MediaQ&A by dot point

Audiences: applying the audience theories. Choosing and applying Blumler and Katz, Gerbner, Hall, Shirky and Jenkins to products, structuring the active-versus-passive audience debate, and reaching the judgement the answers reward.

Audiences: media effects and cultivation (George Gerbner). Long-term exposure, cultivation of beliefs and values, mean world syndrome, and the passive-audience side of the effects debate (with social learning theory as supporting context).

Audiences: reception theory (Stuart Hall). The encoding/decoding model, the preferred (dominant), negotiated and oppositional reading positions, and the idea that meaning is completed by the audience, not fixed in the text.

Audiences: targeting, categorising and reaching audiences. Demographics and psychographics, mass and niche audiences, mode of address and positioning, and uses and gratifications (Blumler and Katz) as a model of the active audience.

Audiences: the end of audience (Clay Shirky) and fandom and participatory culture (Henry Jenkins). Here comes everybody, cognitive surplus, prosumers, textual poaching, convergence culture and the collapse of the producer-audience divide.

Audiences: uses and gratifications (Blumler and Katz). The active audience that selects media to gratify needs, the four gratifications (information, personal identity, personal relationships, diversion), and the contrast with passive-audience models.

Magazines, Mainstream and Alternative Media (Component 2 Section B). Studying a mainstream and an alternative or independent magazine in depth across the framework, the contrast in their industry models and audiences, the historical and cultural contexts, and the sustained essay.

Online Media (Component 2 Section C, Media in the Online Age). Studying the websites and social media of a set producer in depth across the framework, convergence and participatory culture, the postmodern blurring of authenticity, and the sustained essay on the online set products.

Television in the Global Age (Component 2 Section A). Studying contemporary television drama in depth across media language, representation, industries and audiences, the global and national contexts that shape it, and the sustained essay comparing or analysing the set television products.

The Component 1 and Component 2 written papers. The structure, sections and timing of both exams, the question types (stepped, analyse, extended essay), the assessment objectives, and the levels-of-response skill of naming, applying and judging theory.

The set products and the contexts of media. The range of Component 1 forms (advertising and marketing, newspapers, radio, video games, music video, film), how Eduqas updates the close study products, and the social, cultural, economic, political and historical contexts every product is read through.

Media industries: applying the media industries theories. Choosing and applying Curran and Seaton, Hesmondhalgh and Livingstone and Lunt to the products you have studied, linking ownership, risk and regulation, and reaching the judgement the extended responses reward.

Media industries: cultural industries (David Hesmondhalgh). The high-risk, high-reward nature of cultural production, and the strategies firms use to minimise risk and maximise audiences: integration and conglomeration, formatting, stars, genres, franchises and the tension with creativity.

Media industries: power and media industries (Curran and Seaton). The concentration of ownership in a few conglomerates, the pursuit of profit and power, the resulting narrowing of variety, and the case that diversity and alternative ownership widen creativity and democracy.

Media industries: production, distribution and circulation. Vertical and horizontal integration, conglomerates and synergy, convergence and technological change, and the difference between commercial and public service funding models.

Media industries: regulation (Livingstone and Lunt). The role of regulators (Ofcom, IPSO, the BBFC, the ASA), the tension between protecting citizens and serving consumer choice and freedom of expression, and the difficulty of regulating globalised, converged media.

Media language: applying the named theories. Selecting the theory that fits a product (Barthes, Todorov, Levi-Strauss, Neale, Baudrillard), applying it to specific features, and evaluating its usefulness to reach a judgement in the extended response.

Media language: genre theory (Steve Neale). Genre as a repertoire of elements reworked through repetition and difference, how genres serve audience expectation and industry risk, and how genres hybridise and evolve.

Media language: narratology (Tzvetan Todorov) and structuralism (Claude Levi-Strauss). Equilibrium, disruption and new equilibrium, character functions, and binary oppositions, and how narrative structure carries ideology.

Media language: postmodernism (Jean Baudrillard). Simulacra and simulation, hyperreality, the blurring of the real and the mediated, intertextuality, bricolage and pastiche, and how postmodern products play with surface and reference.

Media language: the codes of close analysis. The technical codes of audiovisual products (camera, mise-en-scene, editing, sound), the print codes (layout, typography, image, colour, language) and the codes of online media (hyperlinks, interactivity), and how to read each for meaning.

Media language: semiotics (Roland Barthes). Denotation and connotation, signs and signifiers, codes (the symbolic, technical and written codes), anchorage, and the way repeated connotations harden into myth and ideology.

Representation: applying the named theories. Selecting the theory that fits the representation (Hall, van Zoonen, bell hooks, Butler, Gilroy, Gauntlett), applying it to specific features of a product, combining theories, and evaluating to reach a judgement in the extended response.

Representation: Stuart Hall's representation theory. Representation as construction not reflection, selection and mediation, stereotyping and the exercise of power, and the reinforcing or challenging of dominant ideologies.

Representation: ethnicity and postcolonial theory (Paul Gilroy). The persistence of colonial discourse and its binaries (civilised versus primitive), the marginalising of black and minority groups, diaspora and double consciousness, and how products reproduce or resist a postcolonial racial hierarchy.

Representation: feminist theory (Liesbet van Zoonen and bell hooks). Gender as constructed and performed in the media, the male gaze and the body as display, intersectionality and feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression, and how products reinforce or challenge patriarchal values.

Representation: gender performativity (Judith Butler). Gender as performative rather than a fixed essence, the repetition of acts that produces the illusion of a stable gender, the trouble products make when they expose or subvert the performance, and how this differs from a simple male or female binary.

Representation: identity theory (David Gauntlett). The media provide tools and resources audiences use to construct their identities, the pick and mix relationship with representations, the shift from singular to fluid and negotiated identities, and the role of participatory, do-it-yourself media.

The NEA: applying the framework to production. Using media language to make meaning, constructing intended representations, following the industry conventions of the two forms, and addressing the target audience, so the production demonstrates the theoretical framework in practice (AO3).

The NEA: the production and how it is assessed. The two interrelated products as the main assessed work, the practical application of media knowledge (AO3), internal assessment and external moderation, technical and creative quality, and what distinguishes a top-band production.

The NEA: the brief and the Statement of Aims and Intentions. The individual cross-media production in two media forms, choosing one Eduqas-set annual brief, the target audience and requirements, and the assessed Statement of Aims and Intentions (around 500 words).

The NEA: structuring the Statement of Aims and Intentions. Organising the 500 words around the four framework areas, linking each aim to a concrete production decision, justifying choices through audience and industry understanding, and ensuring the products deliver the stated intentions.