http://public.wsu.edu/~taflinge/com101/ com101home.html

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An understanding of media content as a text that
provides insight into our culture and our lives
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Critical Theories
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• The analysis of media messages to try to figure
  out how they affect people and the societies in
  which they live.
• Here are some common ones

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Semiotics

• The science of signs and symbols
• Looks at how people create and understand signs
  and symbols in order to comprehend communication
• examples

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Semiotics can also be known as symbolic
interactionism by those who dont like semiotics
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Psychoanalysis

• Examines how mass media messages influence the
  audiences social rules in order to suppress
  instinctive anti-social impulses

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Sociological Analysis

• The most common type of analysis done by critics
• Comes in many flavors that have evolved over the
  years

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Direct Effects Model

• Often considered propaganda
• Based on the idea that people are passive targets
  of mass media messages that cannot help but be
  influenced
• Points at such messages as advertising and
  government propaganda that people will follow
  like lemmings
• Denies that people are individuals

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Limited Effects or indirect effects Model

• Found that people may take in the messages, but
  will turn to opinion leaders for how to interpret
  and follow or not follow those messages
• People with strong opinions are unlikely to
  change them
• People pay more attention to messages they
  already agree with
• The most persuadable dont pay attention

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Critical Cultural Model

• Rather than effect, it looks at how people use
  and construct messages
• The media control the flow of information and
  what can be discussed
• Those who control the media control the message
• Rooted in neo-Marxism those who can control the
  culture control the media and thus society

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Agenda Setting

• The media dont tell us what to think, they tell
  us what to think about
• Examples
• Martin Luther
• Tom Paine
• William Randolph Hearst
• Modern news

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Book of the Dead
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Ramses II and the Battle of Kadesh
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The Torah
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Uses and Gratifications

• People actively seek and use those media messages
  that they personally feel gives them something
• They use the media to get something they want
• They feel gratification when they get what they
  want
• Such UGs can include to be amused, to find
  models to imitate, to see authority figures
  inflated or deflated

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Social Learning Theory

• Theres no way a person can experience everything
• The media provide information about the world and
  society that the individual cant experience
  alone
• Can create a persons reality what things are,
  how to think, how to behave, how to interact with
  others, how to be in society

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Cultivation Analysis

• Media messages tell people what the world is like
  and how people respond to what happens in the
  world
• An example is the mean world syndrome heavy
  users of the media think the world is a more
  violent, dangerous place than it actually is
  because so many media messages contain violence
  (e.g., news, cop shows, dramas)

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No one technique or theory has all the answers

• All hypotheses start with assumptions
• Scientific hypotheses start with assumptions
  about the world that can be empirically checked
  and falsified
• Social science hypotheses start with assumptions
  about people that usually cant be empirically
  studied and are taken as axiomatic (theyre true
  because I think theyre true and cant prove it
  one way or the other)

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All are ways to examine the media none are the
final answer
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