Term
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Definition
| - Life is a drama. The dramatistic pentad of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose is the critic’s tool to discover a speaker’s motives. The ultimate motive of rhetoric is the purging of guilt. Without audience identification with the speaker, there is no persuasion. |
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Term
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Definition
| - People are storytelling animals; almost all forms of human communication are fundamentally narrative. Listeners judge a story by whether it hangs together and rings true with the values of an ideal audience. Thus, narrative rationality is a matter of coherence and fidelity. |
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Term
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Definition
| The media must be understood ecologically. Changes in communication technology alter the symbolic environment – the socially constructed, sensory world of meanings. We shaped out tools – the phonetic alphabet, printing press, and telegraph – and they in turn have shaped our perceptions, experiences, attitudes, and behaviors. Thus the medium is the message. |
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Term
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Definition
| - The mass media function to maintain the ideology of those who already have power. Corporately controlled media provide the dominant discourse of the day that frames interpretation of events. Critics should seek not only to interpret culture, but to change it. Media audiences do have the capacity to resist hegemonic influence |
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Term
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Definition
| - Television has become society’s storyteller. Heavy television viewers see a vast quantity of dramatic violence, which cultivates an exaggerated belief in a mean and scary world. Mainstreaming and resonance are two of the processes that create a homogenous and fearful populace |
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Term
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Definition
| - The media tell us 1. What to think about, and 2. How to think about it. The first process (agenda setting) transfers the salience of items on their news agenda to our agenda. The second process (framing) transfers the salience of selected attributes to prominence among the pictures in our heads. |
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Term
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Definition
| - People live in perpetual fear of isolating themselves and carefully monitor public opinion to see which views are acceptable. When their opinions appear out of favor, they keep silent. Television’s constant repetition of a single point of view biases perception of public opinion and accelerates the spiral of silence. |
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Term
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Definition
| - People from collectivistic cultures with an interdependent self-image are concerned with giving other-face or mutual-face, so they adopt a conflict style of avoiding or integrating. People form individualistic cultures with an independent self-image are concerned with protecting self-face so they adopt a conflict style of dominating. |
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Term
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Definition
| - Through ethnography of communication we know cultures have multiple speech codes that involve a distinctive psychology, sociology, and rhetoric. The meaning of a speech code is determined by speaker and listeners, and is woven into speech itself. Artful use of code can explain, predict, and control talk about talk. |
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Term
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Definition
| - Different locations in the social hierarchy affect what is seen. The standpoints of marginalized people provide a less false view of the world than do the privileged perspectives of the powerful. Strong objectivity requires that scientific research start from the lives of women, the poor, gays and lesbians, and racial minorities. |
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Term
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Definition
| - Man-made language aids in defining, depreciating, and excluding women. Women are less articulate in public because the words and the norms for their use have been devised by men. As women cease to be muted, men will no longer maintain their position of dominance in society. |
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