Key Concepts

Media Languages&Conventions: The way in which meanings are created/ways in which media texts communicated.
It is the study of signs and the communication through symbols.
There are three areas of study:

• The sign- The picture, object, sound.
• The system- Into which these signs organised.
• The culture- Within these signs operate.
  

Institution: The organisation's that create media texts. The institution responsible for a text is the study which made the text. The shape of a media institution and the texts it creates is usually formed by a trade- off between four critical influences. You need to be able to identify the institution that has made the text (for unseen exercises you will be told the name) and to know enough about that institution to be able to assess how this has affected the way the text is shaped. For example, a broadcast instution may be required to provide a certain number of factual programmes for a particular social group. Media Institutions can be divided Commercial, Public service and Independent.

Genre: A way of categorising texts according to shared conventions.
Audience: The people who buy/consume a media text. Audience theory is the starting point for many Media Studies tasks, whether you are constructing a taxt or analysing one, you will need to consider the destination ofthat text, for example its target audience of that audience(or any other) will respond. Genre is a class or category of artistic endeavour having a particular form, content, technique, or the like: the genre of epic poetry: the genre of symphonic music. Genre can help an audience identify the products that they are seeing.

Idealogy: The beliefs, ideas and value systems behind or reflected between a media texts. The body doctrine, myth, belief, etc, that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class or large group. Idealogy is the ideas behind a media text, the secret (or sometimes not so secret) agenda of its producers. It is important to be able to identify the different ideological discourses that may be prseent in even an apparently simple photography. Idealogy is present in all media text.

Representation: The ways in which the world is re-presented to us by the media. The term representation means the way in which the media portray or represent people,events,ideas and issues. This gives them power to influence the way their audiences think and behave. Representation is linked to dominate beliefs. A representation can be an image- or a series of images of any person, pace or thing. Representation can be classed class, age, gender and ethnicity.

Narrative: Story/Plot. Narrative Story: Events as they happen in chronological order. Narrative Plot: Events as they are presented to theaudience by the author. A narrative is the relation between a series of events. Story- The story is the strict chronological order in which the events occur. Plot- Plot is the order in which the character find out about these events. The Enigma code is when we encounter plot elemnets that raise questions on the part of the reader of a text. Tzvetan Todorov suggested that stories begin with an equlibrum orstatus quo where any potentially opposing forces are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of events. Problems are solved so that so that order can be restored to the world of fiction.