> > How 'bout translating some of your jargon into English, Jeremy? 'Sounds > > like interesting stuff, but I don't have the background. For example: > > discourse theory, text-oriented, audience-oriented, the viewer as > > "subject" and so on. > > --Fiona > > The reason that "jargon" gets used is that if you had to explain > what "discourse theory" means every time you wanted to use the > word, you'd never get to _say_ anything: you'd spend all your time > defining words. > > M. Tepper Brown University One book that I would recommend to those new (and even not so new) to communications theory is _Key Concepts in Communication_, by O'Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders and Fiske (Methuen: New York, 1983). This is essentially a glossary which provides brief explanations of popular communications "jargon." Here's a sample entry related to this discussion (words between slashes are defined elsewhere in the book): - - - - - discourse: television discourse * Television discourse is, most obviously, the output of television. Thus it includes the familiar /codes/, /styles/, /genres/ and /conventions/ of mainstream television, together with established scheduling and continuity habits, and the whole complex of /professional/ practices, /textual/ devices and strategies that we learn to identify and expect as TV. * However, television discourse is much more than this and much if not most of it can be found outside the programmes, or even outside the medium itself. Television discourse includes the enormous amounts of sense-making /representations/ that have been established as the available mode by means of which our watching or `reading' of television is fixed, directed, regulated and encouraged along particular lines. These representations can be traced in, for instance, government reports and legislation, the output of campaigning groups who wish to affect some change in policy, newspaper reviews and previews of TV programmes, `news' stories about stars, celebrities and TV personalities, the internal communications of media corporations, academic and other studies of TV, spin-off products, promotions and publications tied to TV, literary, cinema or comic reworkings of familiar TV characters or series, parodies in any form, and the almost irrecoverable talk and conversation which people use to place and render personally meaningful their own immediate experience of watching TV. It is clear that television discourse is much more than `what's on the telly.' From the point of view of the viewer, it follows that television discourse includes the discursive resources available to that viewer. These will be determined by education, political /ideology/, and the particular inflections of /common sense/ that are most widely encouraged. Social differences will produce different discursive resources for different viewers--so TV discourse includes social relations and divisions, such as /class/, /gender/, age, ethnic, national, regional, family and others. All these relations can be and are themselves represented more or less coherently, and some (for example, the family) are more systematically encouraged for viewers to identify with than others (for example, class). - - - - - Of course, it is very helpful to have read the entry on /discourse/, but I'm too lazy to reproduce it here. :-) However, the book seems quite good, and includes a 13 page bibliography and many references in the entries. It is certainly a good way to get a start on certain aspects of communications theory. Though I am a novice at the communications game, I find the field quite interesting and would look forward to discussing these ideas further, even if it does involve "jargon." Television is amazingly pervasive in our society and, given the number of hours people spend watching it, it must have a large influence. (Neil Postman, author of _Amusing Ourselves to Death_, certainly makes a strong argument that this is so!) One of the areas that strikes my curiousity seems to be related to the line that Postman takes. There seem to be two extremes of behaviour when watching television. One, which only emerged with the advent of the VCR, is very similar to film: dedicating a chunk of time and sitting straight though the entire programme. (Of course, this isn't quite so far in that direction as a film since one has the option of pausing the show, rewinding it if one missed something, etc.) The other extreme is behaviour I have noticed among people who are not tuning into a specific show: "channel flipping." In this case the viewer is not following any sort of theme or story but is simply viewing images for a short time (usually ranging from less than a second to about ten seconds, sometimes with pauses of a minute or more on one station) and then moving on to the next. There are also behaviours in between these two extremes. Viewing a show that is interrupted by advertisements at periodic intervals is closer to the film end, and MTV is closer to the "channel flipping" end (though with significantly longer segments--ranging from 15 seconds to several minutes). Once in a while one also sees behaviour where the person will follow the current segment (say, part of a movie or show) until it is interupted (usually by an advertisement) and will then "channel flip" for a short time until they discover another segment of interest. They will then stay with that until interupted and repeat the procedure. Television seems to be one of the few mediums or entertainments where involuntary interruptions of the programme/text/whatever are not only tolerated but even encouraged. It's certainly a phenomenon that deserves discussion and study. cjs -- | "It is actually a feature of UUCP that the map of [log in to unmask] | all systems in the network is not known anywhere." [log in to unmask] | --Berkeley Mail Reference Manual (Kurt Schoens)