AUDIENCE – The recipients of a media text, or the people who are intended to read or watch or play or listen to it. A great deal of media studies work is concerned with the effects a text may have on an audience.
CENSORSHIP – Control over the content of a media text. Different media forms have different forms of censorship – sometimes from a government, but mainly from a regulatory agency, eg the British Board of Film Classification
CGI – Computer Generated Imagery. Refers to the (usually) 3-D effects that enhance all kinds of still and moving images, from text effects, to digital snow or fire, to the generation of entire landscapes
CONVENTIONS – The widely recognised way of doing something – this has to do with content, style and form
eg the conventions of music video
- they are the same length as the song (somewhere around 4 minutes, say)
- they present the band, who look as though they are singing
- they have lots of fast edits
CONVERGENCE – The way in which technologies and institutions come together in order to create something new. Cinema is the result of the convergence of photography, moving pictures (the kinetoscope, zoetrope etc), and sound. The iPad represents the convergence of books, TV, maps, the internet and the mobile phone.
DEMOGRAPHIC – Factual characteristics of a population sample, e.g. age, gender, race, nationality, income, disability, education.
FPS – a genre of video game usually based around war and conflict in which action is viewed as if through teh characters own eyes.
GENRE – A way of categorising a media text according to its form, style and content. This categorisation is useful for producers (who can utilise a genre’s conventions) and audiences (who can utilise their expectations of the genre) alike
GLOBALISATION – Process by which different cultures worldwide have come to share the same media texts e.g. movies and pop music.
INSTITUTION – A formal organization (with its own set of rules and behaviours) that creates and distributes media texts
NARRATIVE – The way in which a story, or sequence of events, is put together within a text. All media texts have some sort of narrative, from a single photographic image to a sports report to a feature film.
OWNERSHIP – An important issue in media studies – and a constantly changing one. Who produces and distributes the media texts we read?
POV – A first-person camera shot that shows a scene from an individual character’s viewpoint. Used to help the audience understand what is happening in a character’s head e.g. a predator stalking his/her prey
PROTAGONIST – The character who drives the narrative forward, through the choices they make and the actions they take
REPRESENTATION – The way in which the media “re-presents” the world around us in the form of signs and codes for audiences to read.
STEREOTYPES – Stereotypes are negative (usually) representations of people that rely on preconceived ideas about the group that person is perceived as belonging to. It is assumed that an individual shares personal characteristics with other members of that group eg blondes are all stupid, accountants are all boring.
Although using stereotypes saves a lot of explanation within a text, it can be a very lazy method of characterisation. Stereotypes may be considered dangerous, as they encourage audiences to think large groups of people are all the same, and often have the same negative characteristics.
From: Media knowall © Karina Wilson 2000-2013 Accessed 20/09/15
Glossary of key media terms – an AQA resource from here: http://filestore.aqa.org.uk/
Hitchcock word shape by: Image Chef
Visual Arts 