AS Music Magazine

Media Language definition

Media language is the way in which the meaning of a media text is conveyed to the audience.

One of the ways Media Language works is to convey meaning through signs and symbols suggested by the way a scene is set up and filmed.

Signs and symbols in media texts are polysemic which means they are open to many interpretations. The different possible meanings in media texts depend on two things. The first is the way the signs and symbols in the text are ‘read’. The second is the cultural background of the person ‘reading’ the text.

For film and television media language includes the way meaning comes across through the pictures and through the words or dialogue. Seeing the characters in a moving image text allows meaning to come across as non verbal communication. This includes the gestures, facial expressions, clothing and props in a film as well as where the characters are placed in the frame.

Media language includes the way the camera sees the scene through shot size and camera angle. It is also possible under the heading of media language to analyse the way the actors interpret the script.

From: http://media.edusites.co.uk/article/understanding-media-language/

Narrative definition

The narrative is the way that a sequence of events are put together to convey a story to the audience

Genre definition

A style or category of art, music, literature, film etc.

Representation definition

Representation, in regards to the media, is the ways in which the media portrays particular groups, communities, experiences, ideas, or topics from a particular ideological or value perspective

Postmodernism Definitions

Some examples of how to define postmodernism are:

1) An assertion that knowledge and truth is contextual and constructed

2) A rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon anarchic collective ( a doctrine advocating the abolition of both the state and private ownership of the means of production), anonymous experience. Collage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable, Dionysian passion are the foci of attention. Most importantly we see the dissolution of distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other. This is a sarcastic playful parody of western modernity and the "John Wayne" individual and a radical, anarchist rejection of all attempts to define, reify or re-present the human subject

3) Anti-authoritarian by nature, it refuses to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art or film etc. should be. It collapses the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture. Resultantly, postmodernism can be characterised by its self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, and an eclectic mixing of different artistic and popular styles and media

Audience Definition

Any individual or collective group of people who read or consume any media text (e.g. radio listeners, television viewers, newspaper and magazine readers etc.)