Comm 250 Exam 2

Front 1

Communication Cue

Back 1

message or act to which observers can attribute meaning or significance; examples are gestures, pictures, smells, and other sensory data

Front 2

Technological Determinism

Back 2

interested in the relationship between technology and society; technology drives the social world and drives progress

Front 3

Kinesics

Back 3

the study of the meaning of body movement

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Haptics

Back 4

the study of how people develop meanings for touch behaviors

Front 5

Hard Architecture

Back 5

refers to human-designed environments that make human contact more difficult by, for example, emphasizing uniformity, ease of maintenance, and clearly marked status levels over interpersonal contact

Front 6

Sommer's notion of tunnels and funnels

Back 6

Places that rank high in socially destructive buildings. For example, and airport terminal, the rows of benches do not allow for direct communication. A place that communication cannot happen correctly.

Front 7

Consistency Theory

Back 7

explains the means by which people maintain inner balance, congruence, or consistency among attitudes, opinions, and beliefs.

Front 8

Symbols

Back 8

a message that suggests, rather than verifies or mandates, the relations between things. When something symbolizes something else, it does not stand in one-to-one relation in the sense that when we see a symbol we know exactly what is being referred to. Rather, symbols are interpreted socially in different ways by different people.

Front 9

Icon

Back 9

the sign resembles its object in some way

Front 10

Index

Back 10

there is a direct link between the object and the sign; the two are actually connected. Ex: smoke is related to fire

Front 11

Signifier

Back 11

something that calls attention to, or stands for, something else

Front 12

Signified

Back 12

that which a signifier refers to or stands in for

Front 13

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Back 13

explains how the language of a culture affects (or, in the strong version of the theory, determines) the way a culture defines reality.

Front 14

William's definition of Culture

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culture is ordinary, and everything in a whole way of life.

Front 15

Marx's definition of Ideology

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men make their own history; but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
–“The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” Karl Marx

Front 16

Gramsci's definition of Ideology

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common sense- a system of traces without an inventory
• (common sense=ideology; all the stuff you know, that you don’t know you know)

Front 17

Denotation

Back 17

dictionary definition of something

Front 18

Connotation

Back 18

cultural meaning of something

Front 19

Postmodernism

Back 19

a newer set of social assumptions…
o grand narratives (metanarratives) are no longer persuasive or essential
o voices of different groups have been fragmented into different language games, each with its own set of rules
o no reliable connection exists between meaning and either authors’ intentions or external reality
o postmodern reality is based on surfaces and differing layers of meaning
o messages are inherently unstable and unspecifiable; deconstructing them shows how they are ambiguous and capable of undermining or contradicting themselves

Front 20

Hard Architecture

Back 20

refers to human-designed environments that make human contact more difficult by, for example, emphasizing uniformity, ease of maintenance, and clearly marked status levels over interpersonal contact

Front 21

The Global Village

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McLuhan describes how the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology and the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time . In bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion, electric speed has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree

Front 22

Semantics

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the study of language meaning

Front 23

Figure Ground Perception

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a concept developed by media theorist Marshall McLuhan referring to humans' ability to separate elements based upon contrast

Front 24

Metanarrative

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an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. According to John Stephens it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience". The prefix meta means "beyond" and is here used to mean "about", and a narrative is a story. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within totalizing schemes.

Front 25

The medium is the message

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phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.

Front 26

Communication Ecology

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refers to “the context in which communication processes occur” These processes are seen to involve people communicating with others in their social networks, both face-to-face and using a mix of media and communication technologies

Front 27

Selective Perception

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The act of a listener or reader choosing to filter out or not pay attention to stimuli either consciously or unconsciously.

Front 28

Perception

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process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information

Front 29

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

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prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.

Front 30

Signal

Back 30

an encoded message sent through a channel to a receiver. those messages that stand in a one-to-one, unambiguous relationship to what they represent.

Front 31

Modernism

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perspective that celebrates rationality and scientific method in the enlightenment tradition

Front 32

Code

Back 32

a system by which information can be communicated.