Media Terminology

Primary Media: Where we pay close attention to the media text, for instance, in the close reading of a magazine or newspaper or in the cinema when we concentrate on the film in front of us

Secondary Media: Where the medium or the text is there in the background and we are aware that it is there but not concentrating on it. This happens most often with music-based radio but also when the television is on but we are not really watching it; maybe we are talking with friends, eating or carrying out some other activity.

Tertiary Media: Where the medium is present but we are not aware of it. The most obvious are advertising hoardings or placards that we pass but do not register.

Utopian Solution: A term taken from Dyer (1977), who suggested that entertainment genres are popular because of their fantasy element and the escapism that they provide from daily routines and problems. He suggested that particular genres such as Musicals and Westerns offered particular types of Utopian Solution.

Niche audiences: The way in which the media and its audiences are separated into smaller segments, each of which have different tastes, concerns and interests.

Interpellation: A term that was used by Louis Althusser to describe how the media hail us as an individual who has a shared understanding of the ideology within the text.

Demographics: Audiences can be classified into groups using quantitative (anything that can be charted using a graph) data about age gender and socio-economic group (their profession / class / income).

Psychographics: A system for measuring consumers’ beliefs, opinions and interests. This system gathers psychological information which are called IAO variables (stands for Interests, Attitudes and Opinions). Therefore groups can be classified in terms of variables like personality, values, attitudes, interests or lifestyles.

Situated Culture:  A term used to describe how our ‘situation’ (i.e. daily routines and patterns, social relationships with family and peer groups) can influence our engagement with and interpretation of media texts.

Cultural Imperialism: Refers to the way in which a culture can build empires abroad through the export of its media.

Self Regulation: The content and treatment of articles, programmes and advertisements is monitored an vetted by bodies set up by the industry themselves.