COMM 350 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Symbolic Interactionism, False Hero, Media Studies
20 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
Encoding (creating text) & decoding (audience reading) are limited by social and communication conventions: communication is systematically distorted. Contribution: acts of communication have political implications, attention to audience part in construction of meaning, interplay between theory and practice (real life case studies), multicultural studies. Critique: marxist bias, over-emphasis on class (education, work, power) as a frame for representation, too much focus on popular culture & media study. Core ideas and values: bcs: concerned with and question social structures producing contemporary culture. Views of society: bcs: culture as a sense making of the world, a system of representation. Views of media: based on systems of representation negotiated by classes. Structuralism: structured way of thinking about world, distilling stories to basic elements. Recurring patterns, common endings point to ideologies and political assumptions. Patterns based on assumptions about roles, social relations, useful for uncovering stereotypes. Saussure & levi-strauss studies how language works, rules that create meaning: though they reject the term structuralism.
