Media Literacy Terminology

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Superficial: A term meaning "regarding the surface" that often has a negative connotation based on the idea that deeper parts are more important to consider; of little significance, truth, or value.
Critical Autonomy: The process by which a member of the audience is able to read a media text in a way other than the preferred reading. Also used to describe the ability of media literacy students to deconstruct texts outside the classroom.
Testimonial: The use of famous people or respected institutions to sell a person, idea or product (celebrity endorsement).
Censorship: The practice of suppressing a text or part of a text that is considered objectionable according to certain standards of decency.
First-wave feminism: The feminist movement during the nineteenth and early twentieth century focused on de jure (officially mandated) inequalities, primarily on gaining women's suffrage.
Averted gaze: Another feature of passive representation in which women do not look at the camera. Women do not look directly at the viewers, challenging or meeting their point of view—they are something to be looked at, not someone to look and interpret
Close up: A very close camera angle on a character or object that depicts the subject in extreme detail, completely filling the frame so that little of the surroundings are shown.
Image maker: The person that creates, constructs, or selects the image for publication. In mass media, generally a large number of people contribute to making an image.
Object: A thing to be looked at; it is passive. People who are powerless and not fully-realized as complex individuals.
Bandwagon: The persuasive strategy that says "everyone is doing it." It plays upon the universal loneliness of humankind.
Media literate: A critical viewer who contemplates the ideas a certain media text conveys and carries on an internal dialogue with the image maker. Critical viewers are active, challenging, analyzing, reacting, exploring, and understanding the medium.
Silenced: Images show women with something over their mouth—a hand, clothing, etc. Their body language is passive, subdued, and vulnerable.
Consumers: The audience for whom a commercial media text is constructed and who responds to the text with commercial activity.
Drugged out: A feature of passive representation in which women are weakened by addiction, vulnerable; addiction is portrayed as sexy.
Mid-range shot: A camera shot from medium distance, showing part of the subject in some detail while still giving an impression of the whole subject and following any actions. Typically, individuals are shown from the knees or waist upward. The camera is placed at a middle distance from the subject so that our attention is focused on a particular subject.
Cut: An edited transition between two images in which one image is immediately replaced by another.
Subvert: To undermine a conventional idea or practice with the intent of creating new, revolutionary meaning. An attempt to overthrow or destroy an established notion. A negative media archetype is ridiculed or distorted.
Institutional racism: Those forces, social arrangements, institutions, structures, policies, precedents and systems of social relations that operate to deprive certain racial and ethnic groups of equality. Racism that is systemic and structural.
Over-Sexualized: There are many ways to represent women, but they are almost always presented as sexual in advertisements. Women are often depicted in positions and attire for the viewers pleasure, not their own. Their sexuality is the only aspect that is highlighted and it is exaggerated such that the women are caricatures of desire or attraction.
Media Literacy: The process of understanding and using the mass media in an assertive and non-passive way. This includes an informed and critical understanding of the nature of the media, the techniques used by them and the impact of these techniques. It's the ability to choose and select, to challenge and question, to be conscious about what's going on around you.
Ad hominem: Name calling. It can be direct or delicately indirect. Audiences love it. Flattery: Telling or implying that the members of your target audience are something that makes them feel good or, often, what they want to be. And, I am sure that someone as brilliant as yourself will easily understand this technique.
Glittering generalities: A subset of hype that utilizes impressive language. Vague and meaningless, it leaves the target impressed emotionally and, therefore, more susceptible to the next sales pitch.
Denial: The practice of avoiding attachment to unpopular things; it can be direct or indirect.
Counter advertising: Advertising that takes a position contrary to an advertising message that preceded it. Such advertising may be used to take an opposing position on a controversial topic, or to counter an impression that might be made by another party's advertising.
Trivialization of Power: The power women and girls are offered in advertising is often silly and trivial (i.e. power to change the color of their hair). When women and girls are given power, it is a masculine definition of power.
Violence against women: Violence, hostility, and dominance are often presented as erotic and appealing and normalized by advertisement. Masculinity in advertisements is often linked with violence, brutality, and intimidation, which ties into this portrayal of women.
Stereotype: Biased generalizations about a group of people based on hearsay, opinions, and often negative preconceived ideas. They are popularly held beliefs about a type of person or a group of people which do not take into account individual differences.
Viewer: The person who looks at the image. The person is active and determines how the object or subject should be interpreted.
Oversimplification: Solutions that avoid complexities or attach many problems to one solution.
Subliminal persuasion: The use of an advertising message presented below the threshold of consciousness. A visual or auditory message that is allegedly perceived psychologically, but not consciously. Also called subception.
Defensive nationalism: The use of fear (usually of an enemy) to sell a person, idea or product.
Subculture: A group of people with a culture (shared conventions, values, and rituals) which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong. If it is characterized by a systematic opposition to the dominant culture, it may be described as a counterculture.
Airbrush: An artist's technique for creating a smooth gradation of color. It is often used to cover imperfections in a photograph, e.g., in a model's skin.
Archetype: Patterned character types, plot patterns, or images that reoccur often enough in literature to be recognizable and thus have common meanings shared across diverse cultures.
Nostalgia: The idealization of and longing for the past. A nostalgic setting can make a product seem more attractive.
Long-range shot: The camera is placed at a distance from the subject so that the setting rather than a character is emphasized. This is used to establish the place where the action will take place. This is why it is also call an establishing shot. Given this function, a long shot (or wide shot) is often used at the beginning of a scene or sequence.
Slow motion: Movements on the screen appearing slower than they would in actual life. The footage is edited to have fewer frames per second thereby making the action appear slowed down.
Emaciated: The women in advertisements are unhealthily thin. An attempt to convince women they can and should achieve physical perfection to have value. Models are incredibly thin to a typically unattainable or unhealthy extent.
Card Stacking: Using statements or facts in a context that gives a false and/or misleading impression--telling only part of the story.
Deconstruction: The process by which the audience identifies the elements that make up the construction of meaning within a text.
Construction: The process by which a media text is shaped and given meaning through a process that is subject to a variety of decisions and is designed to keep the audience interested in the text.
Subject: A person who has agency of his or her own. A subject may be a point of focus in a media text, but is not inanimate or static.
Second-wave feminism: The feminist movement starting in the 1960s, particularly in America, where women campaigned for social and economic rights in addition to the more basic rights they had won during first-wave.
Scapegoating: A powerful subset of defensive nationalism that blames many problems upon one person, group, race, religion, etc.
Image advertising: Promoting the image, or general perception, of a product or service, rather than promoting its functional attributes. Commonly used for differentiating brands of parity products (e.g. "This is a woman's cigarette").
Tag Line: A slogan or phrase that conveys the most important product attribute or benefit that the advertiser wishes to convey. Generally, a theme to a campaign and appears in a banner. May also appear as clickable text beneath a banner and when clicked on redirects the browser to the same page as the visitor would have gone to if they had clicked on the banner.
Feminism: A theory advocating for the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes in all aspects of public and private life.
Objectification: Women's bodies are seen as things/objects; women are bodies, not people. Turning a person into a thing is often the first step toward justifying violence against her. Women are dehumanized; not life-like. A woman is presented as a body, not a person; she has no personality.
Advertising: A paid, mediated, form of communication from an identifiable source, designed to persuade the receiver to take some action, now or in the future.
Dismembered Body Parts: Women's bodies are dismembered with excessive focus on just one part of the body where there is intense close up on that part. Many times, a woman's face is not shown, which makes her body a thing, not a person. Other times, the woman is just an outline, shadow, or shape, leaving just her body, not a person. Women ARE their physical attributes and that is what they should be upon judged.
Brand name: Name used to distinguish one product from it's competitors. It can apply to a single product, an entire product line, or even a company.
Close Analysis: Interrupting the relentless flood and pace of entertainment media by pausing to critically assess what is being said, how a message grabs our attention, and what meanings we may be taking from it. Viewers can also conduct a formal close analysis by answering the six key questions.
Plain folks rhetoric: The strategy of promoting oneself or one's products as being of humble origins, common--one of the gals/guys. Unfortunately, plain folks reinforces anti-intellectualism implying that to be "common" is desirable.
Refute: To prove incorrect or show to be inaccurate. A counter-representation that is rarely seen is constructed in response to and in dialogue with prevalent narrow or negative representations.
Commodified: Women are seen as products or objects to be bought and sold. Women's value is not intrinsic but extrinsic—what do they give YOU?
Demographic: A descriptive classification for consumers that share a common characteristic, such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, income, education, household size, or other defining characteristics.
Splash Page: A special entrance page to a website. Advertisers often use it to direct people who click on a particular banner to more information about what the banner was regarding rather then sending them directly to the sites homepage.
Reclaim: The process of transforming words that were once pejorative by recovering them for subversive or political purpose. Communities re-evaluate or re-appropriate words that are used to in the dominant culture to oppress minorities. A community redefines negative media archetypes and embraces a portrayal that has traditionally been considered negative.
Genre: A category of media texts characterized by a particular style, form or content.
Hyperbole: Extreme exaggeration of importance, significance, usefulness, or effectiveness, often abbreviated as "hype."
Voice over narration: A film technique in which a person, typically not present on screen, narrates the action, presents his or her feelings, or summarizes events. The voice-over is often compared to authorial omniscience in prose.
Infantilized: Women are portrayed as childlike. Another feature of passive representation that implies that women should resist growing up and remain little girls. Childlike intelligence or persona is depicted as sexy; Women are shown as dolls
Competition between women: Women fighting against each other over men or products. This archetype potentially isolates women from each other, undermines trust, breeds suspicion, divides women, preventing finding political strength in numbers to challenge status quo
Straw man: Constructing an illogical position or deliberately damaged idea and presenting it as the position one's opposition supports or represents. Then a person proceeds to attack this idea, reducing one's opponent.
Depict: To portray or show, as in a picture.
Ageism: Women are only attractive if they are young; however, men become more "dignified" and "mature" as they age
Cultural appropriation: The dominant culture assimilates a subcultural element by force; a deliberate act of acquiring or adopting some specific elements of a subculture, often without the permission or approval of the group. can include the introduction of forms of dress or personal adornment, music and art, religion, language, or social behavior. These elements, once removed from their indigenous cultural contexts, may take on meanings that are significantly divergent from, or merely less nuanced than, those they originally held.
Transfer: Using symbols, quotations, or images not typically associated with a product in order to transform a product into something else. The notion that if you purchase a product, you are also buying a particular lifestyle or experience.

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