Media Studies A-Level

Media Studies A-Level glossary

542 key terms for Media Studies A-Level, A to Z, each linked to the topic pages that use it.

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A

Access and participation: How far a regulatory framework widens access and protects plural, informed discussion, or narrows participation.AQA
Achieved equality as a claim: The idea that the gains of earlier feminism have been secured and that gender equality is now largely achieved, so feminist critique is presented as no longer…AQA
Active audience: The model assumes audiences are active and select texts to meet purposes, rather than being treated as passive.AQA
Active audiences: Fans who do not simply consume a text but produce and share new meanings.AQA
Advertising: The promotional output that promotes a product or brand to a defined audience.AQA
Advertising and commercial funding: A funding mechanism that ties commercial media to audience size rather than to civic value.AQA
Agency and passivity: A method of noting who is given agency in a text and which group is positioned as passive or other.AQA
Agenda setting: The idea that news media do not tell audiences what to think so much as what to think about.AQA
Amateur producers at scale: The word 'mass' signals scale: it is not a few hobbyists but a large population producing and sharing.AQA
Anchorage: The process by which a text fixes or narrows the meaning of an ambiguous image, using words, captions, voiceovers, headlines or sound.AQA
Anchoring of meaning: The work the dominant signifier does to fix meaning and organise the reading of the other signs.AQA
Application of theory to media texts and industries: Linking a specific textual or industrial detail to the wider distribution of power rather than simply labelling a text 'sexist'.AQA
Application to named texts: Taking a named media example and showing more than one available version of the self it presents.AQA
Applying semiotic terms to media products: Asking how a sign works in a particular product rather than in isolation, identifying a signifier and the signified it is likely to evoke for an audience.AQA
Asymmetry of meaning: The separation of the moment of encoding from the moment of decoding, which can be asymmetrical because encoded and decoded meanings need not match.AQA
Audience address: Material outside the story world, such as on-screen titles, addresses the audience from outside it.AQA
Audience and citizen agency: Power also sits with audiences and citizens, who can campaign or complain.AQA
Audience and institutional response: How authorities, campaigners and audiences then respond as if the threat were real, sustaining the panic.AQA
Audience as producer: The shift from passive consumption to participation, where people produce and share media as well as consume it.AQA
Audience effects and moderation: In the media effects debate, literacy is treated as a moderating factor rather than total protection from influence.AQA
Audience expectation: Guided by narrative codes, including familiar genre patterns so viewers can anticipate what happens.AQA
Audience expectation and genre recognition: The blend of conventions confirms and unsettles what audiences anticipate, shaping or disrupting their expectation.AQA
Audience interpretation: Reading that depends on shared understanding, so the same sign may be read differently by audiences with different cultural knowledge.AQA
Audience interpretation and local adaptation: Audiences reinterpret imported texts and domestic industries adapt, which counters the argument that imported media erodes local culture.AQA
Audience knowledge: The audience's recognition of the texts being referenced, on which the meaning of an intertextual reference depends.AQA
Audience knowledge and skill: The knowledge, understanding and skills that let audiences interpret, evaluate and respond to media content.AQA
Audience maintenance: How media organisations work to hold on to audiences across national and global markets, through marketing and other strategies.AQA
Audience measurement: How ratings bodies and platforms estimate who is watching or engaging, and what those figures can and cannot show.AQA
Audience needs and gratification: A set of audience needs that media texts may satisfy, commonly grouped as information and surveillance, personal identity, social interaction and integration,…AQA
Audience negotiation: How audiences may accept, negotiate or reject the meanings a text makes available rather than being passively shaped.AQA
Audience negotiation and hybridisation: The way audiences may negotiate, resist or hybridise imported meanings, so cultural imperialism should be applied as an analytical claim about power rather…AQA
Audience participation: Audiences are no longer passive receivers but produce, share and circulate content, as in fan production or citizen journalism.AQA
Audience position: The position texts can place the audience in, such as that of an unseen observer watching others who are unaware of being watched.AQA
Audience positioning: How the knowledge shaped by narration shapes the viewer's response.AQA
Audience positioning through narrative: How the quest structure shapes the way the audience is positioned and engaged, rather than merely summarising plot events.AQA
Audience power: Fans do not accept the producer's meaning as final, and their reworking reveals their relationship with the original.AQA
Audience protection versus trade: The regulatory tension between protecting national audiences and enabling international media trade.AQA
Audience readings: How different audiences might read the same representation in contrasting ways, including negotiated or oppositional readings.AQA
Audience reception: The effect on audiences who may hold different views, since different audiences may read a text differently rather than all accepting the dominant ideology.AQA
Audience research and data: Research, demographics and data analytics used by organisations to decide which content and platforms suit which group.AQA
Audience response to constructed versions: Audiences respond to the copy rather than to any original, and may accept, negotiate or resist the simulated version.AQA
Audience segmentation: The grouping of an audience into parts so that a product can be planned, scheduled, priced and sold.AQA
Audience targeting: Who a product is designed for and how its codes, language, scheduling and marketing signal that.AQA
Audience targeting and reception: Targeting, segmentation and reception, kept separate from representation when explaining how a magazine addresses its readers.AQA
Audience understanding: How audiences understand a group or issue, which a misrepresentation shapes through choices about what to include and exclude.AQA
Audiences and distribution in a digital age: How radio reaches audiences through live broadcast, digital radio, streaming and podcast catch-up, and how scheduling and station identity shape meaning.AQA
Audiences and targeting: How audiences are targeted and measured, and how a newspaper product addresses its target audience.AQA

B

Baudrillard and postmodernism: Baudrillard's wider postmodern argument links hyperreality to media saturation.AQA
Belonging and exclusion: Media texts construct a sense of national belonging through shared language, symbols, national broadcasters, scheduling or narratives of common history, and…AQA
Binary oppositions: Pairs a text sets up, such as hero and villain, which deconstruction examines as constructed and made to seem stable.AQA
Binary oppositions in structuralism: Pairs of elements whose relations and oppositions generate meaning, with cultural codes supplying the conventional values placed on each side.AQA
Blurred boundary between producer and audience: The weakening of the line between producer and audience, which the 'end of audience' idea describes.AQA
Blurring media boundaries: The blurring of boundaries between media forms, with resulting changes in how cultural products are made and consumed.AQA
Blurring of original and copy: A postmodern idea that bricolage links to, alongside the mixing of cultural levels.AQA
Blurring of social group differences: Heavy television viewing tends to blur differences between social groups, so that heavy viewers converge towards a common outlook.AQA
Bricolage: The postmodern practice of assembling a media product from fragments of already existing texts, styles and objects, recombined into a new whole rather than…AQA

C

Causality: The chain of cause and effect that links events so that one happening makes the next seem to follow.AQA
Causality and event linkage: The causal links a text asks an audience to accept between events, stating how one event causes, enables or blocks another.AQA
Centre and periphery: The placing of some groups at the centre of a text and others at its edges, judged through screen time, speaking roles, occupational status and framing.AQA
Character perception: Asking who within the story world can perceive a given element, such as a character hearing a radio.AQA
Chronology versus causality: The order events are shown is not the same as why they happen, and editing can present causes before effects or withhold a cause to create mystery.AQA
Circulation: Covers how the product actually reaches and is used by audiences, including cinema release, streaming, broadcast scheduling, physical retail and online sharing.AQA
Circulation and marketing: Processes that, alongside production and distribution, shape what reaches audiences and how a film product is marketed.AQA
Circulation of shared meanings: A pattern across many texts, rather than one text, so the same assumptions recur in advertising, news, film and social media.AQA
Citizen journalism: News and comment produced by ordinary people rather than professional institutions, spread through blogs and social platforms.AQA
Citizen versus consumer framing: Public interest and public service broadcasting represent the citizen-facing side of regulation, as protection and provision for citizens rather than consumers.AQA
Citizen versus consumer interest: A contrast between a citizen-facing view, where regulation safeguards pluralism, accuracy and protection from harm, and a consumer-facing view, where…AQA
Code: A system of signs and conventions shared by a group, which allows meaning to be produced and read.AQA
Codes and conventions: What a product uses or plays with, and how those choices position the reader or viewer.AQA
Codes as systems of signs: The systems of signs a product uses, such as technical codes, written and spoken language, symbolic codes and narrative codes.AQA
Cognitive surplus: The collective free time, talent and willingness to contribute that societies can now direct into making and sharing media, rather than only watching.AQA
Collage and pastiche: Bricolage emphasises assembly of fragments, which distinguishes it from pastiche.AQA
Collective identity: The shared sense of who 'we' are that forms around a group, generation, nation, subculture or fandom, and which media representations help to shape.AQA
Combination and sequence: Reading a syntagm by asking how order and combination make meaning, since each sign sits beside alternatives that were not selected.AQA
Combination of genre conventions: Familiar genre ingredients are recombined so the product both repeats and departs from expectation.AQA
Combined social positions: Overlapping positions such as race, class and gender that a media text constructs and distributes power across, rather than a checklist of separate labels.AQA
Commercial funding: Income from advertising, subscriptions, sponsorship and sales, so products must attract audiences that advertisers or subscribers value.AQA
Commercial imperatives: Innovation is not simply creative freedom: it is shaped by commercial imperatives rather than being purely creative freedom.AQA
Commercial influence on content: Commercial priorities can shape content, with consequences for the diversity of content audiences receive.AQA
Commercial risk and uncertainty: Demand for cultural goods is unpredictable, so the industries that produce them carry risk.AQA
Commercial versus public interest: Commercial bodies may resist restrictions, while public-interest voices argue for protection.AQA
Commodification: The process by which cultural products and experiences are turned into goods that can be bought, sold and profited from.AQA
Community and sharing: Strong support for sharing creations, informal mentorship between experienced and newer fans, and a sense of social connection.AQA
Comparative measurement of audience perceptions: The differential is measured by comparing the responses of heavy and light viewing groups to the same question, such as estimates of crime.AQA
Concentration of media power: Concentrated ownership, driven by profit, that is linked to a narrowing range of voices and reduced incentive to invest in serious or challenging content.AQA
Conditions of consumption: The circumstances and context in which an audience encounters and makes sense of a media text.AQA
Conflict and resolution types: The type of conflict a genre foregrounds and the kind of resolution the text offers, such as contest and control or reconciliation and harmony.AQA
Conformity and departure from structure: Judging how far a text conforms to the model, showing which stages are present, absent, reordered or left unresolved and explaining the effect on the audience.AQA
Conglomerate ownership: One parent company owns many media businesses across different sectors, which can spread risk and enable cross-promotion.AQA
Conglomeration: The growth of large media companies into conglomerates: single corporations that own many separate businesses across different media sectors.AQA
Connotation: The second-order level of meaning in Barthes' semiotic model: the associations, values and feelings a sign carries beyond its literal referent.AQA
Connotation and sign choice: Signs carry connotations that position audiences, and repeated sign choices build a preferred way of seeing the world.AQA
Consent versus coercion: Hegemony is distinguished from simple coercion, since power is secured through consent and normalisation rather than through force.AQA
Constraints on individual creativity: Media output looks patterned rather than random because gatekeeping, professional norms and standardised workflows limit individual creativity.AQA
Constructed identity: The self is actively built rather than simply given at birth, assembled from available materials including media representations and presented to others.AQA
Constructed reality: The idea that media texts do not hold a mirror to the world but build a version of it through selection, editing, framing, casting, lighting and language.AQA
Constructed versus naturalised gender: Subversion disrupts repeated norms so that their constructed, non-natural status becomes visible.AQA
Construction of the natural: Asking what meanings a text makes available, which meanings it excludes, and how a discourse shapes what seems natural or acceptable.AQA
Content and genre variety: A dimension of diversity concerned with the variety of content and genres available within the cultural industries.AQA
Contested identity: A shared identity that is open to dispute and can be adopted or contested by the members of a group.AQA
Contested purposes of media regulation: The idea that regulation has no single neutral goal, because a rule protecting audiences may restrict an owner's freedom to profit.AQA
Contested regulation: Regulation is contested, with competing interests rather than a single authority deciding everything, as commercial bodies may resist restrictions while…AQA
Context and cultural convention: The surrounding text and cultural codes through which the same signifier can carry different signifieds, so meaning is social rather than fixed in the object…AQA
Context of production: Who produced the representation and in whose interest, such as institutional aims or audience targeting.AQA
Contrast with effects models: The model contrasts with effects models that treat audiences as passive, such as the hypodermic needle model.AQA
Conventions: Recurring elements of a genre, such as iconography, narrative patterns, character types and settings, which give audiences expectations and producers a shared…AQA
Conventions as settled habitual uses: The settled, repeated ways a form or genre habitually uses those codes, so audiences can recognise what they are encountering.AQA
Convergence: The merging of previously separate media technologies, platforms and practices, so that one device or service carries text, audio, video and interactivity.AQA
Convergence and interactivity: A media concept to which an example of participatory digital media can be linked.AQA
Convergence of heavy viewers' views: Heavy viewers from different backgrounds come to share more similar views, often closer to the 'television world', where light viewers might differ according…AQA
Countertype: A representation deliberately constructed to oppose a dominant or recurring stereotype of a group.AQA
Creativity versus commercial control: The concept draws attention to the tension between creativity and commercial control.AQA
Critical audience reception: A media-literate reader asks who made the text, for which audience and purpose, and which viewpoints are included or left out.AQA
Critical evaluation of media framing: Asking what a text gains by presenting equality as settled, which inequalities disappear from view, and whether choice is framed as individual.AQA
Critique of early effects models: The model is now widely criticised for ignoring audience differences, selective interpretation and social context, and is usually contrasted with…AQA
Cross-border media ownership: Ownership that crosses national borders, so that media companies are transnational rather than contained within one country.AQA
Cross-platform audience behaviour: Audiences access, share and reshape content across devices rather than receiving media through a single channel at a fixed time.AQA
Cross-platform content: Content that flows across devices and outlets, such as text, video and audio published through one website and app.AQA
Cross-reference between texts: A reference within one media text to another, such as a film recreating a famous shot or an advertisement quoting a well-known painting.AQA
Cultivated assumptions about the real world: Heavy viewers absorb the medium's repeated patterns of representation, so that its versions of crime, gender, authority or risk come to feel normal.AQA
Cultivation differential: The gap in outlook between heavy and light viewers, where heavy viewers are expected to give answers closer to the 'television world' than light viewers do.AQA
Cultivation theory: The theory in which the bardic function helps explain how consistent storytelling across many programmes can cultivate shared perceptions among audiences,…AQA
Cultural association: An association a sign carries that is culturally and contextually variable, so the same sign can carry different associations in different texts or audiences.AQA
Cultural capital: The knowledge, tastes and competencies that shape what media a person finds accessible or valuable.AQA
Cultural codes: Learned meanings a society attaches to signs, decoded by a reader through shared knowledge rather than through the sign's physical form alone.AQA
Cultural context: Circumstances including nationality, ethnicity, religion, language and shared values that shape how an audience reads a media product.AQA
Cultural imperialism: The process by which a dominant culture, often tied to economic and political power, spreads its values, norms and representations so widely that they become…AQA
Cultural meanings and values: A culture's shared meanings and values, which television circulates and reinforces through storytelling.AQA
Cultural plurality and coexistence: The idea that a society contains several cultural groups whose identities, languages and traditions coexist.AQA
Culture and norms: The values, norms, beliefs and shared ways of behaving that a person absorbs from their society.AQA
Cumulation: The gradual build-up of media influence through repeated exposure over time rather than after a single text.AQA
Cumulative exposure and cultivation: Repeated exposure to standardised images of the world is said to produce common, mainstreamed perceptions among heavy viewers.AQA
Cumulative, long-term exposure: Cultivation is gradual and cumulative, building across years of viewing rather than one broadcast.AQA
Curran and Seaton's critique of market power: The argument that market pressure can favour concentration, reduce investment in costly public-interest content and narrow the range of voices.AQA

D

Decline of professional gatekeeping: A shift in who can publish, with the power of professional gatekeepers weakened as audiences turn to user reviews or citizen footage alongside established…AQA
Decoding: The process by which audiences interpret and make meaning from the encoded text, interpreting through their own frameworks, which may differ from the…AQA
Decoding and preferred meaning: Conditions of consumption shape how a text is decoded because they affect attention, expectation and the frameworks an audience brings, steering a reading…AQA
Decoding through cultural knowledge: Reading a sign through audience knowledge and cultural context, so that the same sign can carry different cultural meanings in different societies.AQA
Deconstruction: A way of reading a media text that unsettles the meanings it seems to fix.AQA
Demographic categorisation: Sorting people by measurable social categories: age bands, gender and social class, often using a graded occupational scale.AQA
Demographic factors: Age, gender, social class, ethnicity and income, which shape how audiences use media.AQA
Denotation: The first-order, literal level of meaning in Barthes' semiotic model: the plain, descriptive sense a sign carries before wider cultural associations are added.AQA
Denotation and connotation: The two levels on which signification works: denotation, the literal or descriptive meaning, and connotation, the associated cultural meanings a sign evokes.AQA
Deregulation: Loosening or removing rules that govern media ownership, content or operation, usually so that markets can expand and new entrants can compete.AQA
Deregulation of media: Relaxing ownership rules in the belief that market entry will increase choice, as when a government relaxes cross-media ownership rules.AQA
Detachment from original context: A result of mixing styles, so that the original reference becomes detached from its context.AQA
Diaspora: Describes the dispersal of a people from a homeland and the cultural identities formed across more than one place.AQA
Diegesis: The fictional world of the story as the characters experience it, including events, settings and sounds that exist within that world.AQA
Diegetic and non-diegetic sound: Sound belonging to the story world is diegetic, while material outside it, such as a soundtrack score the characters cannot hear, is non-diegetic.AQA
Digital disruption of regulation: Digital technologies have reshaped regulation because content now circulates across platforms that sit outside traditional broadcast licences.AQA
Digital immigrants: Older people who supposedly adapt to digital and networked media later and less naturally than digital natives.AQA
Digital natives: People who have grown up with digital and networked media and are claimed to use them fluently and instinctively.AQA
Digital platform affordances: Platforms that make fan production cheap and fast, so a fan can publish to a global audience from a phone.AQA
Direct media influence: The idea that media messages are injected directly into a passive audience and produce predictable, powerful effects.AQA
Disproportion and amplification: The defining features of a moral panic, where coverage amplifies concern beyond the measurable harm and the claimed threat is out of proportion to evidence.AQA
Disruption and repair: The breaking of the initial equilibrium and the attempt to repair it, stages that many texts begin mid-way through or leave unresolved.AQA
Distinction between standardisation and mainstreaming: Standardisation concerns shared, homogenised content, whereas mainstreaming concerns the convergence of viewers' attitudes.AQA
Distortion and omission: Selective omission, exaggeration, loaded language or decontextualised images that produce a gap between a portrayal and a defensible account of it.AQA
Distribution: How the video is distributed and promoted across platforms such as streaming services, video-sharing sites and social media, and how audiences consume and…AQA
Distribution and sharing: Users take part by sharing media, alongside publishing, commenting and remixing.AQA
Diversification: A company expands into different markets or products beyond its original core, which can protect income when one market declines.AQA
Diversity of media output: The range of voices available, which regulatory intervention can protect against purely commercial priorities.AQA
Division of labour and professional skills: Tasks require particular skills, equipment and training, with roles such as direction, cinematography, sound and editing separated in a film crew.AQA
Dominant culture and marginalisation: The concern that media may reduce cultural plurality to a single dominant culture, showing groups as exotic, marginal or absent.AQA
Dominant ideology: The set of values, beliefs and assumptions so widely shared in a society that they come to seem normal or common sense.AQA
Dominant ideology in media: Repeated representations can present particular interests as natural, making alternative views harder to voice and winning agreement for a worldview.AQA
Dominant signifier: The sign that carries the meaning the producer most wants an audience to take away and organises how the other signs are understood.AQA
Dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings: The three reading positions: a dominant or preferred reading accepts the encoded meaning, a negotiated reading accepts parts while adapting others to its own…AQA

E

Economic factors: Commercial and not-for-profit public funding that shape what media industries can make and how they make it.AQA
Economies of scale and risk spreading: Large companies benefit from economies of scale and can spread risk across many markets, selling the same product worldwide.AQA
Effects on audience choice and diversity: Concentrated ownership can reduce the range of voices available, and profit-driven companies favour cheap, popular content.AQA
Encoding: The process by which a producer constructs meaning in a text by selecting and combining signs within a particular framework of knowledge, technical…AQA
Enforcement challenges: Algorithms and global distribution make enforcement harder, and the volume of content challenges regulators' capacity.AQA
Enigma and resolution: Devices such as a puzzle set up to be resolved, with clues and payoffs planted along the way.AQA
Equilibrium: The opening settled state of a narrative, in which the world of the text is presented as balanced and the audience learns the normal conditions against which…AQA
Evidence and longitudinal audience data: What would show a build-up over time rather than a single measured reaction, used to test a cumulative claim.AQA
Evidence-based reading of representation: Identifying the trait attached to a group and deciding whether the product frames it as favourable or unfavourable, grounded in what the representation shows.AQA
Exchange value: The value creative work acquires when it is turned into a good that can be sold.AQA

F

Fan audience: An engaged, often loyal group that invests emotionally and socially in a text or star, producing fan culture, discussion and sometimes its own content.AQA
Fan culture: Discussion and sometimes its own content produced by an engaged, often loyal group that invests emotionally and socially in a text or star.AQA
Fan participation: When fans comment on posts, vote in polls, submit questions, share and remix content, or participate in live streams and forums.AQA
Fan production: Fan activity such as writing fan fiction, editing fan videos, making fan art, running wikis and debating interpretations in online communities.AQA
Fandom participation: Watching or playing a text and then generating content around it, such as fan edits, fan fiction, cosplay photographs, reaction videos, wikis or mods.AQA
Fear of crime and trust: Survey questions about how safe and trustworthy the viewer considers the world, combined in the index and compared between light and heavy viewers.AQA
Feminist textual analysis: Analysis identifies the specific textual choice producing an imbalance and links it to the wider feminist argument.AQA
Fiske and Hartley: The originators of the concept of the bardic function, which describes television's role as a storyteller.AQA
Fluidity of identity: The idea that identity is changeable and negotiated, continually made and remade rather than a single settled core.AQA
Folk devils and stereotyping: Groups cast as the cause of a perceived threat, constructed through stereotyped labels and alarmist language in coverage.AQA
Formal and technical choices: For moving image work these include camerawork, editing, mise-en-scène and sound; for print and online products they include layout, typography, colour, image…AQA
Framing: One of the production choices, alongside selection, editing, casting, lighting and language, through which media texts build a version of the world.AQA
Framing devices in media texts: Framing works through word choice, images, headlines and the aspects chosen for emphasis.AQA
Free market: An economic arrangement in which prices, production and provision are shaped mainly by competition between private suppliers and by consumer demand, with…AQA
Free-market economics: A market-led philosophy assuming that competition and consumer choice discipline media companies and improve service to audiences.AQA
Funding models: The BBC is funded by the licence fee and required to inform, educate and entertain across a range of audiences.AQA
Funding models and public service: How funding shapes what gets made, such as a public service broadcaster funded by a licence fee facing different pressures from a commercial conglomerate.AQA

G

Gaps and overlaps in control: Governance is a network of steering mechanisms in which gaps or overlaps appear between the bodies involved.AQA
Gatekeeping and platform power: The continuing professional editorial standards and platform control that still shape much published content and distribution.AQA
Gender as constructed rather than essential: Gender is not an inner essence that produces behaviour but a performativity constituted through acts.AQA
Gender as discourse: A set of shared ways of talking about, showing and understanding masculinity and femininity that circulate through media and shape what seems natural or…AQA
Gender as socially constructed: Gender is learned, repeated and represented rather than treated as biological, which is why the distinction from sex matters.AQA
Gender performativity: Gender comes into being through citation of norms rather than through expression of a pre-existing identity, producing the illusion of an inner essence.AQA
Generalisation and fixed traits: Both positive and negative stereotypes remain stereotypes because they reduce a diverse group to a fixed set of characteristics.AQA
Genre as cultural category: A way of describing genre as a category that circulates in culture rather than simply a bundle of repeated textual conventions.AQA
Genre as repetition and difference: Neale's account of genre as a system that helps explain why sub-genres form, as audiences and producers vary familiar ingredients without abandoning them.AQA
Genre conventions and change over time: The recognition that the expectations a genre label carries shift over time, so conventions change across periods rather than remaining static.AQA
Genre evolution and variation: Genres change as conventions are repeated with difference over time, rather than remaining fixed and unchanging.AQA
Genre, narrative and representation: Framework areas to consider when studying video games, alongside regulation.AQA
Genres of integration: Genres that centre on tensions within a group or community, resolved through reconciliation, the formation of a couple or the rebuilding of collective harmony.AQA
Genres of order: Genres that centre on conflict resolved through a contest, often with an individual protagonist confronting an antagonist or threat.AQA
Gerbner: Researcher whose ideas on cultivation theory the Mean World Index was used by, alongside his colleagues, to test.AQA
Gilroy and the Black Atlantic: Argues that identity is not fixed to a single nation or pure origin but is formed through routes, movement, memory and cultural exchange.AQA
Global context: Shapes the process, for example through international sales, co-production funding or multi-territory platform release.AQA
Global flow of media products: Audiences in many countries consume largely Western, often English-language, content distributed by transnational media corporations.AQA
Global reach: Extending reach across a global scale, for example streaming or social media connecting international fans.AQA
Globalisation: The widening cross-border scale and interconnection of media ownership, production, distribution and consumption, so that formats and audiences operate on a…AQA
Group representation: Shared representations, language or symbols that media provide for a group, which members may adopt or contest.AQA

H

Harmonisation: A problem created by the mismatch, because different countries set different standards.AQA
Heavy versus light viewing: The two viewing groups whose responses to the same question are compared, with heavy viewers expected to answer closer to the 'television world'.AQA
Hegemonic reading: A reading that accepts the preferred meaning encoded by the producer and interprets the text as intended.AQA
Hesmondhalgh's account of cultural industry structure: An account of the cultural industries that treats control of the supply chain as a way of securing profit and reducing dependence on outside businesses.AQA
Historical and cultural contingency of gender: Gender is produced within particular social and cultural conditions, at a particular time, and is therefore open to change.AQA
Historical context: Circumstances including the period of production and the period of reception, which must be kept distinct when explaining audience readings.AQA
hooks' critique of universal feminism: The criticism that earlier feminism treated the concerns of privileged white women as universal.AQA
Hybridity: Describes a media product that combines conventions from two or more genres rather than sitting neatly inside one.AQA
Hybridity and dual belonging: Representations of diaspora may show hybrid identities, dual belonging, generational tension, or nostalgia for a homeland.AQA
Hyperreality: A condition in which the simulated version of reality feels more real, more vivid or more satisfying than any actual experience, so audiences lose the ability…AQA

I

Icon: A sign that resembles what it stands for, so a viewer recognises the meaning through likeness.AQA
Iconic signs: Signs that work through likeness, such as a photograph of a smiling face, a drawing of a flame on a warning label or a map of a country.AQA
Identity: How a person sees themselves and is positioned, such as gender identity, ethnicity, religion or subculture.AQA
Ideology: The set of values, beliefs and assumptions a media product treats as normal, natural or obvious, often without stating them.AQA
Imagined communities: A concept associated with Benedict Anderson's account of nationalism, proposing that a nation is a community imagined by its members, who will never meet most…AQA
Imitation of style: A recognisable copying of the look or conventions of another style, where the borrowing is affectionate or playful rather than satirical.AQA
Impartiality and diversity: PSB is expected to provide impartial news, cater for minority as well as majority tastes, and maintain quality and diversity that market-driven broadcasting…AQA
Independence from state and commercial pressure: Whether debate stays independent of both state and commercial pressure, rather than being narrowed by commercial or state-controlled communication.AQA
Index: A sign that points to something through a real, causal or physical connection rather than through resemblance or learned convention.AQA
Individual choice versus structural inequality: A representational strategy in which women are shown as freely choosing while structural inequality is treated as a personal matter.AQA
Individual producers and creators: Vloggers, podcasters and independent creators publish directly to audiences without a broadcast licence, so responsibility for compliance with law,…AQA
Industry construction of audiences: Audience categories made by industries that simplify real audiences and may embed assumptions.AQA
Inequality in audience competence: It raises the question of who is responsible when literacy is unevenly distributed, and relying on it can disadvantage those with fewer skills or resources.AQA
Inference: What the audience is invited to draw from an indexical sign once the causal link has been named.AQA
Institutional and audience shaping of genre: The idea that genre categories are shaped by institutions, audiences and critical discourse, with labels carrying expectations that producers use, marketing…AQA
Institutional control: Media institutions lose some control over meaning and circulation as audiences produce and circulate media themselves.AQA
Institutional rules, routines and gatekeeping: Work is organised through established bodies with rules and routines, such as studios, broadcasters and regulators, whose gatekeeping constrains individual…AQA
Integration and mergers: Mechanisms through which concentration can occur, alongside takeovers, often linked to the pursuit of profit and economies of scale.AQA
Interactivity: The two-way relationship between media producers and audiences, where audiences respond, contribute and shape content rather than only receiving it.AQA
Interactivity and active audiences: The player's actions shape the experience, so the audience is active rather than passive.AQA
Intersectionality: The idea that gender never operates alone, but combines with race, class, sexuality and other social positions so that experiences of patriarchy differ.AQA
Intertextuality: The way one media text refers to, borrows from or echoes another, so that meaning is shaped by the audience's knowledge of the texts being referenced.AQA

J

Jurisdiction: A problem created by the mismatch, because a platform or broadcaster based abroad may fall outside a national regulator's reach.AQA

L

Learned and shared meaning: Meanings attached to signs that are learned and socially shared rather than properties of the sign itself.AQA
Lévi-Strauss: Argued that meaning in cultural texts is produced through underlying structures of paired, opposed terms rather than through the surface content alone.AQA
Limitations of multiculturalism as a lens: Criticism that the perspective can treat cultures as fixed blocks and overlook power and inequality.AQA
Literal referent: What is shown or said in the most straightforward reading of a sign, stated before moving to connotation.AQA
Livingstone and Lunt on regulatory strain: Their account of regulation holds that globalisation strains national regulators, as harmonised cross-border rules become harder to agree.AQA
Localisation and distribution: Dubbing, subtitling and regional versions, alongside platform distribution, are strategies that help organisations maintain audiences.AQA
Long-term versus short-term effects: Slow, incremental influence built up across exposures, distinguished from immediate imitation after one exposure.AQA
Lowered barriers to media production: Cheap cameras, blogs, social platforms and free editing software mean amateurs can reach wide audiences without a broadcaster, publisher or studio.AQA

M

Magazine industries, ownership and funding: Ownership, funding models such as advertising or cover price, regulation and convergence as examinable knowledge about magazines.AQA
Mainstreaming: A concept within Gerbner's cultivation theory describing how heavy television viewing tends to blur differences between social groups, so heavy viewers from…AQA
Male gaze: A concept that voyeurism connects to because the viewer is often invited to look at a figure, frequently a woman, framed as an object of observation rather…AQA
Managed versus genuine interactivity: Interactivity can be genuine participation or a managed form that keeps audiences engaged for commercial benefit.AQA
Marginalisation: A process that pushes a group to the edges of economic, political and cultural life, limiting access to power, resources and representation.AQA
Market freedom and choice: The consumer-facing rationale that prioritises choice, competition and minimal intervention.AQA
Marketing: The wider process of researching, positioning and promoting to a market.AQA
Marketing and promotion: Tools such as trailers, posters, social media campaigns, star images and tie-ins that build awareness and shape how a product is positioned for different…AQA
Mass amateurisation: Shirky's idea that digital tools let huge numbers of ordinary people publish and distribute content once reserved for professional institutions.AQA
Mass audiences: Large and general groups, whose needs organisations meet with widely appealing content, broad scheduling and mainstream genres.AQA
Masterplot: A recurring, culturally familiar story pattern that audiences and producers recognise across many individual texts.AQA
Meaning and concept: The mental concept associated with a signifier, which is not the object itself and depends on shared cultural understanding.AQA
Meaning through arrangement: How order and combination make meaning, so that a close-up placed before a reaction shot invites a different reading from the same two shots reversed.AQA
Meaning through contrast: The choice implies something compared with the options rejected, so meaning is produced by selection, not by the sign alone.AQA
Meaning-making in media texts: In media analysis you identify the pairs a text sets up, then explain what the hierarchy or resolution of those pairs communicates.AQA
Media access and inequality: Access varies by income, region and education, so skill and critical literacy vary within the same generation.AQA
Media and collective identity: In media study you apply the idea by asking how texts construct a sense of national belonging, which connects the concept to ethnicity and postcolonial theory.AQA
Media as a resource for the self: The idea that media texts can supply resources audiences use to shape and revise their sense of self.AQA
Media concentration: The process by which ownership of media organisations becomes gathered into fewer, larger hands, so that a shrinking number of companies control a growing…AQA
Media construction and technique: Selection, framing, editing, sound and layout are the techniques that shape the meaning of a text.AQA
Media effects evidence: Bandura's experiments with children and filmed models are the classic evidence base suggesting that observation can shape conduct, though the effect depends…AQA
Media forms and their characteristic language: Forms such as television, film, magazines, newspapers, online and social media, advertising, music video, radio and games, which work through recognisable…AQA
Media industries and ownership: How ownership, funding and regulation shape newspaper content.AQA
Media industries framework: The sole framework through which film is studied in this specification, covering how the film industry operates as a system.AQA
Media industries, funding and regulation: The industrial context of who produces and broadcasts radio, how it is funded, and how regulation and public-service or commercial remits affect what can be…AQA
Media influence: The media's role among the agents of enculturation, shaping a viewer's sense of what is normal through repeated exposure to consistent messages.AQA
Media language: The framework area concerned with how a product communicates meaning through its formal and technical choices.AQA
Media language analysis: Naming the signifier precisely, then stating the concept it is taken to signify and explaining how the audience is invited to read it.AQA
Media language and sound codes in radio: The genre, presenters, sound design and mode of address through which a radio programme positions its listeners and constructs meaning.AQA
Media language conventions: Layout, language and images used by front pages and online editions to construct meaning, such as mastheads, headlines and bylines.AQA
Media language in television texts: How camerawork, editing, sound and mise-en-scène build meaning in a television product.AQA
Media language of magazine covers and layouts: Cover lines, masthead, mode of address, layout and image selection through which the magazine form is analysed.AQA
Media literacy: The set of skills that lets an audience read media texts critically rather than absorb them passively.AQA
Media materials for self-presentation: Media representations supply materials such as images, role models or lifestyle cues that people may use when presenting themselves to others.AQA
Media normalising gender: Repetition across media texts normalises particular constructions of gender, which texts present as natural or constructed.AQA
Media ownership and concentration: A small number of large transnational media corporations concentrate ownership and distribute their output globally.AQA
Media ownership and control: The ownership and control of media industries shape what audiences are offered, and privacy is one area where that power becomes visible.AQA
Media representation and normalisation: Recurring images of women and men normalise a hierarchy that audiences may absorb without noticing.AQA
Media saturation: The condition that Baudrillard argues produces the blurring of real and simulated.AQA
Media selection: Audiences select texts to meet their own purposes, which is the model's core assumption.AQA
Media simplification and stereotype: Representations may be reduced to a single story by dominant media, flattening diasporic complexity into stereotype.AQA
Media technologies and platforms: The specific technology or platform matched to a group's habits, such as a specialist magazine, digital radio station or targeted social media feed.AQA
Mediation: Selection, construction and anchoring shape what audiences are invited to believe, rather than simply reflecting reality.AQA
Misrepresentation: A representation that distorts, omits or unfairly characterises a group, event or issue, pointing to a gap between how something is portrayed and a defensible…AQA
Monetisation and industry structure: In-game purchases affect the industry, and developers, publishers or platforms have roles to explain.AQA
Monitoring and data collection: State or corporate monitoring of users' data, such as a platform collecting behavioural data to target advertising.AQA
Moral panic: A heightened, disproportionate public reaction in which the media identify a group, practice or new medium as a threat to shared values.AQA
Multi-sector parent ownership: A large parent company owning many subsidiary businesses across different media sectors, such as film, television, publishing and music.AQA
Multiculturalism: A theoretical perspective for analysing how media represent ethnic and cultural diversity within a society.AQA
Multiple steering bodies: Media is steered by a spread of bodies and processes rather than by one regulator acting alone.AQA
Music video: A short promotional moving-image text made to accompany and market a recorded song, treated as a media form in its own right rather than as a film.AQA
Myth: A second-order level of signification in which a sign from the first level becomes a signifier carrying a further, often ideological, meaning.AQA
Myth and naturalisation: Where connotation becomes so naturalised that it appears obvious.AQA
Mytheme: The smallest meaningful unit of a myth or narrative, comparable to the phoneme in language.AQA

N

Narrating voice and source: The character's voice-over, unseen narrator, or camera and editing system that performs the telling, or in print and online texts the byline voice, captions…AQA
Narration: The process by which a media text delivers its story to an audience, performed by a constructed device rather than the author's unmediated voice.AQA
Narrative function: The job a figure performs in a text, such as setting a task, opposing it, rewarding it, or supplying information or comedy.AQA
Narrative structure: The underlying organisation of a story, analysed in narratology rather than retold as plot, including the goal, obstacles and resolution.AQA
Narratology: The study in which narrative codes are the conventions and structures through which a text organises and communicates a story.AQA
National reach: Serving a niche across a national scale, for example a UK-wide niche service.AQA
National regulation and jurisdiction: Regulators face strain because a platform or broadcaster may sit outside a country's jurisdiction while still reaching its citizens.AQA
National regulation versus global media: Regulation designed for national broadcasting is tested by cultural flows that ignore borders, raising questions about who protects audiences and whose values…AQA
National versus global audiences: Domestic audiences may be served through domestic scheduling and culturally specific content, while global audiences require strategies such as universal…AQA
Naturalisation and ideology: Myth works by making culturally produced meanings look natural and inevitable rather than constructed, carrying value-laden connotations.AQA
Naturalisation in media representation: How texts present gendered behaviour as obvious or inevitable, directing attention to when and where those conventions arose.AQA
Naturalisation of meaning: Deconstruction asks how oppositions are made to look natural and what they leave out.AQA
Neale's genre theory: A theoretical framing for analysis that presents genre as a cultural category produced and negotiated culturally, to be supported with a specific example…AQA
Neale's summary of genre: A summary that distinguishes two broad narrative patterns genres can use, the genres of order and the genres of integration.AQA
Negotiated and oppositional readings: Responses in which audiences do not simply accept the invitation of a text but negotiate or resist the preferred reading it offers.AQA
Negotiated reading: A reading that accepts part of the preferred meaning while adapting or resisting other elements, often because the reader's own social position or experience…AQA
Neo-liberalism: The economic outlook that trusts free markets, private ownership and limited state intervention to deliver efficient, responsive media.AQA
New equilibrium: The closing stage in which the world of the text settles into a fresh balance that is not identical to the opening.AQA
New formats and technologies: Innovation can be technological, through new platforms and distribution methods, or textual, through new genres and formats.AQA
Niche audience: A relatively small, specific group with particular interests, served by specialist magazines, channels or online platforms.AQA
Normalisation of male authority: How media texts or industries reproduce male authority as normal and natural, so that male dominance appears natural or unremarkable.AQA
Normalisation of values: A dominant group's values come to seem normal and common-sense, and repeated representations can present particular interests as natural.AQA
Not-for-profit public funding: Income such as the licence fee that is not tied to advertising and can support less commercial content.AQA
Novelty combined with repetition: Companies often combine novelty with repetition to reduce risk.AQA

O

Objectification: Framing a watched figure as an object of observation rather than a subject with agency.AQA
Observational learning: The idea that audiences can acquire behaviours by observing others, including models shown in media texts.AQA
Obstacles, trials and delay: The tests that structure the middle of the quest, delay success and build suspense, sustaining audience interest.AQA
Ofcom and broadcast standards: The statutory regulator for broadcast television and radio and video-on-demand, applying content standards, impartiality and fairness rules.AQA
Online Safety Act 2023: This creates new duties on platforms regarding illegal and harmful content.AQA
Opposition and difference: A binary opposition sets two terms in tension, and the audience makes sense of the text by recognising the difference between them.AQA
Oppositional reading: A reading that rejects the preferred meaning and interprets the text against the grain, drawing a contrary meaning from the same material.AQA
Order, selection and withholding: The arrangement of events a text presents, including information that is withheld and gaps the audience fills in.AQA
Orientalism: A body of Western knowledge, imagery and representation that constructs 'the East' as exotic, backward, irrational or threatening, and in doing so supports…AQA
Othering and binaries: A patterned discourse that positions the West as normative and the East as other, examined through binaries such as rational/emotional or modern/traditional.AQA
Otherness (alterity): The process by which a media text defines a group as different from an assumed norm, with that difference treated as a marker of lesser value or of threat.AQA
Ownership and conglomeration: How media products are shaped by who owns the company, including commercial conglomerates chasing advertising revenue.AQA
Ownership and control: A dimension of diversity concerned with how concentrated media companies are, where high concentration can narrow the range of perspectives.AQA
Ownership and control of media: The shaping of what gets produced and how diverse the output is, as argued by Curran and Seaton.AQA
Ownership and control of the cultural industries: Treated by Hesmondhalgh's account as a central feature of how media is produced and circulated, namely this concentration of ownership.AQA
Ownership and funding: Industry factors that, with marketing and regulation, shape what reaches audiences and how a film product is financed.AQA
Ownership concentration and diversity of voices: Curran and Seaton's concern that concentrated ownership and profit pressure narrow the range of voices available.AQA

P

Paradigm: The pool of alternative signs available but not chosen, from which each sign in the combined chain was selected.AQA
Paradigm and syntagm together: The paradigm is the selection from a set, and the syntagm is the combination of selected signs into a sequence.AQA
Parody: A form that mocks or comments critically on its target, unlike pastiche, which borrows the manner respectfully or neutrally.AQA
Parody and hyperbolic repetition: Ways in which subversion can operate by exposing the imitative structure of gender norms.AQA
Partial versions of reality: What selection always produces, even when producers aim for balance, so it can be analysed rather than assumed to be bias.AQA
Participation and user-generated content: Users comment, share, remix, tag and upload, so the boundary between producer and audience blurs.AQA
Participatory culture: Jenkins' term for how fans stop being passive receivers and become active producers of meaning.AQA
Participatory media: Channels through which ordinary people report, publish and distribute news and comment themselves.AQA
Passive audience: Audiences treated as uniform and defenceless, so a single message is assumed to shape attitudes or behaviour in the same way for everyone.AQA
Passive mass audience: The older model of an audience receiving finished products, which the concept of the prosumer challenges.AQA
Pastiche: A postmodern technique in which a media text imitates the style, genre or conventions of another text or form without parodying it.AQA
Patriarchy: A feminist concept describing a social system in which men hold dominant power and women are systematically subordinated across institutions such as the…AQA
Performativity through repetition: Gender is produced through repeated stylised acts and representations rather than expressing a fixed inner essence, so media texts participate in 'doing'…AQA
Place, device and social setting: Specific conditions including where and when a text is consumed, the device used, and whether viewing is solitary or shared.AQA
Platform affordances and distribution: Features such as sharing, commenting, algorithmic distribution and user-generated content shape production, distribution and consumption.AQA
Platforms enabling audience publishing: The site, app or tool that lets the audience publish content and enables both the producing and consuming acts.AQA
Pluralism and the range of voices: The range of voices available to audiences, which narrows when a small number of proprietors can shape what is produced and published.AQA
Pluralism of voices: The protection of plural, informed discussion, judged by whose voices are heard and enabled.AQA
Plurality of voice: The number of independent voices, which can be reduced when relaxing ownership limits increases concentration of ownership.AQA
Polysemy: The condition of images carrying several possible readings, which is why producers steer the audience towards a preferred interpretation.AQA
Positive versus negative evaluation: A positive stereotype assigns apparently favourable traits, while a negative stereotype assigns unfavourable traits.AQA
Post-feminism: A critical term for the idea that the gains of earlier feminism have been secured and gender equality is now largely achieved, so feminist critique is…AQA
Postcolonial legacy of empire: The legacy of empire to which cultural imperialism is linked in postcolonial and ethnicity theory, as Western media forms, languages and value systems…AQA
Postcolonial representation: Considering how colonial power relations persist in contemporary representation, linking Orientalism to postcolonial theory.AQA
Postcolonial theory: Links otherness to colonial representation, where colonised peoples were framed as exotic, childlike, irrational or dangerous in order to justify control.AQA
Power and access: The restricted access to power, resources and representation that marginalised groups have.AQA
Power and audience positioning: Power operates through repetition, and a textual choice positions the audience and serves particular interests.AQA
Power and consent: Dominance maintained largely through consent rather than open force, so that a group's values come to seem normal and common-sense.AQA
Power and control in media industries: Those who own or regulate media can observe, profile and shape publics, and the capacity to watch is unevenly distributed.AQA
Power and representation: Reading media representations for how overlapping positions shape power, asking which combination is centred and which is marginalised.AQA
Power asymmetry in global media: The imbalance of power in global media flows, rather than neutral exchange, which the concept draws attention to.AQA
Preferred meaning: The meaning the producer builds into a text using shared codes, conventions and assumptions.AQA
Preferred reading: The reading that the textual strategies of a media text pull an audience towards, which audiences can accept, negotiate or resist.AQA
Preferred readings and interpretation: Framing offers a preferred reading, and audiences may accept, negotiate or reject the frame.AQA
Press regulation and the Editors' Code: Press standards are upheld by IPSO, which enforces the Editors' Code, with IMPRESS as an alternative approved regulator.AQA
Print media and national consciousness: Anderson argued that print media such as the novel and the newspaper helped people imagine themselves as part of a simultaneous national community by…AQA
Privacy and intrusion: Privacy is a legal and ethical limit on how media organisations gather and publish information, and intrusion is weighed against the harm it causes.AQA
Privatisation: Transferring public ownership to private hands, which is distinct from deregulation as rule removal.AQA
Privileging and devaluing in binary oppositions: The analyst examines how binary oppositions are organised so that one side is privileged and the other devalued, and how that arrangement supports a…AQA
Producer and consumer blurring: Audiences stop being a passive mass receiving one message and become producers and distributors too.AQA
Producer–audience boundary: The line between those who make media and those who consume it, which the 'End of audience' argument claims has weakened.AQA
Production: How content is made, including cheaper digital tools and data-driven commissioning.AQA
Production and distribution: Processes of the film industry that, together with circulation, shape what reaches audiences.AQA
Production context: The text's purpose, audience, budget and the wider ideology of the culture that made it, which shape its choices.AQA
Production, distribution and circulation: The processes by which media products are produced, distributed, marketed and consumed, including getting content to audiences.AQA
Production, distribution and exhibition: The successive stages of one chain that a firm might control, from the production studio through the distribution arm to the cinema chain or streaming platform.AQA
Production, distribution and platforms: Developers, publishers, platforms and consoles, plus physical copies, digital storefronts, streaming and subscription services.AQA
Profit and commercial pressure: The pursuit of profit can lead outlets to intrude on individuals' private lives, because personal material attracts attention and revenue.AQA
Profit and production decisions: Commodification shapes what gets made, so cultural industries may favour content that sells reliably.AQA
Profit security and reduced dependence: Control of the supply chain is treated as a way of securing profit and reducing dependence on outside businesses.AQA
Proprietor influence: The ability of a small number of proprietors to shape what is produced and published, as Curran and Seaton argue.AQA
Prosumer: An audience member who both consumes and produces media, blurring the line between reader and maker.AQA
PSB obligations and universality: Obligations commonly include universality of reach, provision of news and information, support for national and regional identity, and programming for…AQA
Psychographic categorisation: Sorting people by lifestyle and taste: what they do, value and enjoy, such as hobby communities, ethical consumers or fans of a genre.AQA
Public interest and regulation: Public funding and regulation can protect pluralism and democratic debate, as Curran and Seaton argue.AQA
Public interest as a contested concept: Defining the public interest is contested because what protects citizens may constrain market freedom.AQA
Public interest protection: The citizen-facing rationale that prioritises pluralism, accuracy and protection from harm.AQA
Public interest versus commercial interest: The tension between the public value regulation is meant to secure and the market value claimed by media owners and advertisers.AQA
Public Service Broadcasting (PSB): Broadcasting that is funded and regulated to serve the public interest rather than purely commercial ends.AQA
Public service remit: An obligation placed on a broadcaster, which is not a funding source and must be kept separate from the money that funds it.AQA
Public sphere: The space of open debate where citizens exchange views on matters of common concern, rather than a physical location.AQA
Public-service alternatives: Models of provision that can be contrasted with the free-market model, alongside state-regulated models.AQA

R

Range of producers and voices: A dimension of diversity concerned with the producers and voices able to enter the market, which digital distribution can widen access for smaller producers.AQA
Raunch culture: A cultural climate in which overt sexual display is presented as empowerment and choice, often commercially.AQA
Reception theory: Hall's reception theory proposes three broad reading positions that audiences may adopt when decoding a text.AQA
Recombination of existing texts: Borrowed pieces are assembled rather than invented, producing a collage-like effect in a new media product.AQA
Recurring narrative patterns: Story shapes that recur across many individual texts, such as the rags-to-riches rise, the quest, or the fall from grace.AQA
Recurring roles: Roles that help a text organise its story and its telling, and which can shift across a text.AQA
Reduced competition and independent voices: Concentration of ownership can reduce the number of independent voices in the market.AQA
Regulation: Rules and bodies that limit ownership concentration or set content standards, acting as a counterweight that can restrain the power of large media…AQA
Regulation and digital technology: Rules that constrain or enable what industries do, and how digital technology has changed distribution and audience access.AQA
Regulation and ethics: Regulation and audience trust constrain an outlet's choice when it weighs a story about a public figure's private life against the harm of intrusion.AQA
Regulation as a shared process: Regulation is not only laws and regulators imposing rules from above, but also depends on what audiences know, understand and can do.AQA
Reinforcement and challenge: Whether a text's representations and narrative choices uphold a dominant value or contest it, which analysis should consider.AQA
Reinforcement and motivation: Imitation is more likely when the model is rewarded for the behaviour and when the viewer is motivated and able to reproduce the action.AQA
Reinterpretation of texts: Fans select characters, settings and moments and reshape them in fan fiction, fan art or fan video.AQA
Relationship between fans and producers: Poaching is a metaphor for creative reuse that can resist or extend the producer's intended meaning.AQA
Relationship between framing and agenda setting: Framing differs from agenda setting, which concerns which issues are selected as important rather than how they are presented.AQA
Relay: Where words and image work together to advance a narrative rather than pin down a single meaning.AQA
Reliability and knowledge limits: What the narrating source knows, whether it is reliable, and how much it withholds from the audience.AQA
Repeated exposure over time: Encountering the same messages again and again across many texts, which may shape attitudes more than any one programme or article.AQA
Repetition and citation of norms: A set of repeated acts and stylised conventions that produce the illusion of an inner essence.AQA
Repetition and difference in Neale's theory: In Neale's terms, hybridity is an extreme form of difference, where familiar genre ingredients are recombined.AQA
Repetition and the production of identity: No single act makes a gender, but sustained repetition across time produces the appearance of a stable identity.AQA
Representation: Closely linked to constructed reality, because the constructed version also carries assumptions about groups and situations.AQA
Representation and mode of address: How a programme's mode of address positions its listeners, analysed alongside representation using the theoretical framework applied across the course.AQA
Representation and visibility: Who is placed at the centre of a text and who at its edges, including which groups speak, are spoken about and are barely visible.AQA
Representation as construction: Media construct meaning, so choices about what to include and exclude shape how audiences understand a group.AQA
Representation in magazine imagery and copy: How gender, class, ethnicity and age are constructed in magazine imagery and copy.AQA
Representation in television: How groups and issues are constructed in a television text.AQA
Representation of social groups: A dimension of diversity concerned with the representation of different social groups and experiences in media output.AQA
Representation versus type: A type is a functional role, whereas a stereotype is a generalised representation and a rounded individual character is distinct from both.AQA
Resemblance: The likeness between a sign and the thing it represents, which produces meaning for the audience.AQA
Responsibility and self-protection: Policy increasingly asks the public to manage risks themselves, for example through privacy settings or reporting tools.AQA
Risk and uncertainty: Cultural industries are risky because each new product is uncertain, so companies try to manage that risk.AQA
Risk spreading across media sectors: A loss in one division can be offset by profit in another.AQA
Risk-management strategies: Companies manage uncertainty through format repetition, genre, star branding and vertical integration.AQA
Rules: They govern how conventions are combined and repeated, setting limits and allowing variation within them.AQA

S

Salience: Signalled to audiences by which stories outlets choose to run, how often and how prominently, with placement, repetition and length acting as cues.AQA
Second-order meaning: The level at which a sign's associations, values and feelings are carried beyond its literal referent, explaining what the showing suggests within a culture.AQA
Second-order signification: A level built on an existing sign, where the first-level sign becomes a signifier carrying a further meaning.AQA
Selection and editing: Choices that build a version of events, as when a news bulletin chooses which events to report and which images to show, or a reality television programme…AQA
Selection and omission: Producers choose some elements of a group, place or issue and leave others out, at every stage from casting to cropping.AQA
Selection from a set of alternatives: The sign actually used gains meaning by contrast with the alternatives that were rejected.AQA
Selective representation: The idea that no media text can show a group, place or issue in full, so producers choose some elements and leave others out.AQA
Selectivity of media images: Choosing an opposite image is also a construction and may leave the underlying categories untouched.AQA
Self-aware referencing: Intertextuality in postmodern contexts that is often playful, drawing attention to the borrowing.AQA
Self-regulation: The press is largely self-regulated, with IPSO enforcing the Editors' Code and IMPRESS acting as an alternative approved regulator.AQA
Semiotics: The study in which the signifier is the physical, perceivable form of a sign.AQA
Sex versus gender: Sex refers to biological and bodily characteristics while gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours and identities associated with…AQA
Sexualisation: The process by which a person is valued primarily for their sexual appeal or behaviour, to the exclusion of other characteristics.AQA
Shared and unclear responsibility: Responsibility is shared and sometimes unclear, so a single harmful output may fall between a statutory regulator, a platform's own policies and industry codes.AQA
Shared and varied conventions: The specific conventions a sub-genre repeats from its parent genre and the ones it varies or adds.AQA
Shared assumptions across a mass audience: Similar assumptions about crime, gender, authority or risk that heavy viewers come to hold through cumulative exposure.AQA
Shared belonging: A sense of who 'we' are formed around a group, which media representations help to shape and which is open to dispute.AQA
Sign: A unit made of two halves, the signifier and the signified, where the signifier carries meaning by pointing towards a concept.AQA
Sign analysis: Justifying an association with evidence from the sign itself, grounding each connotation in visible or audible evidence rather than asserting it.AQA
Sign and referent: The connection between them is lost in Baudrillard's theory of simulation and hyperreality, where the map precedes the territory.AQA
Sign as a unit of meaning: The basic unit of meaning: anything that stands for something else and is read by an audience.AQA
Sign types: Icons, which work through likeness; symbols, where meaning comes from convention; and indices, where meaning comes from a causal or physical link.AQA
Signification: The process by which a sign carries meaning for a reader, producing meaning rather than fixing it in the sign itself.AQA
Signified: The concept or meaning that a signifier brings to mind, being the idea that a perceivable form is understood to represent.AQA
Signifier: The physical, perceivable form of a sign: the marks, sounds, colours, shapes or words that a reader or viewer actually encounters.AQA
Signifier and signified: A sign split into its physical or perceptible form, such as a word, image, sound or colour, and the concept or meaning it evokes.AQA
Simulacra: Copies that no longer have an original behind them, or signs that refer to other signs rather than to reality.AQA
Simulation: The process that produces signs which no longer refer to a real original, with hyperreality being the resulting condition.AQA
Social context: Circumstances including class, gender, age, education and peer group that shape how an audience reads a media product.AQA
Social interaction: Identity is made through choices and social interaction, not simply given, and construction describes making rather than fakery.AQA
Socialisation: The process by which people learn the norms, values and expectations of their society.AQA
Specialised audiences: Smaller and interest-defined groups, whose needs organisations meet with niche content, dedicated channels, magazines or online communities.AQA
Specialised versus mass audiences: A specialised audience is a narrow, interest-based group, while a mass audience is the broad general public.AQA
Standardisation: The way television's recurring, repeated patterns of representation become shared and uniform across a mass audience.AQA
Standardised workflows and release conventions: Institutions set schedules, budgets, commissioning conventions, compliance procedures and release windows that shape what gets made and how it travels.AQA
Star image: A constructed image built through editing, camerawork, mise-en-scène and sound, analysed precisely with media terminology.AQA
State and corporate observation: A government using communications data to monitor populations, or corporate monitoring of audience data, rather than only state activity.AQA
Statutory and self-regulation: Formal regulators, government and parliament, industry self-regulation, platform rules and international bodies all interact to shape media conduct.AQA
Statutory regulation: Regulation through bodies such as Ofcom, which oversees broadcast television and radio, video-on-demand services and telecoms under the Communications Act 2003.AQA
Statutory, co-regulatory and self-regulatory levels: The several levels at which regulation operates, which a strong answer identifies for a given example rather than treating regulation as a single fixed system.AQA
Stereotype: A representation that reduces a group to a few repeated, often negative traits.AQA
Stereotyping as simplification: Simplified, generalised judgements about a group that reduce a diverse group to a fixed set of characteristics.AQA
Story and telling: The two things narratology treats character types as helping a text to organise.AQA
Story versus plot: Story is the full set of events and characters in chronological order, while plot is the order, selection and emphasis the text actually presents.AQA
Structural power and gender hierarchy: Power located in systems and norms rather than in single attitudes or people, concerning a gendered hierarchy which intersects with class, race and other…AQA
Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss's approach of breaking myths into mythemes and mapping how they relate, often through binary oppositions, to reveal shared structures beneath…AQA
Stuart Hall: The theorist whose encoding/decoding model treats communication as a structured process rather than a simple transmission.AQA
Stylisation and cultural convention: Acts are stylised in that they follow culturally recognisable conventions of dress, gesture, speech and movement rather than being spontaneous expressions of…AQA
Sub-genre: A narrower category inside a broader genre, sharing the parent genre's core conventions while adding its own recurring features.AQA
Surveillance: The gathering and monitoring of information about audiences and citizens, whether by states, platforms or media organisations.AQA
Symbol: A sign whose meaning rests on convention rather than resemblance or physical connection.AQA
Symbolic code: A code such as colour and costume associations.AQA
Symbolic value of cultural goods: The primary value of the texts produced and circulated by cultural industries is symbolic or communicative.AQA
Syntagm: The chain of signs a text actually puts together, such as the sequence of shots in a trailer or the words in a headline.AQA

T

Target audience: The audience a product is designed for, which must be distinguished from the actual audience and supported with evidence.AQA
Targeting: Addressing a specific group so that producers can address specific needs profitably, with significance lying in loyalty, revenue and participation.AQA
Technical code: A code such as camera framing or editing patterns.AQA
Technical codes and meaning: Specific textual evidence such as mise-en-scène, camera angle, editing, language, sound or casting, explained through the meaning that choice produces for an…AQA
Technological change: Recent shifts that reshape the media industries, which should be connected to business decisions rather than treated as only about devices.AQA
Technological convergence: The merging of previously separate media technologies and platforms, which should be distinguished from the way audiences use media across platforms.AQA
Television as an agent of socialisation: Cultivation theory treats television as one agent of the process of socialisation, alongside family, school and peers.AQA
Television as storyteller: The role of television in telling stories that reflect and confirm what a society regards as important, normal and acceptable.AQA
Television industries and audiences: Production, distribution, regulation and funding, including public service broadcasting, alongside targeting, reception and response.AQA
Television world versus social reality: Heavy viewers converge towards a common outlook often closer to the 'television world'; mainstreaming is a relative tendency, not a claim that all viewers…AQA
Tension between public service and market freedom: Commercial broadcasters may argue obligations distort competition, and commercial pressure can be presented as a challenge to PSB obligations.AQA
Textual construction of viewpoint: How selection and combination, such as cropping, voiceover address or editing order, invite the audience into a viewpoint on a represented group.AQA
Textual evidence for interpretation: An ideological reading is an interpretation supported by textual evidence, not a claim about the producer's private intentions or a verdict on whether the…AQA
Textual evidence for narrative stages: Details such as the final scene, closing dialogue or last shot used to justify where each stage boundary falls.AQA
Textual poaching: Fans take material from a media text and rework it for their own purposes, a metaphor borrowed from Michel de Certeau.AQA
The protagonist's goal and transformation: The object of pursuit that motivates the protagonist and drives the narrative forward, and the change the protagonist undergoes.AQA
The self as effect rather than cause of gendered acts: The gendered self is treated as an effect of repeated acts rather than their cause.AQA
The unmarked norm: A white, Western, heterosexual, able-bodied or otherwise dominant position presented as ordinary, while the other group is marked by costume, accent, setting,…AQA
Theoretical framework applied to television: Applying a named framework area to a specific set television product rather than reciting a list of programmes.AQA
Todorov's equilibrium model: A common structure of an initial state of equilibrium, a disruption that breaks it, a recognition of the disruption, an attempt to repair it, and a new…AQA
Todorov's narratology: An approach that treats a narrative as a movement from a settled state, through disturbance, towards a restored or new order.AQA
Transnational culture: Media content, ownership and audiences that cross national borders, while rule-making and enforcement remain largely national.AQA
Turning points and resolution: The points through which plot works, alongside complications, shaping meaning or audience response.AQA

U

Uniform effects: The assumption that a single message shapes attitudes or behaviour in the same way for everyone, treating audiences as uniform and defenceless.AQA
User-generated content and participatory culture: Reviews, remixed clips, fan edits or gameplay footage that users publish on platforms for others to consume.AQA
Uses of media: Ways audiences use media differently, such as for information, escapism, identity affirmation, social connection or status.AQA

V

Value: The competing social goods that regulation is meant to protect, set against the commercial value that media firms seek from markets.AQA
Value judgements in setting and enforcing rules: Judgements that shape who is consulted and how compliance is judged when rules are set and enforced.AQA
Values and beliefs presented as natural: Assumptions a media product treats as normal, natural or obvious, often without stating them, which a learner should question as common sense.AQA
Values presented as natural: An ideological reading interprets a media product for the values, beliefs and assumptions it presents as normal, natural or desirable.AQA
Variation in audience reception: Audiences do not all consume a text under identical conditions, so reception can differ through variation in place, device and social setting.AQA
Vertical integration: One company owns several stages of the supply chain, for example both production and distribution, which can reduce costs and increase control over release.AQA
Visual track: The imagery of the video, which relates to the song through performance, narrative or concept imagery.AQA
Voyeurism: The pleasure of watching others who are unaware of being watched, and the way texts can place the audience in that position.AQA

W

Who sets the rules: Regulation involves struggles over who gets to set rules, whose interests are protected and who is heard.AQA
Whose interests an assumption serves: A question a learner should ask about what a text presents as common sense, alongside what it leaves out.AQA
Worldviews and social belief: A practical method is to identify a central opposition, note which side the product rewards, which it punishes or marginalises, and explain what social belief…AQA

Other terms

'End of audience': The idea that audiences access and circulate content across platforms, so they no longer receive media through a single channel at a fixed time.AQA

Where these terms come from

Each definition is one we publish on a Media Studies A-Level topic page or study guide. Open a term to see how each exam board words it and which topic it belongs to. For the full course, go to Media Studies revision or the glossary for every subject.

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