Key Media Concepts

MEDIA LANGUAGE

This is the way in which a text is constructed to create meaning for a reader or a viewer of the text

Media language contains:

         - Visual codes

         - Audio codes

         - Technical codes

         - Linguistic codes

         - Narrative codes

Visual codes:
Audio codes:
Technical codes:
Narrative Codes:

Linguistic Codes:
Any use of language, written or spoken, in the media text

Audience

Representation

• Age

• Gender

• Race/Ethnicity

• Financial Status

• Job

• Culture/nationality

Genre

This includes things such as the setting and the scenery, iconography, expressions and costumes etc.

This has 2 parts,

Diegetic sound - Can be heard by the characters within a scene (e.g. dialogue, sfx)

Non-diegetic sound - Sound that the characters cannot hear and is not part of the imaginary world of the story (e.g. music or a voice over)

Technical codes are the ways in which equipment is used to tell the story in a media text

This includes: camera angles, lighting and editing (e.g back lighting in a horror for suspense)

They exist as enigmas that the reader wishes to be resolved. A detective story, for example, is a narrative that operates primarily by the hermetic code. A crime is exposed or postulated and the rest of the narrative is devoted to answering questions raised by the initial event.

Slide show

Quick Video

'Audience' is a very important concept throughout media studies. All media texts are made with an audience in mind, ie a group of people who will receive it and make some sort of sense out of it. And generally, but not always, the producers make some money out of that audience. Therefore it is important to understand what happens when an audience "meets" a media text.

This is a demographic chart which is used to determine a certain audience class

          Quick Video of demographics

             Slide share audience revision

Understanding representation is all about understanding the choices that are made when it comes to portraying something or someone in a mass media text. It's impossible to portray every aspect of an individual in a photograph, or even in a feature film, so certain features of their personality and appearance get highlighted, and are often enhanced, when it comes to constructing the representation that the audience will see. When representing a person, media texts often focus on their:

 Representation in 7 mins 

Working definition: a way of categorizing a particular media text according to its content and style.

Genre does not rely simply on what's in a media text but also on the way it is put together (constructed). This can be important, for example, when distinguishing between a horror movie and a thriller, which can deal with similar subject matter, and look the same — lots of action set at night — but belong to separate genres (a horror film takes the audience into a supernatural place, where a thriller sticks to reality).

A media text is said to belong to a genre, as it adopts the codes and conventions of other texts in that genre, and lives up to the same expectations. Texts from different mediums may belong to the same genre (e.g. a TV programme like Dr Who and a comic book like The Incredible Hulk can both be categorized as Science Fiction.)

You can define a genre by the content and style

Links:

Genre. What is it?

Genre Slide show