Week 6

Agenda settings is how the media presents the issues or news to the public. Media uses agenda settings to show the issues or problem, and we, the public, are the one who has to think about the issues and problem.

There's three purposes of agenda settings, which is prioritization, prediction and organizing power. Prioritization refers to the hierarchy of importance, where the the most important news are on the first page and the least important goes to the back. For example, in Brunei Times, news related about the whole Brunei, example an outbreak of the H1N1 disease, or news related about His Majesty goes to the front page.

Prediction, it refers to what the clientele wants, assuming the agenda is for the public. For example, a football match between Liverpool and Arsenal, and the football captain for Liverpool got injured during training. When the newspaper publish this story, the Liverpool fans are going to ask among them what is the team going to do without the team captain, what will be the outcome of the match and so on. The last purpose is organizing power, where the news construct our view of the world. The media organize what we should talk about and see. 

"Mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agenda to the public agenda.", as believed by McCombs and Shaw.(Griffin, 2009, p.359). What they believe is that the mass media has the ability to transfer important issues or news from the media to the public. For example, a disaster has happened on a country and the media keeps showing the image or the video of the disaster of what had happened to public and makes the public feel sympathy for the country and makes the public the wanting to help them in anyway.  

There's two important part in agenda settings, one of it is that affirmation of the power of the press. The public view media as the truth. The second part is that the individual were free to choose. The individual are free to choose weather or not to agree with the with news, some might agree and some might not.

Agenda settings has two levels; "The 1st level agenda settings deals with the transfer of object salience from the media to the public agenda." (Ghanem, 1997, p.4). The 2nd level agenda settings is the transfer of attribute salience.

The second level of agenda settings involves two major hypotheses about attribute salience:-
1) "The way an issue or other object is covered in the media (the attributes emphasized in the news) affects the way the public thinks about that object." (Ghanem, 1997, p.4)
2) "The way an issue or other object is covered in the media (the attributes emphasized in the news) affects the salience of that object on the public agenda." (Ghanem, 1997, p.4)

Function of agenda settings:-

i) Media Agenda- "The main dependent variable is the importance of an issue on the mass media agenda." (Dearing and Rogers, 1996, p.6)

ii) Public Agenda- "The main dependent variable is the importance of set of issues on the public agenda." (Dearing and Rogers, 1996, p.6)

iii) Policy Agenda- Issues that policy makers like legislators and government official consider important.

iv) Corporate Agenda- Issues that business corporation consider as important.

"Framing is the selection of a restricted number of thematically related attributes for inclusion on the media agenda when a particular object or issue is discussed." (Griffin, 2009, p.364). What it means is that framing is the process of  choosing of a specific number of points related to the media agenda. For example there has been a disease outbreak, so the frame would be how did it started? will there be a cure? how many has been infected? Is it deadly?.

Frame processes:-

=> Frame amplification- The clarification of a set of problems or issues

=> Frame extensions- Adding ideas or issues to an argument

=> Frame bridging- Linking of two or more idea, similar to frame extensions.

=> Frame transformation- The changing of an original structure and/or content of a frame to something else.

ASSIGNMENT

Education is needed to 'clean the face' of country 'X'

1st level agenda settings- The countries bad image

2nd level agenda settings- The public deviance, less public education, criminal activity, fall of economy and less foreign investor.

Its a mixture of both public and corporate agenda, as the news is about the public, and effects the public, and the news keeps talking about the economy of the country.

Prioritization of the article should be on the country's bad image. The reason is that, most of the problem that has been stated in the article leads to the bad image of country 'X'. This is also the reason why its the 1st level agenda settings. The other problems, public deviance, less public education, criminal activity, fall of economy and less foreign investor, are the 2nd level agenda due to the fact that they are attribute's to the main problem.

Frame amplification- How the bad image comes to country 'X' is being clarified in the statement, which is due to the lack of public education and public deviance

Frame extension- One of the reason for the bad image is due to the less of public education. Due to the less of public education, it leads to more stories, which is more children working and running amok and also about where the youth got used to watch the older citizens to spit and urinate in public places

Frame bridging- the main story, which is bad image, has been linked to the reason why there's less foreign investor which links to the story of the fall of economy of the group.

External references

Dearing, J. W. & Rogers, E.V (1996). Communication Concepts 6: Agenda-Setting. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Ghanem, S. (1997). Filling in the tapestry: The second level of agenda setting. In McCombs, M., L.Shaw, D., and Weaver, D. (Eds.)., Communication and Democracy: Exploring The Intellectual Frontiers In Agenda-Setting Theory (p.4). New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Association, Inc.

Griffin, E. (2009) A first look of communication theory (7th ed). Glencoe, IL: McGraw Hill.

Week 5

In week 5, we studied about Media Ecology. "Media Ecology is the study of different personal and social environment created by the use of different communication technologies." (Griffin, 2009, p.313). In other words, its the study of the medium of media. "A medium is a specific type of media; for example a book, newspaper, radio, television, telephone. film, web site. or email." (Griffin, 2009. p.313).

We touched on Communication versus Media Ecology. Communication focuses on audience reception and meaning-making.While, media ecology focuses on system and environment change of medium changes the whole communication environment. Media ecology critiques communication models.

Issues of media ecology is that technology is shaping our worldview, in other words, it is called technological determinism. There's 4 types of determinism:-

1) No Determinism- The media does not shape the society
2) Hard Determinism- The media alters the society directly, meaning that, we can't live without technologies
3) Soft Determinism- The media may alter the social structure
4) Partial Determinism- The media is one of many factors that shapes the society.

The three paradigm of viewing media:-
Medium as conduit
Medium as language
Medium as an environment

Media effects:-

Proposition

first proposition- media directly affects the viewer
second proposition- media is generally psychologically harmful and potentially dangerous. Meaning media desensitize society, what was once scary and gruesome in the past is not longer the same today.
third proposition- media damages community and social life.

Criticism 

first criticism- cultivation theory, the media is experienced and the influence it gains take time, not suddenly.
second criticism- media violence does not equate to social/ personal risk. The violence that we see through media doesn't mean that we, the people, will follow this violence act.
third criticism- media ecology, the medium and environment changes the interpretation of the content.

"The Medium Is The Message" by Marshall McLuhan

We have to prioritize the medium over its content. "The reason is that the "content" of any medium is always another medium." (McLuhan, 1979, p.391). There's two type of medium:-

Hot Medium- which means that the medium gives a lot of information but low in participation.(McLuhan, 1964, p.23).

Cold Medium- which means that the medium gives less information but high in participation. (McLuhan, 1964, p.23).

The Mobile Phone

How Mobile Phone, the medium, effects me??
-It's one of the Medium that is important to majority of the people today for communication that is.
-It's portable and I could communicate others easily.
-For me its a high medium, this due to the reason that, today's phone could access to the internet, high information, but the participants is the owner of the phone.

Reference list

Griffin, E. (2009) A first look at communication theory (7th ed). Glencoe, IL: McGraw Hill

McLuhan, M. (1979). The Medium Is The Message. In Mortensen, C. D. (Eds.)., Basic Readings In Communication Theory (2nd ed.). (p.391). New York

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: Extension Of Man. London: Routledge

Week 4

"Semiotics involves the study of signs and formalises an attempt to establish the meaning of theses signs." (Inskip, MacFarlane and Rafferty, 2007, p. 693). Sign is the combination of signifiers and signified. A signifier has many signified. There's 3 different types sign, which is symbolic, indexical and iconic.

Then, there's Code, where its a set of rules agreed upon by a community. The knowledge about this code is important or else the interpretation of the sign can't be understood by others. Chris also thought us about Denotation and Connotation. "Denotation tend to be described as the defitional, 'literal', 'obvious' or 'commonsense' meaning of a sign."(Chandler, 2002, p.140). While Connotation is the representation and the concept of the sign.

Semiotic is used as a tool of analysis for visual communication. It explain how discourse and ideologies are usually constructed and also to help us to study culture and laws governing social life.

The study of signs guide us to understand the visual image which construct meaning for us and when certain signifiers are combined with others, it could create an entirely different meaning.

Anchorage, which is a very powerful tool used in Semiotic, where it shapes how we view and see things. It is use to "anchor" the meaning of the sign so that a more specific interpretation is use. If anchorage was absent, the definition of an image would go any direction.

Before officially ending the class, he told us that "You Don't Wear Clothes, But Clothes Wear You." What he meant was that the clothes are sign which are already embedded with meaning that is already coded by culture, therefore we are wearing meaning that are already construct. He then told us to update the blog on what we have learned today and asked us to do semiotics on a transcript or a picture. 

This picture's shows a man in a public male toilet,  and on the walls are picture of ladies with different poses which represents different meaning. If the man were to "pee" on the 1st toilet bowl, the women in the picture is looking at his penis with a magnifying glass, which is kinda demeaning. I say its demeaning because it say's that the guy, if that guy were to "pee" on the 1st toilet bowl, has a small penis. On the 2nd toilet bowl, shows a women smiling and giving a thumbs up, this shows that the women like what she's seeing on the guy. 

While on the 3rd toilet bowl, from the picture, shows the guy peeing there and turning his head to the left and the women, what I could see is holding a can of spray and she's tilting back slightly. I guess this shows that, the women thinks that the urine was really stinky that she had to spray it with perfume. On the last toilet bowl, shows a picture of a women handing out money, so I assume that this shows that if the guy were to do his business on this bowl, it shows that the guy is some sort male stripper or something. Why I say this is that , the guy is revealing his penis and the women is paying him. 

Reference List


Chandler, D. (2002). Semiotics: The Basics. New York; Routledge.


Inskip, C., MacFarlane, A. & Rafferty, P. (2008). Meaning, communication, music: towards a revised communication model. Journal of Documentation, 64(5), 693