This document provides an overview of key concepts and debates in media theory, structured as a toolkit. It covers topics such as texts and literacies, analyzing still and moving images, debates around audiences and effects, concepts of ideology and power in media, and emerging perspectives on media 2.0 and participatory digital media. The document uses examples, concepts, and theories to illustrate different analytical approaches to understanding media. It aims to equip readers with a range of theoretical lenses for interpreting and critiquing media texts.

1. Media Theory toolkit
(1) Texts & Literacies
(2) Concepts & Debates

2. Right here, right now

3. Disclaimer / Mediation

4. The plan:
•The point of it all and the what and the how;
•Texts and literacies – key concepts
•Still image analysis
•Moving image analysis
(breaks as and when)
Spot of lunch downstairs
•Debates and perspectives:
•Audiences, effects, reception
•Power, democracy, ideology
•Media 2.0 and ‘We Media’
•Postmodernism
(breaks as and when)

5. Recommended

6. Using …
90 slides with many links
Lots of images, moving images and sounds
Some modelled learning plans
Some Key Readings
Lots of Charlie Brooker
Some Zizek

7. Texts and Meaning
Reception
Genre, Narrative, Representation
Democracy
Effects
Regulation v Responsibilities
Futures and utopia / dystopia
Funding, access and citizenship
Global Culture
Identities
Mickey Mouse?

8. Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan,
Television by Raymond Williams
Mythologies by Roland Barthes
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
The Image by Daniel Boorstin
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky
No Sense of Place by Joshua Meyrowitz
Television Culture by John Fiske
NB - The notable name missing is Stuart Hall, who sadly never authored a 'text' as such
(only edited them), but clearly warrants a place in a list of important media thinkers.
‘Laughey’s Canon’

9. Sociocultural literacy (Bhabha and
Gutierrez’s conceptions)
Curriculum and power (Yandell)
Cultural capital (Bourdieu)
Funds of knowledge (Bourdieu,
Marsh, Moll but also Parry et al)
Semi permeable membrane
(Potter, McDougall & Potter)
The “Third Space” of learning

10. THEORY / PRACTICE / PRAXIS

12. Doing Text / Being Text

13. Texts: Transmedia
• Doctor Who has encompassed television, radio, literature, cinema and
videogames, across 50 years.
• All adds up to a rich metatext, with multiple access points –
although television is clearly the dominant medium.

14. Key Concepts: Genre | Narrative

15. Representation
Key Reading: Laura Mulvey

16. That the more restricted forms
of textual engagement that
English offers remain at the
core of the National Curriculum
and that English retains a
relatively elevated academic
status are testament to the
strange but powerful grip of
an educational order that has
been and remains difficult to
shake off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W99TKSwIMk
The so-called ‘long revolution’ has indeed been ‘long’ as
the young people say.
We don’t know if the happy playground of Media Studies might in the very
long run have some serious impact on the established academic order and
might seriously challenge what Derrida has called the ‘violence’ that attends
‘the legitimization of canons’. Nick Peim, Preface to Doing Text.

18. Key Concepts: Representation

20. Image Literacy | Semiotics
From Saussure and Barthes.From Saussure and Barthes.
Signs.Signs.
Symbols.Symbols.
Myth.Myth.
Micro to macro.Micro to macro.
Polysemy and fluidity at level ofPolysemy and fluidity at level of
connotationconnotation

21. Mythology

22. Moving Image Literacy

23. Camera Helps to Deliver Meaning
• Shot Types – what meanings do a long shot and a
Point of View (POV) shot help deliver?
- Long shot – establishing shot, shows the viewer where they are in the
scene. POV –feel as though you are part of the scene
Shot Types Helps to Situate the Viewer
• Angle – (high angle POV shot = superiority, low angle POV shot =
weakness)
• Movement - Zoom can highlight emotion on a character, Jerky hand
held POV shot can provide tension and involvement in action sequences
(e.g. Cloverfield)
• Focus / Detail – Used to highlight important elements to the
narrative / storyline

24. Editing Helps to Deliver Meaning
• Manipulation of Time / Space – flashbacks, Jump Cuts,
Cross Cuts, etc
• Rhythm and Pace – Fast paced / frequent cuts = action,
slow paced / infrequent cuts = drama
/ romance
• Persuasion – Edit tries to influence your view of the events
• Ellipsis – When parts of the story (narrative) are edited out
(can be explicit and implicit)
• Dialectical montage (Eisenstein) – 2 different shots put
together to construct meaning

25. Sound | Image Helps to Deliver Meaning
• Provides Anchorage (Romantic music + 2 people staring into
each others eyes tells you that you are watching a romantic scene)
• Contrast or Flow (can provide an indication as to whether the
direction of a movie is changing or staying the same)
• Diegetic Sound (sound that originates from within the movie
narrative – e.g. the sound of a CD playing when an actor presses
play.)
• Non-diegetic sound (sound that is not part of the narrative – e.g.
background music)
Contributes to Mise en SceneContributes to Mise en Scene

26. Mise en scene helps to deliver meaning
•Refers to the overall Atmosphere / Ambience of a scene
•What contributes to mise en scene?
- Costume
- Lighting
- Props
- Sound
- Actors
•Moving image = still images moving (Semiotics can be applied to help explain
meaning)
•Versisimilitude?
- Where the scene provides a sense of realism (2 types:- Generic = realistic
for the type of genre, Cultural = realistic because it mimics real life)

27. Micro to Macro
• What are Micro elements?
– individual elements (such as camera angles, editing, sound,
elements of mise en scene) Elements can be diegetic and
non-diegetic.
• What is Macro?
What meaning the individual elements amount to
• But always remember THE ACTIVE AUDIENCE MAKESTHE ACTIVE AUDIENCE MAKES
THE MEANINGTHE MEANING (based on cultural experiences and literacy).
There may be many ways a film can be interpreted
(PolsyemyPolsyemy)

28. Decoding: Bound up in identity
Your examples of curation?
Putting texts to work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwsQ_5Wm4oo

29. Media Theory Toolkit:
(2) Concepts and Perspectives
@JulianMcDougall

30. Theories of Culture
Adorno: ‘Culture industry reconsidered’in
New German Critique, 6, Fall 1975, 12-19
Hesmondalgh: ‘Creative and Cultural Industries’ in
Bennett, (2008): The Sage Handbook of Cultural
Analysis 552–569

31. The Culture Industry or Cultural Industries?
Adorno – standardisation (of cultural products and consumers)
•Popular music (and jazz) – mass consumption, formula, subjugation
•THE culture industry = monolothic, standardised
•Political economy account – sets up mass production against the
creative (high) artist.
Hesmondalgh – plural cultural industries
•Symbolic creators – degrees of creative autonomy, complexity and
difference
•Socio-cultural account – looks at structure / agency dynamics
•Compares creative workers’ levels of freedom to other industries
•Emphasises “contested ground’ upon which different kinds of cultural
texts are produced” (Laughey, 2007: 126)

32. Culture | Industry
Adorno: ‘mass culture’ is structural: The cultural commodities of
the industry are governed, as value, and not by their own specific
content and harmonious formation. Anti-enlightenment
Only their deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical
reality in the spiritual make-up of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since
perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the culture industry.
Hesmondhalgh: ‘Cultural Industries’ = an attempt to pluralize
Adorno’s flawed theory. Emphasis on contradiction and complexity
in neo-liberal context.
Those who prefer the term ‘cultural industries’ tend to be much more sober in their claims regarding the role of
culture or creativity in modern economies and societies, and, as we shall see, considerably more sceptical about
the benefits of marketization in the domain of culture, than what we might call the creativity or creative
industries theorists.

33. Work
Adorno: transformations in the industrial production of art
(Frankfurt School neo-Marxist tradition – along with
Benjamin’s ‘mechanical reproduction’).
Hesmondalgh: creative labour as “communication of experience
through symbolic reproduction” (from Raymond Williams’ ‘Long
Revolution’).
Key ideas: autonomy (workplace + creative), self-realisation,
divisions of labour.

34. Culture Industry, Creative Industry, Creative Work
Mass media central to consumer economy since 1950s.
Internet, social media and inter-active media – paradigm shift?
Lopez (2012) – 4 elements to neo-liberal hegemony of culture:
•Privatisation
•Commodification
•Crisis for control
•Enclosure of creative commons – by corporations.
Autonomy of the creative worker:
Policies that argue for a radical expansion of these industries under present conditions,
without attention to the conditions of creative labour, risk fuelling labour markets marked by
irregular, insecure and unprotected work. (Hesmondalgh)
Sociological focus in STRUCTURE and AGENCY (Bourdieu, Giddens).

36. Discussion
• Creative Labour
• Authenticity
• Autonomy
• Culture
• INDUSTRIES – Art, Film, Museum, Graffiti
Group 1 - What would Adorno say?
Group 2 - Apply Hesmondalgh?

37. Discuss

38. Complex

39. Audience, Effects, Reception
Although we might think of media habits as mundane and idiosyncratic, the fact
that we all have them shows structural forces afoot. (Ruddock: 77)

41. Models of Mass Media
‘Classic’ (outdated or timeless?) models:
• Shannon and Weaver, 1949
• Galtung and Ruge, 1965
• Blumer and Katz,1974

42. Ideology and Interpellation
Key example = gender based magazines
Nuts does four things:
1. Represents men to men.
2. Represents men to women.
3. Represents women to men.
4. Represents women to women.

43. Men’s magazine covers = women
Women’s magazine covers = women
Why?

44. Complicity
Key Reading:
Althusser: Interpellation
(misrecognition)
Winship: complicity and
(false) belonging
Gauntlett – irony / play

45. Feminism (Butler)
Gender is not natural, it is learned and
PERFORMED
Playful renegotiation of gender = gender
trouble (a subversive act)
Madonna, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift
Grayson Perry
See Gauntlett – Media, Gender, Identity

46. Moral Panics
Cohen, S, 1972.
Key Reading: Charles Krinsky

49. The Other

50. Murder of James Bulger by two boys
Shocked public reaction
Trial: search for blame
Father’s videoshop membership info
CP3 picked on by press
Spurious links with narrative offered

51. Recent panics
Videogames
Online activity
Campus killings / knife and gun crime / gangs and Youtube
Texting, internet and literacy
Electronic media and obesity
Screen / web addiction
Social skills in decline due to internet

52. Identity: British Social Realism

53. National Identity?
Films do not present a neutral, transparent view of reality, but offer
instead a mediated re-presentation of it.
Types of Realism
Discourses
Ideology
Othering
Plural readings
Key Reading: Paul Gilroy

55. Text-Case 1
Types of Realism
Discourses
Ideology
Othering
Plural readings

56. Text-Case 2
Types of Realism
Discourses
Ideology
Othering
Plural readings

57. Text-Case 3
Types of Realism
Discourses
Ideology
Othering
Plural readings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4G_UYK0Rkk

58. Text-Case 4
Types of Realism
Discourses
Ideology
Othering
Plural readings

59. Text-Case 5
Types of Realism
Discourses
Ideology
Othering
Plural readings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4KbJLpu7yo

60. Postcolonial power
Laughing at oneself is an
extension of the subjective
positioning of the colonized that
– internalization of inferiority.
But other examples of resistance
– women on screen in hybrid
game shows.

62. Ownership and Media Power
A Marxist view of media will focus
on the relationship between the
providers of media, broader power
structures and the messages in
media products circulated by these
power-holding institutions.
This is media hegemony /
ideology theory.

63. Marxist ideology theory presents the
media as a controlling force.
Effects theories tend to assume a
passive audience.
Reception theory sees audiences as
active makers of meaning.
Audiences may read the media as the
producers intended (preferred reading
- hegemonic).
They may partly share the preferred
response (negotiated reading)
They may interpret the text in an
alternative way (oppositional, counter-
hegemonic reading).
But ideology doesn’t go away. Ask
Zizek.

64. We Media | The Empire Strikes Back

65. The benchmark
Bold claims

66. Media Ideology – Chomsky

67. it’s complicated

68. Media Theory Toolkit:
Media 2.0?
@JulianMcDougall

69. Modalities

70. Media 2.0
Lots of DIFFERENT IDEAS on this.
Very much a CONTESTED view.

71. Merrin | Gauntlett
Media 1.0
• Celebrates key texts produced by media moguls and celebrated by well-known
critics
• Vague recognition of internet and new digital media, as an 'add on' to the
traditional media
• A preference for conventional ideas where most people are treated as non-expert
audience 'receivers', or, if they are part of the formal media industries, as expert
'producers'.

72. Merrin | Gauntlett
Media 2.0
• Interest in the massive 'long tail' of independent media projects such as those
found on YouTube and many other websites, mobile devices, and other forms of
DIY media
Recognition that internet and digital media have fundamentally changed the ways
in which we engage with all media
• Media now more democratic through people making and connecting

74. So – for Media Studies: WHAT COUNTS?

75. RELATIVISM?

76. New frameworks?
).
Apply new framework to:
Lego Movie
Talking dog
Fake JL ad
Your two choices of media 2.0 viral

77. Merrin (2014)
Mass media and computing converged at the end of the 20th century with
material, ecological, cultural and personal transformations.
What are these, for you?
Media Studies is a product of the analogue, broadcast era, emerging in the early 20th century as a
response to the success of newspapers, radio and cinema and reflecting that era back in its
organisation, themes and concepts.
Does it seem this way to you? If so, how? If not, why not?
Digitalisation takes us beyond this analogue era (media studies 1.0) into a new, post-broadcast era.
This era demands an upgraded academic discipline: one reflecting the real media life of its students
and teaching the key skills needed by the 21st-century user. Media 2.0 demand a media studies 2.0.
What do you think this would look like?
If digital media are the result of the meeting and merger of computing and mass media then we need
to teach our students computing to enable them to produce software and products for themselves.
One thing at least is certain: filling students’ time by teaching them how to use a video camera or
making them pretend to be a newsreader in a fake studio is a waste of their fees and an inadequate
training for the 21st century.
What about your fees, then?

78. Merrin (2014)
Print, radio, cinema and television have been transformed in their
material basis, ecological position and relationships, cultural production,
distribution and consumption and their individual use. Each medium has had to
Realign itself to meet the demands of a different era and different market
conditions, changing their economic models, content creation, modes of
distribution, relationship with other forms and even their own idea of what they are doing and how their forms will
be used. Apply to television - discuss.
Whilst media studies 2.0 privileges digital media as a revolutionary force in consuming older forms and practices
and creating new modes of media experience, it isn’t an uncritical celebration of these forms or these modes.
McLuhan commented how ‘ many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favour
of it’ and discussions of digital media attract the same reaction.
Manovich already argued in The Language of New Media (2001) that ‘ new media calls for a new stage in
media theory’ , suggesting that ‘ to understand the logic of new media, we need to turn to computer science. It is
there that we may expect to find the new terms, categories and operations that characterise media that became
programmable.’ Computing can serve as a key research tool for the digital environment, with data visualisation
software allowing the analysis of large collections of information.
In order to be able to write media today our students need to know how to produce software, how to employ or
create digital tools and platforms, and how to navigate and use the digital ecology. ‘ Media practice’, therefore,
needs to be reorientated towards training students in computing and the digital ecology. Today’ s user needs up-
to-date, practical knowledge of how to best take advantage of digital technologies and, like the hacker, how to
secure their communications, anonymise or hide their activities and delete and control their digital footprint.
These may well be the most important ‘ practice’ skills of the 21st century.
How are we doing here?

79. Imagine
OK, but
Unthinkable now ….

80. Morozov
• View that the web is emancipatory is a “mis-reading of history”
• Part of the technologically deterministic, cyber-utopian “Google
Doctrine” or “Twitter Agenda”, ie a mirror image of a moral
panic…
• Governments are actually using the
web for propaganda, control,
surveillance, censorship and
suppression
• Big Data - an algorithmic panopticon?

81. Present Shock?
Alvin Toffler’s radical 1970 book, Future Shock, theorized that things were
changing so fast we would soon lose the ability to cope. Rushkoff argues
that the future is now and we’re contending with a fundamentally new
challenge. Whereas Toffler said we were disoriented by a future that was
careening toward us, Rushkoff argues that we no longer have a sense of a
future, of goals, of direction at all. We have a completely new relationship
to time; we live in an always-on “now,” where the priorities of this
moment seem to be everything.
Wall Street traders no longer invest in a future; they expect profits off their
algorithmic trades themselves, in the ultra-fast moment. Voters want immediate
results from their politicians, having lost all sense of the historic timescale on
which government functions. Kids txt during parties to find out if there’s
something better happening in the moment, somewhere else.
Douglas Rushkoff

82. • Many scholars very much against the media 2.0 hypothesis
• It is very cynical about theory, but does draw heavily from theorists such
as Bourdieu and McLuhan
• Celebrates the “power of active users” , ignoring the commercial
structures that help to shape those powers
• Ignores real material and cultural constraints?
– Gender inequality?
– Poverty?
– Who’s online?

83. Back to …. The story of text
Radical democracy or not, something is happening to
text ‘after the media’ …

84. Games and Media Concepts
1.0
Genre
Narrative
Representation
Audience
Effects
2.0
Ludology
Play
Flow
Immersion
Identity
Key Reading; Frasca

85. Reading Games as
(Authorless) Literature

89. FLATTENED TEXTUALITY
Key reading: Videogames as (authorless literature)

90. The Postmodern: Baudrillard’s hyper-real?
neither dream nor reality but simulacrum –
fetishised reality

91. Virtual reality = product
deprived of its substance.
“Just as decaffeinated coffee
smells and tastes like real
coffee without being real
coffee,Virtual reality is
experienced as reality without
being so.What happens at the
end of this process of
virtualization, however, is that
we begin to experience ‘real
reality’ itself as a virtual
entity”.
(2002:231)

92. Thanks for coming!
More stuff in Dropbox …
Slides with links
Learning plans
Links to resources / further reading
julian@cemp.ac.uk