When analysing news in the Online Age, learners will be required to use the following critical perspectives.

Match the perspective to the definition.

  • Texts communicate meaning through a process of signification and signs can function at the level of denotation and connotation.
  • Constructed meanings can come to seem self-evident, achieving the status of myth through a process of naturalisation.
  • The idea that representation is the production of meaning through language, with language defined in its broadest sense as a system of signs.
  • The idea that stereotyping, as a form of representation, reduces people to a few simple characteristics or traits.
  • Exposure to repeated patterns of representation over long periods of time can shape and influence the way in which people perceive the world around them, cultivating particular views and opinions.
  • Communication is a process that involves encoding by producers and decoding by audiences.
  • The belief that there are 3 positions from which messages and meanings may be decoded: (dominant/hegemonic position or preferred reading, negotiated position, oppositional position)
  • The view of passive consumers of mass media content is no longer justifiable in the age of the internet as media consumers have now become producers who ‘speak back’ to the media in various ways.
  • Semiotics – Roland Barthes
  • Semiotics – Roland Barthes
  • Critical Perspectives on representation, including ethnicity – Stuart Hall
  • Critical Perspectives on representation, including ethnicity – Stuart Hall
  • Cultivation Theory – George Gerbner
  • Reception Theory – Stuart Hall
  • Reception Theory – Stuart Hall
  • ‘End of Audience’ - Clay Shirky