Media terminology

Audience- A group of people reading any media text.

Connotations- The cultural meanings brought to a sign or symbol by the person/people interpreting it.

Convergence- Hardware and software coming together across media, and companies coming together across similar boundaries.

Copyright- The ownership of ideas as creative or intellectual property.

Deconstruction- A theoretical investigation of a cultural product or cultural actions, to see how they are put together and how they can only be understood in relation to other texts or cultural products or meanings.

Diagetic- Describes what is present in the world of a text, as opposed to extra material added for the audience, which is extra-diagetic or non-diagetic.

Digital- Information broken down into noughts and ones.

Download- The practise of selecting and receiving digital information from an online source on a computer, as opposed to sending it by upload.

Globalisation- The shift in media distribution from local or national to international and to the whole world at once.

Hybrid- A fusion of more than one media form, or a mixing of global and local, or mixing of identities.

Iconic- A sign which resembles directly what it represents.

Identity- The complex way that one has a representative sense of oneself.

Linear- In a clear, logical order moving in one direction.

Macro- Big broad themes. the sum of lots of micro things added up.

Media studies 2.0- A response to web 2.0 proposed by gauntlett in which the role of online user-generated content and sharing is seen as fundamental to how we understand media audiences.

Mode of address- How a text in any media speaks to its audience.

Multimedia- A cultural product produced using a variety of media.

narrative- The way information is ordered, or a story is told.

Piracy- Distribution of media material that infringes copyright law.

Polysemic- Plural meaning as opposed to fixed singular meaning.

Representation- Students of media are taught that media texts do not present a neutral, transparent view of reality, but offer instead a mediated re-presentation of it.

Semiotics- The science of signs and symbols from saussure's linguistics (1974) and barthes' structuralism (1973). The study of the sign in terms of its connotations within cultural myth systems.

Stereotype- A blunt overstated representation of a type of person. Usually negative.

Synergy- Interconnected marketing and distribution of media products across a range of platforms and sectors.