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

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when universities in Europe, Australia and elsewhere began to open

their doors to people whose families had never before sent a daughter

or son to university. The combination – new ideas, new objects of

study, new students – has made this field very dynamic, very

interesting to work in and also controversial.

As relatively new areas of study, communication, cultural and media

studies have been characterised by fast-moving and innovative research

work; by the attempt to say new things in new ways. At the same time,

they have borrowed widely from a variety of established academic

disciplines and discourses. As a result, there is often an uneasy period

for the newcomer to the area, until you get your bearings.

What follows is a field guide. It is designed to put together in an

accessible form some of the most important concepts that you will

encounter, and to show some of the ways in which these concepts

have been (or might be) used. The book is not a dictionary – it does

not claim to treat concepts ‘definitively’. The entries are not

destinations but starting points for further intellectual and practical

work.

Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts is

designed to help students and teachers new to the area find their way

about. It may be that getting to know a new area of study is best done

by the usual method: crashing about in the dark and bumping into

things. This was certainly the case was for me when I started trying to

understand communication, culture and media back in 1969, the year

I went to university (the first member of my family to do so). And it

still is, really, given the speed and scale of change in all of these

domains. Always there is something new to discover, and people keep

moving the furniture around when you’re not looking. I thought at

the time that a guide would be handy, and still do. I hope that what

follows helps you to shed a little light on your chosen topics.

Using a book like this might seem cumbersome to begin with, but

as you struggle with the clumsy technology of knowledge, remember

those computer disks the size of woks. Clumsy indeed – but they got

us to the moon.

INTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This couldn’t have been done without Ellie Rennie and Marc

Brennan – research assistants maybe; ‘killer apps’ (q.v.) certainly.

Thanks to you both.

. Thanks to Martin Montgomery, without whose language concepts this

edition would have been poorer.

. I want to thank John Fiske, Tim O’Sullivan, Danny Saunders and

Martin Montgomery – co-authors of the first and second editions – it

has been a privilege, snuggling between the covers with you for nearly

twenty years.

. My thanks are due to Queensland University of Technology, for

material assistance towards research for the book.

. As always, Rebecca Barden has made a book appear where none was

expected.

. And my family – Tina Horton, and Karri, Rhiannon and Sophie

Hartley – thanks for waiting!

John Hartley

QUT

March 2002

LIST OF CONCEPTS

Aberrant decoding

Accessing

Actuality

Aesthetics

Analogue

Anti-globalisation

Applications

Art–science interface

Articulation

Audiences

Author/ship

b2b

Bardic function

Bias

Binary opposition

Biotechnology

Bricolage

Broadband

Broadcasting

Celebrity

Class

Cluster

Code

Collocation

Communication

Communication design

Connectivity

Consumer sovereignty

Content analysis

Content industries

Convergence

Conversation analysis

Creative industries

Cultural capital

Cultural citizenship

Cultural populism

Cultural studies

Culture

Culture as service industry

Culture jamming

Culture wars

Customisation

Cyberdemocracy

Cybernetics

Cyborg

Datacasting

Diexis

Democratainment

Deregulation

Diachronic

Dialect

Dialogic

Diaspora

Diegesis

Difference

Digital/analogue distribution

Digital divide

Diglossia

Discourse

Diversity

DIY culture

Dot.com crash

Dumbing down

xii

E-commerce

Edutainment

Effects

Entertainment

Ethnic/ethnicity

Ethnography

Ex-nomination

Foregrounding

Frankfurt School

Games (computer/video)

Gatekeeper

Gender

Genre

Globalisation

Hegemony

ICT

Identification

Identity politics

Ideological state apparatuses

Ideology

Image

Impartiality

Implicature (conversational)

Independence

Individual

Individualism

Information society/information

economy

Infotainment

Infrastructure

Innovation

Intangibles

Intellectual property

Interactivity

Internationalisation

Internet

Interpellation

Intertextuality

Kinesics

Knowledge

Knowledge economy

Language

Language, functions of

Langue

Lifestyle

Literacy

Localisation

Mass communication

Mass society/mass society theory

Meaning

Media law

Mediasphere

Medium/media

Metaphor

Methodology

Metonymy

Mode of address

Moral panic

Motivation (of the shot)

Modern/modernism/modernity

MP3

Multi-accentuality

Multiculturalism

Multimedia

Myth

Nanotechnology

Napster

Narrative

Nasdaq

Nation

Naturalising

Naturalism

Nature

Net radio

Network society

New economy

New media policies

New media technologies

News values

Noise

Objectivity

Online

Online music distribution

Orality

xiii

LIST OF CONCEPTS

Orientalism

Paradigm

Parole

Participant observation

Performance

Persuasion

Phatic communication

Phonemic/phonetic

Phonology

Pidgin

Polysemy/polysemic

Popular/popular culture

Post-broadcast media

Postmodern/postmodernism/post-

modernity

Power

Pragmatics

Privatisation

Propaganda

Proxemics

Public

Public service broadcasting

Public sphere

Race

Reader/readership

Realism

Reality TV

Rearviewmirrorism

Redundancy

Referent

Regulation

Rhetoric

Representation

Semantics

Semiosphere

Semiotics/semiology

Sign

Signification

Sit up/sit back

Speech act

Speech community

Spin

Standard language

Star/stardom

Stereotype

Streaming

Structuralism

Style

Subculture

Subjectivity

Symbol

Syntagm

Synchronic

Technological determinism

Text/textual analysis

Textual system

Textuality

Transitivity

Virtual communities

Virtuality

Violence

Walled garden

World Trade Organisation

World Wide Web

xiv

LIST OF CONCEPTS

ABERRANT DECODING

A concept originating with Umberto Eco, identifying a mismatch of

meaning between sender (encoder) and receiver (decoder) of any

message, from ancient art to contemporary media. Eco himself used

the term in a ‘semiotic inquiry into the television message’, first

published in 1965 in Italian, a pioneering attempt to apply semiotics to

mass communication (Eco, 1972). He suggested that ‘aberrant

decoding’ was an accident in pre-industrial societies, an exception

to the expectation of speakers and artists that their own communities

would normally ‘get’ what they were talking about. There were four

classes of exception to this rule:

. people who didn’t know the language (what meanings did the

Greeks, and then everyone till Jean-Franc¸ois Champollion, ascribe

to Egyptian hieroglyphics?);

. people from future generations (what meanings did medieval

Christians ascribe to Greek and Roman art?);

. people from different belief systems (what meanings do modern

tourists ascribe to the stained glass windows of cathedrals such as

Chartres?);

. people from different cultures (what meanings do white people

ascribe to Aboriginal art?).

However, and herein lies the importance of the concept, Eco argued

that contemporary media such as television are communicative codes

in which aberrant decoding is the norm, not the exception. TV

communicators know a priori that their code is not shared by all the

receivers.

Eco proposed therefore that research into television required three

phases:

. a semiotic analysis of television ‘messages’ to establish the codes

used by the transmitting organisation and producers, and the

references audiences were expected to have in order to decode

them;

. field research into ‘how the messages, previously analysed, have in

fact been received in selected sample situations’;

. a comparative analysis to determine the extent to which the two

sets of results tally.

ABERRANT DECODING

Eco speculated: ‘We could discover that the community of the users

has such freedom in decoding as to make the influencing power of the

organisation much weaker than one could have thought. Or just the

opposite’ (1972: 107). This research agenda proved remarkably stable.

Its combination of textual (semiotic) and audience (sociological)

analysis designed to assess the ideological power of media and the

room for manoeuvre of audiences remains to this day at the core of

academic media research.

Eco’s article was translated (by Paola Splendore) and published in

the journal of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

(CCS), Working Papers in Cultural Studies, in 1972. It was a source of

influence for Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding’ thesis and for much

subsequent work by media researchers at the CCCS, for instance,

Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley, Ian Connell and Lydia Curti,

and thence made its way into the mainstream of media studies.

ACCESSING

The practice of including verbal quotations and film/tape interviews

or statements (in news/current affairs coverage) which originate from

people or groups not directly employed by the media organisation

itself. Access is a serious matter in broadcasting organisations, because

scarcity of airtime means that it has to be heavily rationed, which is

why for such organisations it is a political issue. In post-broadcast

media such as the Internet, access does not need to be rationed and

therefore is not an issue.

Demands for broadcast access are based on a reflection theory of the

media – that is, that the media ought to reflect the plurality of different

groups, politics or lifestyles that can be identified outside the media in

social life. Many groups argue that their access to television is blocked

and that as a result they are unable to establish their point of view in the

public mind. The assumption often is that the blockage is caused by a

more or less deliberate conspiracy by the media to exclude them.

Even when access is achieved, ‘minority groups’ are often

disappointed with the coverage they receive. Commercial and

industrial organisations with an extensive division of labour and an

occupational ideology of professionalism won’t let you simply appear

on television or radio and state your case or tell your story. Despite the

media’s centrality to public life and to citizenship, there is no right of

access. Whether you get on air depends on the professionals’

assessment of your talent, newsworthiness or representative status,

ACCESSING

and what you say is mediated through their professional codes and

production processes.

The professional mediation of accessed voices extends to the

message. Even when you have your say on television, you won’t speak

for yourself. What you say becomes what television says, and television

discourse has its own peculiarities. When a newsreader quotes or an

interviewer questions you, your utterance becomes a discursive

element which is subordinate to the narrative flow and visual codes

of the item as a whole. Its meaning is not self-contained, but depends

on what is said and seen before and afterwards. You become, in effect,

one actor in a drama, and even if you’re lucky enough to be playing

the lead, it is still the case that what you say is significant only in the

context of what all the others say, and of what the drama is about.

Further, one aspect of your role is entirely at odds with your own

purposes. For simply by accessing you, the institutional discourse is

able to claim authenticity and credibility for itself. You become the

means through which the legitimacy of media representations can be

established – irrespective of what you actually say.

There is, then, a conflict of interest between professional media

discourses and the demands for access that various groups express. The

way this has been handled in practice takes two forms. First, news and

current affairs subscribe to the principle of impartiality, thereby

ensuring that a (narrow and ‘balanced’) range of voices is accessed on

any one topic. Second, specialist ‘access programmes’ have been

established on many networks. In these off-peak slots media

professionals may relinquish control of the programme content, but

retain control of the production process. Unfortunately, both these

well-intentioned practices have negative consequences. Impartiality

legitimates the mainstream bipartisan form of politics at the expense of

the various single-issue groups (e.g. environmental campaigns), ethnic

‘minority’ groups, radical or feminist groups and community groups

that tend to end up having to make do with the marginal access slots.

For such groups, the very fact of winning access results in

representations that seem ‘naturally’ to confirm their marginal status.

This is why they’ve all migrated to the Internet.

Further reading: Glasgow Media Group (1982); Hartley (1982, 1992a); Willis and

Wollen (1990)

ACCESSING

ACTUALITY

Professional term for film/tape footage used in news and current affairs

broadcasts that records events as they happen. Contrasted with studio

presentation (talking heads) and with archive (stock) footage.

In semiotic analysis, actuality is seen as a key device in producing

ideological closure, by anchoring the preferred reading on the

apparently unarguable ‘facts’ of the event-as-filmed. Actuality is

presented as self-evident; the production processes are rarely shown, so

that viewers are encouraged to make sense of the footage in terms of

the event, and not the way in which it is represented. However,

actuality rarely appears on the screen without an accompanying

commentary – and considerable professional skill is expended on

contextualising it for the ‘benefit’ of viewers. As Peter Sissons, a

British news presenter has put it: ‘Let’s remember that although a

picture can tell the story, only a word can put it into its historical

perspective, can caution against gullibility, can weigh the true

significance of the event’ (Independent Broadcasting, 1982). In short,

actuality is a device for naturalising meaning (it proposes the cultural as

natural).

AESTHETICS

A term deriving from the philosophical analysis of art, aesthetics refers

to insight, expressiveness and beauty in creativity. The use of the term

was popularised in the nineteenth century as a means of separating art

from craft. In this tradition, aesthetics provided a paradigm for talking

about texts as art, and art as humanising civility, not mere decoration.

The theory of aesthetics understood its practice as objective. The

properties of artworks were expressions of universal values, open to the

same interpretation by all who were free. The theory relied on the

assumption that aesthetic criteria lay within the work itself, negating

the need to consider issues of context and the means of production

(‘art for art’s sake’).

Aesthetic judgements in Marxist theory are considered a form of

ideology. Whilst this is certainly a valid point, attempts by, for

example, Marxists, feminists and queer theory to subvert aesthetic

practice have arguably continued the tradition. Attempting to replace

‘universal’ assumptions about taste with subcultural categories creates

many splinter aesthetic theories that, although speaking on behalf of

ACTUALITY

smaller groups, continue to imply a set of common beliefs around

notions of truth, beauty and art.

The term aesthetic gained some currency in semiotic analysis,

especially in the notion of an ‘aesthetic code’, in which the production

of meaning is not the aim but the starting point of a given message. It

prioritises the signifier over the signified, and seeks to exploit rather

than confirm the limits and constraints of the form, genre or

convention within which it operates. Hence aesthetic codes put a

premium on innovation, entropy and experimentation with the raw

materials of signification (words, colours, composition, sequence), and

evoke pleasurable responses for that reason. Semiotics goes beyond

idealist aesthetics in its attempt to find a value-free and culturally

specific description of aesthetic codes, and thence to find such codes

operating in discourses or media not usually associated with the

category ‘art’: advertising copy, political slogans, graffiti, and the

output of consumer and entertainment media.