Scholarship Media Studies flashcards

33 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Encoding/decoding model

Stuart Hall's model in which producers encode a preferred meaning and audiences decode it as dominant, negotiated, or oppositional, making meaning a site of struggle rather than transmission.

Preferred reading

The meaning a media text's producers intend and structure the text to favor. It is not guaranteed, because audiences may decode the same text differently.

Agenda-setting

The claim that media coverage determines which issues audiences consider important. It concerns the transfer of issue salience, not the direction of opinion.

Framing

Selecting some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient in a text, thereby promoting a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, or treatment recommendation.

Cultivation theory

Gerbner's theory that cumulative television exposure, especially to violence, shapes heavy viewers' perceptions of social reality toward a mean-world view over time.

Uses and gratifications

An audience-centered approach holding that people actively choose media to satisfy needs such as information, personal identity, social integration, and entertainment, competing with other sources.

Signifier and signified

Saussure's two components of the sign: the signifier is the sound or mark, and the signified is the concept it evokes. Their link is conventional, not natural.

Denotation and connotation

Barthes's two levels of meaning: denotation is the literal, descriptive level, and connotation is the cultural, associative level through which ideology can be naturalized.

Public service broadcasting

A broadcasting model mandated to serve universal reach, diversity, and independence from commercial and political pressure, typically funded by license fees or public money.

HHI concentration index

The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index sums the squared percentage market shares of all firms. Higher values indicate greater concentration; regulators use it in merger review.

Gatekeeping

The process by which editors and journalists select which events become news, guided by news values such as proximity, prominence, novelty, conflict, and negativity.

Audience commodity

Smythe's argument that advertiser-funded media sell audiences' attention to advertisers, so programming exists to assemble and deliver a measurable audience.

Algorithmic curation

Ranking of content by platform algorithms optimized for engagement metrics. It shapes visibility independent of editorial judgment and can amplify emotional or polarizing material.

Fair use four factors

A US balancing test for unlicensed use: purpose and character, nature of the work, amount used, and effect on the market. There is no fixed percentage safe harbor.

Media literacy

The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce media, including judging sources, recognizing persuasion, and understanding how platforms and algorithms shape content.

Intercoder reliability

A statistic such as Cohen's kappa or Krippendorff's alpha quantifying agreement among coders. Content analysis should report it before drawing conclusions from coded data.

Content analysis

A systematic method that codes a defined sample of media texts using explicit categories and trained coders, enabling quantitative description of manifest content.

Random assignment

Allocating participants to conditions by chance so groups are comparable on average. It supports causal inference about the manipulated variable within the study.

External validity

The degree to which findings generalize beyond the study's sample, setting, and stimuli. Lab experiments often trade external validity for strong internal control.

Probability sampling

Sampling in which every population member has a known nonzero chance of selection, such as random or stratified sampling. It is required for statistical generalization.

Triangulation

Combining multiple methods, data sources, or researchers to check a finding. Convergence raises confidence; divergence can reveal measurement artifacts or context effects.

Spurious correlation

An observed association between two variables produced by a third common cause rather than a direct relationship, so the correlation disappears once the confounder is controlled.

Informed consent

Participants receive understandable information about purpose, procedures, risks, and data use, and agree voluntarily. It is a baseline requirement for human-subjects media research.

Limited-effects model

Lazarsfeld's finding that media effects are modest because interpersonal networks and selective exposure mediate messages. It replaced the earlier hypodermic-needle view.

Priming

The process by which media coverage makes certain considerations more accessible in memory, so those considerations weigh more heavily in subsequent judgments.

Culture industry thesis

The Frankfurt School argument that mass-produced culture standardizes taste, erodes critical thought, and integrates audiences into the commercial order rather than challenging it.

Moral panic

Cohen's concept describing media amplification of a perceived threat through exaggeration, prediction, and symbolization, producing folk devils and justifying social control.

Glocalization

The adaptation of globally circulating media formats to local cultures and markets, producing hybrid content rather than one-directional cultural homogenization.

Media imperialism

The thesis that dominant nations' media industries shape other societies' cultures and information environments through unequal flows of content, capital, and technology.

Stereotype

A simplified, widely shared generalization applied to a group. In media analysis it is examined for naturalization and its relation to social power.

Two-step flow

Lazarsfeld and Katz's model in which media messages reach opinion leaders, who interpret and relay them through interpersonal networks, moderating direct media influence.

Platform affordances

The actions and interactions a platform's design enables or constrains, such as sharing, anonymity, or algorithmic ranking, which shape how users communicate.

Lateral reading

A verification strategy in which readers leave a source and check what other independent sources say about it, rather than evaluating the page's internal claims alone.