Soap Opera Key Terms

Audience - A group of people reading or consuming any media product.

Binary - Thinking in opposites. In digital coding, binary describes the coding of digits, we often find that meaning is constructed around binary opposites which are simplistic.

Catharsis - To purify or cleanse yourself by releasing emotions or feelings. In relation to video games, the question is whether playing a violent game releases pent-up anger and frudtration, which in turn make a person less likely to be violent or angry in the 'real world'.

Convention - The expected ingredients in a particular type of media text - usually associated with genre.

Effects - The idea that the media have influence over people and can play a role in changing behaviour. The suggestion that people's behaviour is influenced or altered as a result of exposure to media: direct and indirect, sgnificant to others or relatively unimportant are all described as 'media effects'.

Feminism - The belief that we should oppose media texts that represent women as unequal to men.

Gate keeping - The role played by editors, producers, owners and reulators in opening and closing to greater and lesser extents, the flow of media information, through selecting which information to provide and wjich to deny people access to.

Hybrid - A fusion of more than one media form or a mixing of global and local or a mixing of identities.

Hyperreality - A state in which images and simulatios take on more relaity than the state they represent so that the distinction between reality and representation is no longer sustainable.

Iconic - A sign which resembles directly what it represents.

Male gaze - From Lauren Mulvey (1975), an analysis of media images which suggest that the camera represents a male perspective and as such casts men as subjects and woment as objects.

Narrative - The way information is ordered or a story is told.

Pleasure - All forms of engagement with media texts.

Public Service - Founded on priciples of democract as opposed to profit. Funded through public taxation.

Realism - The degree and the variety of ways in which media text represent and fit with ideas about reality.

Reflective - Being relective is very difficult - it is to do with analysing yourself, your ways of understanding the world, your actions and the way you think.

Representation - A neutral, transparaetn view of reality but offer instead a mediated re- presentation or it. The processes by whihc audience members come to undersatand media texts in terms of how they seem to relate to people, ideas, events, themes and places.

Stereotype - A blunt, overstated representation of a type of person.

Text - All media products are texts but we can extend this term to include people, ourselves and others.

Theory/theories - Often described as the opposite of practice or practical theory is actually the understanding of how things work.

Verisimilitude - The logical, seemingly authentic world of a text. Not the same as 'realist' because every text has a logical, sensible world constructed through continuity, detail and recognition.