AQA GCSE Media Studies Student Book

• As you would expect in a chapter called Media Language, you will be looking at some of the ways in which the media communicates in the same ways as a language. • This chapter introduces you to many of the key terms and concepts that you’ll need when it comes to doing one of the most interesting things in Media Studies: the practical analysis of media products such as television programmes, video games, newspapers, magazines and advertisements. How the media communicate meanings The linear model The introduction to this book gave some idea of what the mass media are and you can now start asking some more questions. For example: • What does the mass media do? • How do they do it? The answer to the first question is fairly straightforward. You can simply say that the mass media communicate to a very large number of people. Then we could add that they usually do this in a short space of time by using a range of technologies. Some are lightning fast such as the internet, live television and radio, while some are relatively slow such as the print media. How is this done? That’s media language. Later in the book you will be looking in more detail at the ways in which different media technologies communicate, but in this chapter the focus is a little different. Here, you will be exploring some basics of communication. If the mass media are all about communication, then they must be able to make meanings and audiences must be able to understand these meanings. But how does this process work? How do we manage to communicate meaningfully with each other? What’s in this chapter? 8 1 Media Language

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