Essential terms for commy coommy comm comms

a. Key Concepts: Essential

Codes: meaning systems consisting of signs. Signs are anything that has the potential to generate meaning, to signify. When a sign has generated meaning, it is said to have achieved signification. This is fundamental to the semiotic approach to the study of communication.

Communication: a process through which meanings are exchanged.

Context: the situation within which communication takes place.

Culture: a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values.

Identity: the sense we have of ourselves, which we then ‘represent’ ‘elsewhere’: a person’s social meaning.

Power: control and influence over other people and their actions.

Representation: refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. Such representations may be in speech or writing as well as still or moving pictures. (Daniel Chandler’s definition).

Value: the worth, importance, or usefulness of something to somebody.

b (i) The Nature of Culture: Essential

Bias: a way of privileging one argument or interest over another based on personal feeling rather than rational argument.

Cultural Practice: the things people do in everyday life – such as greeting ach other.

Cultural Product: the things that we encounter in our daily lives.

Elite Culture: the culture of those with power and influence.

High Culture: according to Arnold “the best that has been thought and said”: Art, Literature and Music.

Popular (Low) Culture: the products and practices of everyday life as practised and valued by ordinary people.

Youth Culture: the cultural products and practices of the young.

Ethnicity: a term which represents social groups with a shared history, sense of identity, geography and cultural roots which may occur despite racial difference. Ethnic character, background, or affiliation.

Gender: refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.

Meanings and Practices of Everyday Life (MPEL): the codes and conventions that govern the way we live our lives.

Prejudice: a pre-formed opinion, usually an unfavourable one, based on insufficient knowledge, irrational feelings, or inaccurate stereotypes.

Register: is used to describe variations in the use of language or other communication codes associated with a particular context such as a job, an area of technical expertise or social setting. As a student, part of the task is to learn the register of your subject so that you are able to write and speak as, say, a historian or

a geographer or a biologist.

Ritual: the system of set procedures and actions of a group.

Social class: any category based on power, wealth or income.

Socialisation: all of the processes through which we are inducted into society.

Status: the relative position or standing of somebody or something in a society or other group.

Stereotype: a mould into which reality is poured, whatever its individual shape. A stereotype is a simplified and generalised image of a group of people, which is created out of the values, judgements and assumptions of its creators, in most cases society itself. A stereotype of men might suggest their machismo or manliness.

Style: a distinctive and identifiable form in an artistic medium such as music, architecture, or literature: a way of doing something, especially a way regarded as expressing a particular attitude or typifying a particular period.

Taboo: forbidden to be used, mentioned, or approached because of social or cultural rather than legal prohibitions

c (i) Cultural Codes: Essential

Accent: a way of pronouncing words that indicates the place of origin or social background of the speaker.

Appearance: the way somebody or something looks or seems to other people: an outward aspect of somebody or something that creates a particular impression.

Bodily Adornment: all the ways in which ‘furnish’ and decorate the body (clothing, jewellery, make-up, tattooing etc).

Dialect: a type of language use specific to a particular area within a country.

Facial Expression: the use of the face as an expressive instrument of communication.

Feedback: the response received by the sender to a message.

Gesture: a movement made with a part of the body in order to express meaning or emotion or to communicate an instruction.

Group: a collection of individuals.

Group cohesion: the tendency of a group to remain intact.

Groupthink: a feature of groups whereby individual performance is inhibited by the priorities of the group as a whole.

Ideal self: the kind of person we would like to be.

Idiolect (idiosyncratic dialect): An individual’s personal language register, it encompasses all our experiences and knowledge of language. The idiolect consists not only of vocabulary but also of the conventions of performance: all our words in all the forms, contexts and with all the differing emphasis we have given to them.

Interaction: communication between or joint activity involving two or more people.

Kinesics: body movement such as gesture, facial expression, posture, head nodding, orientation (where you put your self in relation to others): the study of the way meanings are communicated by bodily movement.

Language: an abstract system of communication using words and sentences to convey meaning.

Non-verbal communication: all communication other than that involving words and language.

Non-verbal leakage: when messages ‘slip out’ in spite of our attempts to control them.

Paralanguage: consists of the non-verbal elements that accompany speech. It includes the way we speak (also known as prosodic features); volume; pitch; intonation; speed of delivery; articulation; rhythm; the sounds we make other than language; laughter; crying; lip smacking; yawning; sighing; screeching; coughing; filled pauses such as ‘Mmmm’, ‘Ahhh’, Errr’, Ummm; unfilled pauses.

Persona: an adopted form of the self/identity.

Perception: the process of making sense of sensory data.

Personal Style: the specific features of our individual communication.

Posture: the way we sit, stand and hold our bodies.

Proxemics: the study of how we use space and distance including seating arrangements, queuing and territoriality.

Proximity: the ways in which the space around us creates meanings for ourselves and others.

Role: a part we play.

Role model: a person whose behaviour, persona and/or appearance provide an influential model for others to follow.

School of thought: a set of beliefs or ideas held by a group of academics; a shared way of thinking about a particular issue.

Self-concept: is the idea we have of ourselves as individuals.

Self disclosure: the act of revealing ourselves, consciously or otherwise.

Self esteem: a measure of our own self worth.

Self-fulfilling prophecy: refers to how our belief that something is true can cause it to be so. For example, if we believe we are confident, we act as if we are confident, and so become confident.

Self image: the view we have of ourselves.

Self presentation: the conscious process through which self becomes text.

Verbal communication: communicating with words and language (as opposed to images, actions or behaviours)

d (i) Toolkits: Essential

Anchorage: directing receivers towards one particular meaning from a range of possible meanings. A caption can anchor the meaning of a photograph.

Barrier: anything which interferes with the processes of communication.

Channel: a communication route or connection.

Connotation: the meanings in a text that are revealed through the receiver’s own personal and cultural experience.

Convention: a rule of artistic practice.

Decode: to convert an encoded message into a form that can be understood.

Denotation: the specific, direct or obvious meaning of a sign rather than its associated meanings: those things directly referenced by a sign.

Encode: to convert a message into a means capable of being transmitted.

Form and Content: these describe the essential relationship between the ‘shape’ of a text (how it’s been made) and ‘what’s in it/what it’s about’.

Function: what a text, group of texts, or indeed communication itself, ‘does’ (inform, persuade, entertain, socialise etc).

Gatekeeper: someone who controls the selection of information to be offered to a given channel. Thus, for example, newspaper editors are significant gatekeepers, but we are all gatekeepers in an interpersonal sense, deciding as we do what we communicate and what we omit or hold back.

Genre: this term describes the subdivisions of the output of a given medium (e.g. television, film, magazine publishing). A genre is a type, a particular version of a communication medium. For example, soap opera is a television genre, for it represents a particular approach to theme, style and form.

Icon: a sign that works by its similarity to the thing it represents.

Index: a type of sign (in C.S. Peirce’s categorisation) that has a direct or causal relationship with its signified. The sign points (like an index finger) to its signified. Smoke is an index of fire.

Medium (and media): the method(s) we use to communicate.

Message: the meaning carried by an act of communication or text.

Model: a graphic or verbal representation of communication processes or aspects of them: a diagrammatic representation of a communication issue.

Noise source: the origin of any barrier to communication.

Open and closed texts: Eco talked about two tendencies of texts: the tendency to be ‘open’ and allow/invite/encourage a wide range of different interpretations: the opposite tendency presents ‘closed’ text which can only be read in a limited number of ways, sometimes only one way.

Process School: a school of thought in which communication is conceived as a process whereby information is transmitted.

Reader: the active interpreter of a message.

Reading: Hall et al. conceive of three distinct ‘varieties’:

a) Dominant-hegemonic: the ‘intended’ meaning or ‘preferred’ reading

b) Negotiated: an interpretation of a text that identifies the dominant reading but also seeks to mediate this

c) Oppositional: any reading that rejects or significantly ‘quarrels’ with the dominant reading and/or presents different/contrary meanings.

Receiver: someone to whom a message is directed.

Register: a form of linguistic performance which is responsive to the situation in which communication is taking place.

Semiotics: the study of signs and how they communicate.

Sender: the originator of communication.

Sign: That which stands for or represents an object, idea or mental concept.

Symbol: an arbitrary sign that works by the agreement among people as to what it represents.

Text: this term is used to refer to anything which can be 'read' for meaning. In this

sense, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a bowler hat, a television advertisement and Buckingham Palace are all texts.