Dictionary of Media and Communications Dictionary of Media and Communications Marcel Danesi M.E.Sharpe Armonk, New York London, England FOREWORD Copyright © 2009 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Danesi, Marcel, 1946– Dictionary of media and communications / Marcel Danesi; foreword by Arthur Asa Berger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7656-8098-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Mass media—Dictionaries. 2. Communication—Dictionaries. I. Title. 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Image on page 116 provided by Erich Lessing/Art Resource. FOREWORD CONTENTS Foreword by Arthur Asa Berger vii Introduction xi A–Z 3 Chronology 313 Bibliography 325 Resources on the World Wide Web 329 About the Author 333 v FOREWORD FOREWORD With each year that passes, the mass media and the various means of communi- cation available to us exert a greater and more direct impact upon our cultures, societies, economies, and everyday lives. Most of us live in a media-saturated society and spend increasing amounts of time with different kinds of media. According to a 2005 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, young people from the ages of eight to eighteen in the United States devote approximately forty hours a week to using media of all kinds for recreational purposes. In addition to more time, most of us also spend more money on accessing the media and on buying devices for recording information and for communi- cating with one another. Consider how much your family spends, for example, on all of the following: access to the Internet, cable and satellite services, video game players and video games, and cell phones and cell phone contracts, not to mention all of the other gizmos and gadgets that come flooding onto the market in rapid succession. Think, for example, of the price tag on those large- screen high-definition digital television sets; some run into thousands of dollars. Every day, meanwhile, we send billions of e-mail messages and receive billions of others—wanted or unwanted—from friends, family members, fellow student and colleagues, or spammers. Internet technology makes it as easy to send someone a message 10,000 miles away as it is to send a message to someone ten feet away. In barely more than a decade, cell phone use has exploded all over the world, with still new (non-talking) uses of the device— vii FOREWORD from texting to searching the World Wide Web to accessing satellite navigation systems—constantly are being developed. Cell phones have already exerted a major impact on society and our daily lives, shaping everything from politics to the dating behavior of adolescents. At the same time, video games and video game players now constitute a multibillion-dollar industry, even larger than the film industry. Apple’s iPods, other portable media players, and all the devices created for them have radically altered the way many of us, especially young people, access and listen to music. Powerful tools for using the Internet likewise have had a transformative effect, enabling millions of people to spend time blogging, buying and selling products on eBay, looking up information on Google and other search engines, ordering books and other products on Amazon.com and similar sites, compil- ing their pages on Facebook and MySpace, watching videos on You Tube, and guiding their avatars on Second Life. We use the Internet now to do everything from finding dates and marriage partners to looking up travel information, obtaining medical data, paying bills, and buying stocks. As the media and the means of communication have grown in importance and influence, studying them has become ever more widespread in high schools and universities. Courses on subjects that involve media literacy—such as advertising, marketing, linguistics, anthropology, and sociology—have become common. These courses are designed to teach students about the impact of the media and communications on our institutions and way of life, as well as on those in other countries—also part of the “global village.” Given the ubiquitous nature of old and new media and the new technolo- gies that are constantly being developed, it is invaluable to have a single, handy reference book that covers all of them and related cognate fields (dis- ciplines) in an informed and insightful manner. The Dictionary of Media and Communications enables students from high school to graduate school to find accessible, authoritative explanations of essential theories and concepts in all relevant subject areas. Also included are portraits of leading figures in media scholarship and clear, straightforward explanations of practical methods and constructs used in media studies, communications, and related fields, such as semiotics and psychoanalytic theory. With more than 2,000 entries of varying lengths, the Dictionary of Media and Communications is an authoritative and reader-friendly reference that en- ables anyone interested in the media and communications to find clearly written definitions and explanations. In addition to defining terms, individual entries may also include examples of how the terms are used and background history on the origins and development of related concepts. For visual appeal and to illustrate diverse subjects in terms that are meaningful to readers, the volume also includes dozens of photographs, line drawings, and diagrams. viii FOREWORD In addition to the alphabetical listing of definitions, the Dictionary of Media and Communications contains several information-packed appendices. The Chronology is a detailed list of historic events for various media types, industries, means of communication, and cognate fields. To help readers pursue further research, the Bibliography suggests recommended books in the field, also organized by media and communications categories. Finally, Resources on the World Wide Web offers similar assistance with an extensive list. The Dictionary of Media and Communications is an invaluable resource that is readable, comprehensive, and authoritative. It is more than a reference book. Because of the centrality of media and communications in modern life, it is, in effect, an introduction to contemporary culture and to the wide-ranging theories and concepts that scholars have developed to better understand the world—some would say the “brave new world”—in which we now live. Arthur Asa Berger Professor Emeritus Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts San Francisco State University ix INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION In 1938, a truly significant event took place that epitomized the power of the emerging role of the media in the modern world. That event was the radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel about interplanetary invasion, The War of the Worlds. It was created by the famous actor and director, Orson Welles, as a radio drama simulating the style of a news broadcast. Welles pulled off his “reality-inducing effect” by using a series of fake “on-the-spot” news reports describing the landing of Martian spaceships in New Jersey. An announcer would remind the radio audience, from time to time, that the show was fic- tional. But many listeners believed that what they were hearing was factual. In New Jersey, many people went into a state of panic, believing that Martians had actually invaded the Earth. Concerned citizens notified the police and the army; some ran onto the streets shouting hysterically; and a few even contem- plated escaping somewhere—anywhere. The event was a watershed one in the history of the modern world, becoming itself a topic of media attention and, a year later, leading to the first psychological study of the effects of the media on common people, called the Cantril Study, after Hadley Cantril who headed a team of researchers at Princeton University. Cantril wanted to find out why some believed the fake reports and others not. After interviewing 135 subjects, the research team came to the conclusion that the key was critical thinking— better-educated listeners were more capable of recognizing the broadcast as a fake than less-educated ones. The Cantril report also laid the foundation for a systematic study of the media in universities and colleges, leading eventually to the establishment of departments, institutes, journals, book series, and the like for the study of mod- ern media. Since the 1940s, such study has skyrocketed, becoming an area of xi INTRODUCTION intense interest, not only on the part of academics and researchers, but also on the part of virtually everyone. A seemingly different path of study was opened up in the late 1940s by the late engineer Claude Shannon (1916–2001).