Cmn 140 Chapter 9

Front 1

active-audience theories

Back 1

theories that focus on assessing what people do with media; audience-centered theories

Front 2

uses-and-gratifications approach

Back 2

approach to media study focusing on the uses to which people put media and the gratifications they seek from those uses

Front 3

fraction of selection

Back 3

Schramm's graphic description of how individuals make media and content choices based on expectation of reward and effort required

Front 4

reception studies

Back 4

audience-centered theory that focuses on how various types of audience members make sense of specific forms of content (sometimes referred to as reception analysis)

Front 5

polysemic

Back 5

the characteristic of media texts as fundamentally ambiguous and legitimately interpretable in different ways

Front 6

preferred (or dominant) reading

Back 6

in reception studies the producer-intended meaning of a piece of content; assumed to reinforce the status quo (sometimes referred to as the dominant reading)

Front 7

negotiated meaning

Back 7

in reception studies when an audience member creates a personally meaningful interpretation of content that differs from the preferred reading in important ways

Front 8

oppositional decoding

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in reception studies when an audience member develops interpretations of content that are in direct opposition to a dominant reading

Front 9

moderate-effects theories

Back 9

mass communication theories that conceptualize media as capable of inducing important effects under certain conditions

Front 10

information-processing theory

Back 10

theory that uses mechanistic analogies to describe and interpret how people deal with all the stimuli they recieve

Front 11

elaboration likelihood model

Back 11

model of information processing that seeks to explain the level elaboration, or effort, brought to evaluating messages

Front 12

entertainment theory

Back 12

theory that conceptualizes and explicates key psychological mechanisms underlying audience use and enjoyment of entertainment-oriented media content

Front 13

limited cognitive resources

Back 13

in information-processing theory, idea that as more resources are directed toward one task, another will suffer

Front 14

schemas

Back 14

more or less highly structured sets of categories or patterns; sets of interrelated conceptual categories

Front 15

peripheral route

Back 15

in ELM, information processing that relies on cues unrelated to the issue at hand

Front 16

central route

Back 16

in ELM, information processing characterized by heightened scrutiny of information related to the issue at hand