Key Concepts

Genre
A text is classified in a genre through the identification of key elements which occur in that text and in others of the same genre.
Genre is important for both the audience and the producers:
Audience: Select text based on genre
                   : Have systems of expectations
                   : Identify with repetition and may shape their own identity
Producers: Market texts according to genre
                    : Standardise production practices according to to genre coventions, which cuts costs
                   
Genre Classisfication can be seen as both positive and negative. positives include conformity established, as well as giving audiences what they want, however this can lead to stagnation and the audinece beings to believe 'they're all just the same'.
However on the other hand, for exapmle the great British Soap Opera has been the same for decades, inlcude people living in the same house/go about a heightened version of their daily lives, surface realism and making idiots of themselves.
Genre provides key elements for an audience to recognise, so that they may further appreciate the variation and originality surrounding the representation of those elements.


Narrative
Narrative is the coherence/organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. We connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. Each text becomes part of the previous and the next through its relationship with the audience.
When narriative is examined, there are cdes and conventions that need to be consiedered, which are Genre, Character, Form and Time. Because we read narrative from an early age we are able to compare texts with others that we understand convetions. Narrative is the mre basic sense of series of events, but in order to construct a menaing form these events they must be linked in some form.

Barthes´ Codes
Roland Barthes describes a text as
"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..."
in basic terms, what he is saying is that text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours.
Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following four ways:
- Action Code & Enigma Code (answer & questions)
- Symbols & Signs
- Points of Cultural Reference
- Simple description/reproduction

Narrative Structure
There are many different ways of breaking down narriative structures:
- Todorov, suggests narriative is simply equilibrium, disequilibrium and new equilibrium
- Propp,  suggests characters and actions
- Levi-Strauss, suggests constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narraitve can only end on a resolution of conflict. opposition can be visual or conceptual. Binary Oppositions


Representation
All media texts are re-presentations of reality.

Extension/Restiction of Eperince of Reality
By giving audiences information, media texts extend experience of reality. Every time you see a wildlife documentary, or read about political events in a country on the other side of the world, or watch a movie about a historical event, you extend your experience of life on this planet. However, because the producers of the media text have selected the information we receive, then our experience is restricted: we only see selected highlights of the lifestyle of the creatures portrayed in the wildlife documentary
The study of representation is about decoding the different layers of truth/fiction/whatever. In order to fully appreciate the part representation plays in a media text you must consider:
- Who Produced it?
- What/Who represented in the text?
- How is that thing represented?
- Why was this particular representation (this shot, framed from this angle, this story phrased in these terms, etc) selected, and what might the alternatives have been?
- What frame of reference does the audience use when understanding the representation?


Audeince
Audience theory provides a starting point for many Media Studies tasks. Both the producer and the audience of a text will need to consider the destination of that text, for example, its target audience and how that audience will respond to that text.
A media text in itself has no meaning until it is read or decoded by an audience.

The Hypodermic Needle Model
This theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media.
The Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciouness of the audience unmediated, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text. This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers. This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents, politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media texts, for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent behaviour and will then act them out themselves.

Two-Step Flow
Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their findings suggested that the information filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts.

Uses & Gratifiations
In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:
- Surveillance
- Correlation
- Entertainment
- Cultural transmission
Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes:
- Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.
- Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life
- Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts
- Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

Reception Theory
This is based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means.