how we appear to others, how others judge that appearance, and then developing the self in light of that (hypothetical) judgement.  The point of difference (with impressions management and why this is a psychological rather than a sociological concept), is that this process is entirely in the mind of the individual.

M

Macro-economic: Economic study of large-scale economic phenomenon such as national markets or industrial behaviors.

Magic-bullet theory: See hypodermic needle theory

Maker culture: Culture/sub-culture focused on the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with and fixing existing devices.

Marxist/marxism: Marxism is concerned with a materialist understanding of societal development. Fundamental to it are the economic activities that human society employs to provide for its needs. This base is essential to, and influences, the social, legal, moral and ideological systems that form the superstructure. The superstructure in turn can influence the economic base.

Market: The social space – physical or otherwise – where a good or service can be bought or sold.

Mass audience: In early media theory the idea that mass produced culture was consumed by an audience who was large, undifferentiated, likely uniformed, and largely passive.  As media theory has developed, audiences are seen as considerably more nuanced and active.

Mass communication: Information transmitted to large segments of a population or society.  This communication is typically one-to-many, though digital and “new media” technologies have also made many-to-many possible.  Mass communication tends rely on mediated communication in some form.

Mass media: A means of communication designed to reach a wide audience utilizing a communication technology.

Medium/media: A complex term that can be used to mean a variety of things.  Most commonly it refers to the technology that serves as the communication mechanism.  In this case, the technologies collapse time and/or space constraints upon communication, and serve to highlight particular features of a message while minimizing others.  For example, television is a medium of communication that emphasizes both visual elements and particular forms of engagement and immersion while minimizing others.   Media might also be used to refer to the economic institutions that create mediated communication, as when we speak about the media as gatekeeprs, etc.

Media effects: The theoretical perspective that sees a Causal relationship between media and audience, where the media in some way influences audiences.

Media literacy: The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in a variety of forms.

Media logic theory: Media theory that suggests that the processes, routines, formats, etc. used in producing media serve as a means of framing our understanding of the world.

Memes: A communication or cultural element, practice, or behavior that is passed/shared from one individual to another and which, like a biological gene, both self-replicates and mutates.

Micro-economic: Economic study of small-scale phenomenon such as a particular company, product, or labor market.

Minimal effects model: A variety of media effects where the influence is not powerful enough to entirely overturn audience reaction. The flipside of this is the strong effects model where the media influence is strong enough to alter audience reactions.

Model: A tool for describing how systems function.

Myths: The stories employed by societies to reinforce their self belief.

N

Narrative: The presentation of story information. See also Story and Plot.

Neoliberal: Ideological belief that emphasizes free-market capitalism, privatization, and deregulation.

New/digital media: The media context, usually digital and online but not essentially, where one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many forms of discourse prevail. Newspapers, radio and TV are regarded as examples of old media.

Neuroplasticity: Neuroplasticity explores how the brain changes throughout life. It challenges the idea that the brain is a physiologically static organ.

O

Obscenity: In the U.S., obscenity is a category of speech concerned with prohibiting lewd, filthy, or discussing words or pictures.  Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment and is evaluated by a three-pronged test.

P

Participant observation: Research method drawing on Anthropology in which researchers take part in the group, culture, or sub-culture they are seeking to understand.

Participatory culture: The way in which media audiences and users ae able to annotate, use, comment on, remix, and influence culture.

Passive audience: The opposite extreme of an active audience in which the audience is seen as unthinkingly (or passively) accepting the messages they are receiving.

Patent: A form of intellectual property that grants an exclusive legal right to make, use, or sell an invention or technology.  The exclusive right is usually for a limited time and differs from one country to another.

Peer-to-peer (P2P): Use of a distributed network to communicate from one person or computer to another without the use of a centralized server.

Phenomenology: The science (description and classification0 of phenomena

Plot: The directly presented information in a narrative structure. see also Narrative and Story.

Political ecology: Explores the connection between nature, culture and media, the ways in which human relations and politics affect and impact upon the environment, which in turn conditions our understandings of nature. A political ecology of media seeks to explore the multiplicity of ways in which media condition our preconceptions of what nature is.

Political economy: This perspective considers that politics and economics are not separate entities, but are best understood as being entangled. In media studies it is an approach where the focus is on the ways in which media is produced, distributed and consumed, as well as on the nature of power relations in a society, rather than on analyzing the interpretations of the signs and symbols found within texts.

Popular culture/Pop culture: Thought of as the culture of the masses or mass audience.  However, this does not mean pop culture is common across all cultures, but rather it reflects its audiences and users.  Different schools of thought have approached popular culture differently.  For example, members of the Frankfurt School saw popular culture as trivial and commercial and something to be concerned with, while members of the Birmingham School recognized that how we interact popular culture matters greatly.

Pragmatics: Pragmatics is the relationship of the sign to the person reading or understanding that sign.

Print media: Media forms produced mechanically using printing, photocopying, etc. which results in “ink and paper” communication.  This includes books, newspapers, and magazines and represents some of the earliest forms of both mediated communication and media literacies.

Private goods: Goods or services purchased, owned, and consumed by a single entity.

Privatization: The transfer control of a business, industry, or service from public/government control to private/business control.  Examples include a cup of coffee, shoes, or a camera.

Production: Within media studies production is the creation of meaning.

Propaganda: Media texts whose purpose is not to inform rational critical societal debate, but to normalize a particular ideology.

Propaganda model: Media theory advanced Chomsky and Herman that suggests that mass media serve as a mechanism to amuse, entertain, and inform even as they inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will help them integrate into and help them function as members of society and its prevailing ideology.

Prosumers: The combination of producer and consumer and describes the notion that today’s audiences are interactive participants within a digital convergence culture.

Protocols: Shared language and rules governing the format and communication of data over the Internet or other network.  Examples include File Transfer Protocols (FTP) and Hypertext Transmission Protocol (HTTP).

Public: This may refer to all the members of society as a whole or to a group of people having common interests or characteristics.  It can also suggest a place, good, or service that is accessible, visible, or usable to members of society or to a group or people having common interests or characteristics.

Public forum: A space, physical or otherwise, that allows open expression and sharing of ideas.  This may include the way mass media allow discussion of ideas, but it might also fall under specific First Amendment guidelines.

Public goods: Goods and services that are shared, paid for, and consumed or used by a large group.  Examples include roads, electricity, and the broadcast spectrum.

Public relations: Media industry focused on the deliberate managing of the release, spread, and framing of information between an institution or individual and a public.

Public sphere: The public sphere is the area of social life where public opinion can emerge.

Q

R

Receivers: Related to audience and users, but where ‘receivers’ describes passive readers of media texts.

Reception studies: The study of receivers of media texts.

Referent: In semiotics the referent is the real world object that the sign references and the index stands in for.

Regulation: The forces which constrain the production, distribution, and consumption of media texts.

Representation: Media always constructs images as representations of the real

Rhetorics: Communication as discourse – who is communicating to what purpose and in what context.

Rhetorical analysis: Research method focused on examining the styles, words, images, etc. used to communicate and influence in communication.

S

Schema: Outline of the commonalities that form a culture.

Sectors: All the parts of a particular industry concerned with a single area of production.  All the companies which own movie theaters are involved in one section – theaters – of the larger film industry.

Semantics: The mechanics of semiotics – concerned with this relationship between a signified and signifier – the sign and what it stands in for.

Semiotics: Is the study of signs and their meaning in society.

Signifier/signified: The signifier is the thing, item, or code that we ‘read’ – so, a drawing, a word, a photo. The signified is the idea or meaning being expressed by that signifier.

Signs: A sign is something which can stand for something else – in other words, a sign is anything that can convey meaning. Iconic signs are signs where meaning is based on similarity of appearance.  Indexical signs have a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the sign and the meaning of the sign. Symbolic signs are signs that have an arbitrary or conventional link.

Slander: Defamation of a person’s reputation involving spoken statements.

Social constructivism: The impacts of technologies are socially and culturally constructed by the ways in which they are employed by humans.

Social network: Dedicated website or application allowing users to communicate with each other by posting information, comments, etc. which helps facilitate a range of social interactions and relationships.

Society: Societies at their simplest can be defined as groups of interacting individuals. Not the same as culture – however, see also culture.

Sociocultural: The model that views media and communication as a replication and reinforcement of social and cultural order.

Socio-psychological: An approach to media and communication that takes into account human behavior.

Stereotypes: Cognitive and representational practice that relies on value-laden pre-conceived oversimplifications and generalizations.  Such generalizations are often resistant to change, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Story: All the narrative information, both directly presented as well as inferred, in order. See also narrative and Plot.

Structuralism: The idea that social institutions and discourse have hidden patterns, rules, and laws which underlie a range of interactions and which can be understood through research.

Symbolic interactionism: The concern with the construction of identity within a social context, how an identity is presented and re-presented within a given social or communicative situation.

Synergy: Economic activity that seeks to maximize the profitability of a good or service by utilizing all holdings and markets a company or conglomerate have access to.

Syntactics: This refers to structural relations such as language and grammar. However, syntactics in semiotics refers to the formal relationship between signs that becomes sign systems.

T

Technology: One of the features which distinguish media from other types of communication is the technology that is necessary. These range from pen and paper, through printing presses, film, video, radio, television to digital technologies associated with the Internet.

Telecommunications Act of 1996 (TCA): The first significant overhaul of telecommunications law in the U.S. since 1934 that emphasized deregulation, privatization, and cross-ownership in response to the rise of new digital and Internet technologies.

Terms of service: Legal agreement between the provider of a service and the person who wishes to use the service that stipulate how the service can and cannot be used.

Text: Any system of signs that can be read such as photos, films, books, dress, language and human mannerisms.

Trademark: Form of intellectual property that protects a symbol, word, or words used to represent and distinguish a good or service in the market place. In the U.S., trademarks are protected until the owner stops defending it.

Trade secret: Form of intellectual property in which a person or institution maintains a secret about a technology or technique they use in producing their goods or services.  Unlike trademarks, patents, and copyright, trade secrets are not government granted protections, and so, are only viable until the secret becomes public.

Two-step flow of information: A communication model where there is an intermediary between the sender of a message and the audience.

U

User: An active agent who uses available tools to interact with information, can be sender and receiver, audience and producer, or engaged in interpersonal communication that is also public performance. See also audience and receiver.

Uses and gratifications model: A theoretical model that emphasizes audience uses of media texts.  This paradigm views audiences as active seekers who may choose texts to suits their expected reactions.

V

Vertical integration: Economic process where an institution acquires others in the different sectors.  For example, a newspaper publisher purchasing paper production or newsstands

Viral marketing: Method of marketing and content distribution where consumers and users are encouraged to share information with others.

W

X

Y

Z

Some definitions in this glossary were remixed from Understanding Media and Culture by University of Minnesota (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License) and Media Studies 101 by Media Text Hack Team (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License).