Week 3 Language

Question 1

Language as Site of Power

Answer 1

• Representation is like a dialogue: encode/decode
• Meanings are stabilized by power
• Language is not neutral, it is gendered, racialized, and shaped by social and economic conditions
• It is constitutive part of media representations, negotiated and contested by audiences

Question 2

The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language

Answer 2

• Social uses of language owe their specifically social value to fact that they tend to be organized in systems of differences which reproduce in symbolic order of differentiated deviations in system of social differences

Question 3

Domination 101

Answer 3

• Power stabilizes meanings
• Meanings are based on binary distinctions
• These distinctions carry particular values (+/-)
• Access is limited: capacity to speak is universal but socially conditioned ways of realizing this natural capacity

Question 4

Postrace and Feminism

Answer 4

• Impressions that markers of identity (eg race, gender) no longer matter
• Conceal discrimination: pretending it doesn’t exist
• Language is structured by binary distinctions that are embedded in social and economic conditions

Question 5

Media Studies and Audiences

Answer 5

• Media culture: “the materials out of which people forge their very identities
• Media representations: one of the ways in which ideological struggle takes place and ideologies are transformed is by articulating elements differently, thereby producing different meaning
• Audiences construct self-images in conversation with their screens

Question 6

Language as Domination (Pierre Bourdieu)

Answer 6

• Official language is bound up with state, both in its genesis and in social uses
• Integration into single linguistic community, which is a product of political domination that is endlessly reproduced by institutions capable of imposing universal recognition of dominant language, is condition fro establishment of relations of linguistic domination

Question 7

Language as Cultural Space and Site of Power

Answer 7

Representation is like a dialogue: encode/decode
- “What sustains the “dialogue” is the presence of shared cultural codes, which cannot guarantee that meanings will remain stable forever - though attempting to fix meaning is exactly why power intervenes in discourse”
- “But, even when power is circulating through meaning and knowledge, codes only work if they are to some degree shared, at least to extent that they make effective translation between speakers possible”

Question 8

Info Literacy

Answer 8

• “Info literacy means being able to recognize that there are hierarchies in source quality, pseudo-facts can easily masquerade as facts, and biases can distort information we are being asked to consider, leading to bad decisions and bad results

Question 9

News Literacy (Questions to ask)

Answer 9

• What’s the source?
• Why is it credible
• Why is it important?

Question 10

Three kinds of conversation (Duhigg)

Answer 10

• What’s this really about?
• How do we feel?
• Who are we?
• Decision making mindset: negotiating opinions, discussing intellectual concepts, determining what to discuss
• Emotional mindset: shaped by beliefs, emotions, and memories
• Social mindset: thinking about “other people, oneself, and the relation of oneself with other people” (Lieberman)

Question 11

Effective Communication

Answer 11

• Knowing what kind of conversation is occurring
• Synchronizing
• Symmetry: “Matching isn’t mimicry”

Question 12

Rise of Storytelling

Answer 12

• Narrative journalism
• Narrative therapy
• Narrative mediation
• Political narratives
• Narratives in branding, marketing, advertising

Question 13

Sociology of Storytelling

Answer 13

• How do stories work?
• What are they good for?
• Why should they be trusted?
• How are they related to power, solidarity, inequality, and social change

Question 14

Plot (different kind of explanation)

Answer 14

• Plot is NOT an explanation based on formal logic
• Plot is structure of a story
• What would otherwise be mere occurrences is assembled in way so that it creates casual links between event

Question 15

Types of Paradigm

Answer 15

• Rational-World Paradigm (‘Rationality’ is determined by how much we know and how well we argue)
• Narrative Paradigm (‘Narrative rationality’ is determined by coherence and fidelity of our stories)

Question 16

Functions of Stories

Answer 16

• Solidify people’s identities
• Establish truth claims (eg in science)
• Are a critical and even liberatory discursive form

Question 17

Research on Storytelling has shown…

Answer 17

• Stories often unfold over repeated interactions rather than being told in an uninterrupted fashion
• Meaning of story is often negotiated by teller and audience
• Power inheres in storytelling rights that are unevenly distributed

Question 18

Postracial resistance

Answer 18

• “images on our phone-our televisions, phone, computers, tablets, and watches– function as fabricated fantasies that conceal very real intersectional disparities, at once, racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed”

Question 19

What is the postracial resistance paradox?

Answer 19

Black women set the standards for beauty, talent, and fame for ALL Americans while simultaneously structures of racism and sexism remain unchanged

Question 20

Rational world paradigm

Answer 20

• Humans are essentially rational beings
• Humans communicate and make decisions primarily through argument
• The conduct of argument is determined by the situation (legal, scientific, etc.)
• ‘Rationality’ is determined by how much we know and how well we argue
• The world is a set of puzzles that we can solve through logic and argument

Question 21

Narrative paradigm

Answer 21

• Humans are essentially storytellers
• Humans communicate and make decisions primarily on the basis of ‘good reasons’
• Good reasons are determined by history, biography, culture, and character
• ‘Narrative rationality’ is determined by the coherence and fidelity of our stories
• The world is a set of stories from which we choose

Question 22

Why study storytelling?

Answer 22

• Stories counter the notion that people are free to construct their own stories
• Stories can and do contest narrative conventions
• Institutions depend on storytelling
• Important that we tell the right stories at the right time and place and that people interpret them in the right way

Question 23

Beginning of stories

Answer 23

• Hooks reader fast and hard
• Set the scene
• Straightforward and declarative sentences
• Frontload the drama (characters, conflict, place, and stakes)