● “Culture is the learned and shared system of attitudes, values, beliefs, and
practices that guide a community’s way of life and is passed down across
generations through customs, artifacts, stories, and other means.”
● Functions of stories:
○ Revealing how things work
○ What things are
○ What to do
● Second great transformation: the electronic revolution, it challenges the
culture that has been passed down from generation to generation via
family and close personal relationships
● Values, attitudes, practices, beliefs, norms, institutions and artifacts
● Sociocultural effects and Physiological effects
● Elements of a Story:
○ Setting
○ Characters
■ Protagonist, Antagonist, Foil
○ Point of view
■ First person, second person, third person, omniscient
○ Plot (narrative arc)
■ Inciting action
■ Journey
■ Discovery
■ Crisis
■ Confrontation
○ Theme (messege)
■ Moral: do stories always tell us the “right thing to do”?
● Semiotics: How people share meaning, Why words have different
meanings at different times and places, Why random shapes can be used
to conjure specific ideas in our brains
● “Communication is the relational process of creating and interpreting
messages that elicit a response.” (Griffin p. 6)
● Polysemic: a quality of symbols that means theyre open to multiple
interpretations
● Theory: “…a set of systematic, informed hunches about the way things
work.”
○ Nets: catch every aspect of the world
○ Lenses: transition the world to make it easier to see
○ Maps: make the world easier to navigate
● Macro – theories of broad scale
○ Systems of language
■ complex rules/patterns we invent to facilitate communication
○ Theories of representation
■ “hunches” for how humans create meaning
● Micro–theories about specific operations within systems
○ Signs (signifier, signified)
○ “Fixing” meaning
● Constructionism: things don't have meaning, we construct meaning
using representational systems
○ Culture affects meaning
○ Humans construct meaning
○ Meaning does not exist outside of language
● Reflective Theory: reflecting the true meaning that already exists in the
world
○ All language does is reflect meaning back to us
○ meaning is already there
● Intentional Theory: words mean what the author intends they to mean
○ The author imposes a direct and unique meaning
○ Objects don't have meaning until someone declares it does
● Representation: using language to say something meaningful about, or
to represent, the world meaningfully, to other people
○ Sign: stand for or represent concepts and conceptual relationships
■ Signifier
The image itself
2. Signified
Anger, or “I’m angry”
3. Sign
1+2
(sign = sign’r + sign’d)
○ Language: writing and speaking system
● Systems of representation
○ First: by which all sorts of objects, people and events are
correlated with a set of concepts or mental representations
■ The process of finding meaning and deciphering anyhing to
find meaning
■ Makes meaning out of things we cannot see
○ Second: the relationship between “things”, concepts, and signs lies
at the heart of the production of meaning in language
● Connections and meanings are arbitrary
● Regime of Truth: Each regime of truth determines what it true for the
people within it
● Subject Position: any given individual in a society uses the discursive
formation to see themself in a relationship to the society
● Discursive Formation: the entirety of the process, the experience that
they lived in, formed concepts, generated language, and exchanged
meanings
● Narrative Analysis: pg. 135 of Rowland Narrative Perspective
● Agenda Setting: “…mass media have the ability to transfer the salience
of items on their news agendas to the public agenda”
○ “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people
what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling people what
to think about.”
○ Salient: what sticks
■ Object Salience: the situation, object, even, etc, that the
media gets people to think about (snowstorm, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki)
■ Attribute Salience: the point of view or characteristic the
media gets people to think about (danger v. delight, formal
report v. first-hand account )
○ selection
emphasis
exclusion
elaboration