Hartley J. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts

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refers to how both media texts and media organisations address

audiences. While it originates from the study of face-to-face

communication, mode of address can also refer to textual features

beyond verbal language.

Mode of address is reliant on the genre in which it appears. In

everyday communication, the way the same story is related will often

alter when told to a friend, a parent, a policeofficer or via an office

document. So it is with media texts, where the mode of address will

alter between, for example, news and current affairs and game shows.

While there are differences in the processes involved, mode of address

allows media texts to invent a fictional image of their preferred

audience. Discourse analysis is useful here in uncovering the

characteristics of this imagined viewer.

Relevant to notions of address is Althusser’s theory of interpella-

tion. Interpellation refers to how subjects are ‘hailed’ by the discourse

of a text. Consider the example of sports reporting. Here,

interpellation works through the ideology of nation (or city, etc.).

The commentator’s mode of address assumes or even requires (hails) a

national subject. To understand the force of interpellation, then, you

only have to watch sports coverage from someone else’s nation or city

– they are clearly not addressing you at all, and what is more, they are

getting excited about things that are unimportant; it’s all too obviously

ideology. The Althusserian position is that all media discourse is

ideological in this way, because no matter what it is about, it must

employ a mode of address that interpellates a subject.

Consideration of mode of address need not be limited to individual

texts. Entire television stations will utilise different modes of address in

order to differentiate themselves and make unique the types of

programming they offer. This feature can be noted most obviously in a

station’s own promotional advertising. The same can be said of

newspapers, where what differs between one title and another is not

the content (they cover the same stories) but the mode of address –

one is aimed at women, one at lads, another at business leaders and so

on. Thus the difference between the Daily Mail, the Sun and The

Financial Times is at least in part a difference of mode of address

creating a special relationship between addresser and addressee through

discursive strategies.

See also: Genre, Ideology, Interpellation

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MORAL PANIC

A term used to describe public anxiety about a perceived deviancy or

threat from within a culture itself that is thought to challenge generally

accepted societal norms, values and interests. The term moral panic

was originally employed by Jock Young (1971) and Stanley Cohen

(1980) in studies of deviancy in the media. They argued that the media

played an ideological role, both contributing to and amplifying the

active construction of certain kinds of meaning (McRobbie, 1994:

203).

The problem with moral panic theory is that is assumes that the

media are involved in misrepresentation or distortion of opinion.

However, as Lumby (1999b) points out, this suggests that there is some

place outside of the mediasphere where rational debate and opinion

are being informed in direct contrast to the media’s construction. But

by now the media are fully integrated participants in the process of

public opinion and policy formation; they don’t ‘amplify’ anxieties

generated elsewhere, but orchestrate them. Thus, evidence of what

looks like a moral panic needs to take account of the extent to which

particular media are campaigning on an issue, whether it be juvenile

crime or the ‘outing’ of paedophiles.

Further reading:

Cohen (1980); Thornton (1994)

MOTIVATION (OF THE SHOT)

The arrangement of props and actions in a film or video shot to

suggest the source of diegetic features (see deixis). Light is motivated

if a window, table lamp, candle, extraterrestrial being or other source is

shown on screen as well as the light that apparently emanates from it.

However – and this is the point for analysts – it is extremely rare to

find that the scene actually is lit from the motivating source;

motivation is a convention designed to promote naturalism (verisimi-

litude).

Motivation is among the distinctive features of a genre, contribut-

ing to its aesthetics. TV soap opera, for instance, has become

associated with unmotivated studio lighting; lots of it, pouring down

on the glistening heads of the characters, brightening colours but

flattening the scene. Subtly motivated lighting, conversely, is often

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associated with high-budget drama series, precisely to set apart such

(filmed) shows from the ‘cheaper’ look of studio (video) productions.

Hartley and Montgomery (1985) found the term motivation useful

to distinguish between different kinds of news camerawork. Motivated

news filming is where the camera ‘defers’ to the action and

participants, following their movements by panning, reframing, etc.

Unmotivated news camerawork, conversely, imposes itself on the

scene without reference to what participants are actually doing. Often

this is by means of a close-up shot on an apparently insignificant detail,

followed by a reframing zoom-out/pan to a wide shot of the main

action. Where both motivated and unmotivated news camerawork are

co-present in one news item, and applied to opposing parties in an

industrial dispute, the argument is that this is a form of visual bias,

producing an ideological preference for those treated ‘deferentially’.

Further reading: Hartley (1992a); Hartley and Montgomery (1985)

MODERN/MODERNISM/MODERNITY

Modernity may be thought of as a period, modernism as an

ideological attitude towards that period. Like all historical phenomena,

modernity developed unevenly. It ‘began’ at rather different times over

about half a millennium, depending on the area under scrutiny.

. Economic modernity began in the 1400s in the city-republics of Italy,

with the invention of banking, joint-stock companies, international

trade and, therefore, of capitalism.

. Technological modernity may be traced even further back to ‘early

modern’ inventions that were made in medieval times, but without

which modernity could not have taken the course that it did. These

included the plough, the compass, gunpowder and printing in

Europe from the 1200s to 1450s. Technologies of exploration,

mapping and navigation, associated with a range of maritime

nations from the 1400s to 1600s – Genoa, Portugal, Spain, the

Dutch, England – were also ‘modern’ applications of medieval

technologies.

. Literary modernity began with secular drama presented to an

unknown audience for profit (Shakespeare), the novel (Cervantes)

and realism (both journalistic and literary); these developments

occurred at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

. Scientific modernity began with the scientific revolution of the

seventeenth century, associated with Galileo and Francis Bacon, and

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with the Royal Society, founded in 1662.

. Philosophical modernity began with the Enlightenment, centred on

the eighteenth-century philosophers of France.

. Political modernity began with the transfer of sovereignty from

monarch to people. After an interrupted English experiment

(1645–1660), it was inaugurated successfully, i.e. continuously, in

the American (1776) and French (1789) Revolutions.

. Industrial modernity began with the Industrial Revolution,

associated with the ‘steam age’ and manufacturing pioneered in

England from about 1780 to 1830.

. Cultural modernity came of age in the nineteenth century, when all

these influences were fused and generalised internationally, with the

great metropolitan cities, rapid communication systems, industrial

workforces, popular entertainments and the beginnings of media,

tourism, department stores and mechanised warfare. Here was

where New York began to outshine its European antecedents.

Modernism as an artistic or literary movement was associated with the

intellectual and artistic reaction to the last of the developments noted

above; it was influential at the turn of the twentieth century.

There was also, perhaps more importantly, a ‘small-m’ modernism

that turned the historical amalgam of modernity (as above) into a kind

of manifesto. This was modernism as the pursuit of modern ideals –

reason, truth, progress, science, secularism, popular sovereignty, open

society, technology and communication. Such an ideology of modern-

ism contrasted with the condition of modernity by its partisanship, and

it tended to become more pronounced the more it felt itself

threatened. Threats to modernism of this sort came from three

directions:

. pre-modern thought – magical systems, traditional authority,

private realities;

. modernity’s own ‘dark side’ – the horrors that reason and science

could unleash, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima, Apartheid to

colonialism, exploitation by market, gender, race, class, etc.

. postmodernism – ‘high’ modernists saw ‘postmodern’ develop-

ments as undermining truth and reason in the name of relativism

and irrealism, displacing the hope of progress in the rush for

identity, which was seen as retribalising modern societies.

See also: Culture wars, Meaning, Postmodern/postmodernism/

postmodernity

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MP3

A compression technology that allows for the storing and transmitting

of audio data, usually music. Evolving from the development of digital

television, MP3 technology provides the means for transferring digital

audio to data that can be translated by computer software. The original

intention for this technology was a means of saving valuable

information space held on hard drives and CD ROMs. This certainly

has been achieved – for example, thirteen hours of MP3 files can now

be stored on a CD compared to traditional digital audio only allowing

for seventy-four minutes.

MP3 files not only provide an efficient means of storing audio

information but also for transmitting it. It is here that most discussion

concerning MP3s is centred. Prior to a court order closing down

online music distributor Napster in 2001, MP3 users were able to

traffic and trade favoured songs, artists and genres with other users

with a speed and an ease that were previously unknown. Intervention

from the music industry, however, has attempted to halt this activity,

with copyright infringement cited as the legal rationale.

While the debate over intellectual copyright continues to impinge

on the future uses of MP3s, musicians continue to argue the

importance of this new technology. For newer artists MP3s provide a

means of distributing their music without the need for record label

and distributive support. Established artists too are seeing the potential

for establishing a direct link between themselves and their fans without

the need for support from the music industry. The threat to the music

industry as a result of these possibilities suggests that further debates

concerning MP3s will not be based on technological possibility, but

rather how to control, regulate and benefit economically from the

distribution possibilities.

Further reading:

Hacker (2000)

MULTI-ACCENTUALITY

A property of signs, consisting in the capacity every sign has to signify

more than one meaning, depending on the circumstances of its use.

The term was coined by Volosinov (1973) as part of an argument

which sought to show how the meaning of signs is fixed not by the

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abstract system of language (langue), but by the dialogic interaction

of social relations within which the potential for meaning is fixed.

In principle multi-accentuality is a property of all signs, but in

practice most signs are not constantly the object of active struggle.

However, the concept remains useful in accounting for such

phenomena as anti-languages or languages of resistance such as those

of slaves in the West Indies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

which are characterised by complete inversions of existing signs and

their values (thus ‘black’ is inverted to become the sign for ‘good’,

‘powerful’, ‘sacred’, and so on). Feminism too has demonstrated that

apparently inert signs (‘he’, ‘man’, ‘mankind’) are ideologically loaded

and represent social power relations.

MULTICULTURALISM

Diversity of population and culture as public policy. The advent of

multiculturalism as a governmental programme signified a deliberate

departure in the way that nation-states historically have chosen to

depict themselves. Rather than projecting an image of the nation as a

unified, culturally homogenous group, multiculturalism recognises

that contemporary society is made up of distinct and diverse groups.

The official policies of multiculturalism aim to manage cultural

diversity through welfare, culture and social justice initiatives. The

intention is to move away from ‘assimilation’ of migrants or

Indigenous people towards wider social acceptance of difference as

something legitimate and valuable.

Multiculturalism emerged in the latter half of the twentieth

primarily as a response to political demands from ethnic minorities.

Countries facing populations that contained distinctive cultural groups

as a result of migration policies began to accept that assimilation was

either not possible or not desired for a large proportion of groups.

Migration, as a result, took on new significance. It was no longer

simply a means to population growth, but something culturally

significant requiring government recognition and assistance.

In the 1970s Australia and Canada officially declared themselves

multiculturalist societies. Considerable infrastructure was erected to

support these policies, including, in Australia, the SBS or Special

Broadcasting Service, a national radio and television network

dedicated to ‘free-to-air’ broadcasting of materials in languages other

than English and English-language programming that promotes

multicultural aims. SBS television, run on a shoestring compared to

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established public broadcasters (in Australia, the ABC), is a wonder of

world television.

Early works on multiculturalism advocated ‘toleration’ as a means

of living peacefully in a society made up of disparate groups (Walzer,

1997). These have been replaced by demands for public affirmation

and respect for difference, as toleration can have the negative

implication of ‘conceding the validity of society’s disapproval and

relying on its self-restraint’ (Parekh, 2000: 1).

Some people of colour have rejected multiculturalism as cosmetic

and even part of entertainment culture, arguing that it has not had

sufficient effect on the living conditions of people in non-white

neighbourhoods. As Joan Morgan put it in the American context,

multiculturalism can come over as another ‘brand’ of white

consumerism:

What white American racism offers to people of color, under

the guise of multiculturalism, is an invitation to a dinner

where we are expected to lay out a cultural smorgasbord while

white America shows up with a very big fork.

(Morgan, 1994: 34)

See also: Diaspora, Ethnic/ethnicity, Nation

Further reading:

Castels et al. (1988); Rajchman (1995)

MULTIMEDIA

The term multimedia was used originally to describe audio-visual

presentations that consisted of slide presentations synchronised with

sound (Wise, 2000) – in other words, the very same mode of

exhibition as the magic lantern shows of the nineteenth century. The

literal definition of the term as the processing and presentation of

communication by more than one medium (audio and visual) still

holds true but has been extended and complicated in contemporary

use.

It is now most widely used to refer to communication that is

mediated by computer technologies and that utilises a repertoire of

graphics, text, sound, animation or video. This includes web sites,

video games, digital television, electronic books and CD ROMs. The

boundaries of multimedia’s definition are far-reaching and unspecified

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in literature on the subject. A common characteristic, however, is the

appearance of cohesion, or ‘seamlessness’. The integration of images,

text, audio and video within multimedia is often made possible by

digital technology, although it may also involve analogue media.

Multimedia has liberated the way in which ideas are presented. The

sci-fi dream of being able to layer sensory experiences in the recreation

of real or imagined worlds – complete with taste, sound, touch and

visual images – may not be fully realised yet, but due to multimedia

developments it appears to be getting closer.

See also: Digital/analogue distribution, New media technologies

MYTH

Myth is generally understood to be a form of narrative that is shared

amongst members of a traditional community or culture. In

communications studies myth is understood as a means of disguising

or masking ambiguities within a culture, and to a certain extent its role

can be understood as ideological. Its theoretical application is usually

anthropological, psychoanalytical and/or semiotic.

The anthropological understanding of myths is influenced by the

work of Claude Le

vi-Strauss, who argued that myths are unique to

specific cultures and are used as a means of explaining the workings of

the world: they are thinking machines. He argued that these

explanatory narratives worked to ‘deal with contradictions in

experience, to explain the apparently inexplicable, and to justify the

inevitable’ (Turner, 1993: 72). The contradictions inherent in human

existence were thought through in myths using binary opposition,

simplifying the process of ‘being’ into an either/or scenario. To this

end, myth worked to ex-nominate the gaps that can be understood

to exist between such oppositions.

The psychoanalytical approach carries with it a similar thesis in that

it is concerned with how myths seek to teach universal morals albeit

on a more ‘internal’ level. The work of Jung is influential here, as he

developed what he termed archetypes that he thought were common to

all myths. Jung argued that the archetypical characters in myths guide

individuals into behaving in certain ways, and proffer, for instance,

preferred types of gendered behaviour as a means for reaching our

ideal humanity (see O’Shaughnessy, 1999: 147–154). Like Le

vi-

Strauss’ understanding, Jung’s also is based on a series of binary

oppositions as a means of masking contradictions.

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MYTH

The semiotic understanding of myths is one that is influenced by

the work of Barthes (1973: 117) who argued that myth was a mode of

signification. He argued that in myth, the link between the signifier

and the signified was motivated (unlike the arbitrary model that

underpins semiotics), so that a culturally constructed sign becomes a

signifier, thus allowing what is signified to be naturalised.

Contemporary examples of this form of mythical analysis can be

applied to leisure-wear brand names. The name of Nike for instance

has come to signify an attitude, status and class that are beyond what

might otherwise be signified by sports apparel (i.e. practically nothing).

In examples such as this, and in many contemporary advertisements,

myth works to mask its very own contradictions – which in the case of

Nike is largely the price of, for example, a sports shoe in comparison

to the values of those who supposedly wear them. Myth works to

naturalise contradictions such as these and attempts to turn something

that is cultural (a shoe) into something natural (‘just doing it’).

See also: Narrative, Semiotics/semiology

Further reading:

O’Shaughnessy (1999)

NANOTECHNOLOGY see biotechnology

NAPSTER

see MP3, online music distribution

NARRATIVE

Narrative is continuous story. It has two facets. The first is the chain or

plot. Plot tends to move between an opening equilibrium that is

disrupted, precipitating the action that goes through the usual

tribulations, towards a new or restored equilibrium. Or, as the old

Three-Act Play had it: Act One: Get a man up a tree; Act Two: Throw

stones at him; Act Three: Get him down again. The second facet of

narrative involves choice or presentation – the way the story is realised

or told. It is this facet, and the devices and surprises chosen in it, that

are often the focus of textual analysis.

Narratives are understood to reveal the work of ideology and

discourse in both plot and presentation; chain and choice. In the

former, narrative is driven by a series of questions and answers in the

movement between opening and closing equilibrium. Which

character or discourse underpins these questions is often referred to

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as the point of view that leads to a preferred reading of the text. The

resolution of these questions will often involve putting forward

dominant cultural beliefs.

In the presentation of a narrative, what types of individuals are

chosen as heroes, victims, villains or innocents may reproduce

common cultural assumptions about such individuals. Accusations of

stereotypes arise in analysis of narrative presentation, especially in

relation to raced or gendered characters. It is narrative’s use of shared

cultural assumptions that leads to the suggestion that all narratives are

ideological.

Narrative analysis is applicable to more than traditional film

practices. It is a central function in photographic images and print

advertising, where the reader of an image is invited to make sense of

what happened before the image was captured and what will happen

after.

Narrative is also applicable to non-fictional genres such as television

news. In a similar way to soap operas, news does not explicitly begin

with a stable situation, but rather assumes there has been one. The

nightly news broadcast can be thought of as presenting the ongoing

disruptions to this presumed equilibrium through the representation of

question and answers. Like other narratives the techniques used in

television news are ‘meaningful because they are conventional rather

than natural’ (Taylor and Willis, 1999: 67). Attention to the narratives

of news reporting reveals that they negotiate cultural values and beliefs

in a way that is directly comparable to fictional narrative.

See also: Discourse, Genre, Myth, Representation, Structuralism

Further reading:

Bordwell and Thompson (2001)

NASDAQ

The world’s largest electronic stock exchange or securities market,

founded in the US and launched in 1971. Its business is capital

formation by share trading. Nasdaq was the focus of the ‘dot.com’

boom and subsequently the ‘tech wreck’ of 1999–2000. It remains

the barometer for the ‘new economy’: companies in the private and

public sector trading including electronics, e-commerce, the

Internet, interactive technologies and applications. Nasdaq had its

big bubble (boom and bust) year in 1999–2000 and was restructured

and floated as a for-profit company later in 2000. In the meantime it

had linked with new and existing stock exchanges in Hong Kong,

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NASDAQ