MEDIA STUDIES KEY CONCEPTS

EXPLORING BASIC CONCEPTS
To understand and analyse the media products and decode the messages conveyed through them one has to understand the basic concepts. Once you understand the ideas and theories associated with these concepts you can figure out hoe a media text/product is constructed and recieved. Media studies revolves around seven key concepts:


MEDIA FORMS AND LANGUAGE:
A media form is the type of media text being studied whereas the language used to study these forms will be different from one another e.g while studying a movie clip the movie is the media form and the language will be talking about the camera angles, sound, editing and mise en scene.

INSTITUTIONS:                                                                                                                       

A media institution is a company that owns numerous companies in various mass media i.e television, radio, publishing, motion pictures and the internet, A media institution is an organisation that deals with production, marketing, publishing and regulation of a media product. Learning about institutions helps us have a better understanding about who produces media texts, what their set of codes and values are and their relationship with us as individual. some of the most famous media institutions are Disney, Sony, Viacom, Time Warner, 20th Century Fox, News Corporation

Here are some of the links to the sites of these media giants

https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/

http://www.viacom.com/Pages/default.aspx

http://www.timewarner.com/

GENRE:

It is a way of categorizing a media text through its style and form e,g film genres i,e horror, comedy, thriller, sci fi, romance, action etc. The codes and conventions of the media text in different genres varies in one another.

REPRESENTATION:

The features shown in a media product are never real, instead they are representations of the real thing, this means that the reality is intentionally altered by the media producers, and that they are completely artificial versions of the reality we percieve around us. The analysis of the representation of different social groups forms an important part of the Media studies i.e representation of  gender, race, ethnicity, disability, age. sexuality etc

     

AUDIENCES:                                                                                                                      

Before producing a media product one has to determine its destination i.e the target audience and what messages do you want to convey to them. 

IDEOLOGY:

Literally it means a set of beliefs and values which an individual or a society holds to be true and important and live their lives with a mindset based on these values. However in Media, it is the idea behind a media text, it is the hidden message within the media product that the producer is trying to convey to the audience. There are some dominant ideologies present in the society e.g family values and importance of marriage etc, however they shift and change in accordance with the changes in the society.

 

NARRATIVE:

In media terms Narrative means story telling, it is the way the media producer combines different elements in a meaningful way and convey the message he wants to.