SACE Stage 2 Media Studies flashcards
SACE Stage 2 Media Studies · Build recall with a focused review session.
31 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Media languages
- The systems of codes - technical, written, and symbolic - through which media texts create meaning, including camera, editing, sound, colour, language, and layout choices.
- Technical codes
- Production techniques such as camera angle, framing, movement, lighting, editing, and sound design that shape how an audience reads a media text.
- Symbolic codes
- Meaning-bearing elements beneath the surface, such as colour, costume, gesture, expression, setting, and props, which connote attitudes, status, and emotion.
- Mise-en-scène
- Everything placed within the frame: setting, lighting, costume, makeup, props, and actor positioning. It constructs atmosphere and character meaning before editing begins.
- Diegetic sound
- Sound whose source exists within the narrative world, such as dialogue, footsteps, or a radio playing in the scene. Characters could plausibly hear it.
- Non-diegetic sound
- Sound added outside the narrative world, such as a soundtrack score or voice-over narration, which guides audience emotion without characters being able to hear it.
- Representation
- The constructed depiction of people, groups, places, or ideas in media. It is selective, reflecting choices about what is shown, omitted, and emphasised.
- Stereotype
- A simplified, generalised representation of a group that reduces individuals to assumed traits, often reinforcing power imbalances by naturalising those assumptions.
- Countertype
- A representation deliberately constructed to challenge a dominant stereotype by showing complexity, agency, or characteristics the stereotype denies.
- Ideology
- The set of values, beliefs, and assumptions a text presents as natural or normal, often invisibly, through its representations and narrative resolutions.
- Uses and gratifications
- An audience theory holding that people actively select media to meet needs: information, personal identity, social integration, and entertainment or escapism.
- Reception theory
- Stuart Hall's model proposing audiences decode texts as preferred, negotiated, or oppositional readings, depending on their social position and prior experience.
- Preferred reading
- The meaning the producer intended and encoded, which an audience accepts when it shares the text's assumptions, values, and cultural frameworks.
- Oppositional reading
- An interpretation in which an audience rejects the text's intended meaning because its own values or experience conflict with the encoded ideology.
- Cultivation theory
- Gerbner's claim that repeated exposure to media, especially television, gradually shapes audiences' perceptions of social reality toward the world the media portray.
- Media institution
- An organisation that produces, funds, regulates, or distributes media, whose ownership, economics, and legal obligations shape the content it releases.
- Public service broadcasting
- Broadcasting funded publicly rather than by advertising, obligated to serve diverse audiences with information, education, and entertainment independent of commercial pressure.
- Genre conventions
- Recurring elements audiences expect from a genre - stock characters, settings, iconography, narrative patterns, and sound - which enable recognition and prediction.
- Hybrid genre
- A text combining conventions from two or more genres, producing novelty and appealing to overlapping audiences while complicating simple genre classification.
- Todorov's narrative theory
- A five-stage model: equilibrium, disruption, recognition of disruption, attempt to repair, and new equilibrium. It explains how narratives restore or transform order.
- Binary opposition
- Levi-Strauss's concept that meaning is generated through paired opposites, such as good/evil or nature/technology, whose conflict structures the text's values.
- Production folio
- A documented record of a media production's investigation, planning, production, and evaluation, evidencing decisions about audience, purpose, and technical execution.
- Target audience
- The specific group a text is designed for, defined by demographics, psychographics, or media use, and identifiable through the text's codes and distribution platform.
- Analytical evidence
- A named, specific textual example paired with explanation of its effect. This pairing, not description, is what earns analytical marks in assessment.
- Exam answer structure
- Claim, named example, technique analysis, then effect on audience, institution, or representation. This sequence keeps extended responses analytical rather than descriptive.
- Comparative response
- An exam answer organised by concept, treating both texts in parallel within each paragraph, rather than describing one text fully then the other.
- Stimulus text
- Unseen material supplied in an exam. Responses must cite its specific features; pre-prepared generic answers that ignore the stimulus lose marks.
- Precise terminology
- Using media terms correctly and consistently - for example, mise-en-scène for staging, not editing - so analysis demonstrates accurate conceptual understanding.
- Mark-weighted timing
- Allocating exam minutes in proportion to marks available, with most planning time reserved for extended responses worth the greatest share of the total.
- Supported judgement
- An evaluative statement justified by stated criteria, such as effectiveness for the intended audience or coherence of codes, rather than an unsupported personal opinion.
- Textual reference
- Naming a media text, its platform or institution, and its audience or release context, so an example functions as valid evidence in an exam response.