The document discusses several key concepts relating to how media texts are classified and understood: 1) Genre provides audiences with expectations about a text based on recognizable elements or "paradigms" like plot points, costumes or music. This allows for variation while audiences can still appreciate how elements are represented. 2) Narratives in all media texts, including fiction, news, ads and docs, involve a constructed series of events with a beginning, middle and end that audiences interpret based on their experience. 3) All media texts are representations of reality that are intentionally composed using signs and symbols. Audiences need media to make sense of the world, but representations also reflect a producer's perspective.

1. Key ConceptsMedia

2. Genre A text is classified in a genre through the identification of key elements which occur in that text and in others of the same genre. These elements may be referred to as paradigms, and range from costume to music to plot points to font. Audiences recognise these paradigms, and bring a set of expectations to their reading of the text accordingly: the criminal will be brought to justice at the end of the police thriller. These paradigms may be grouped into those relating to iconography (i.e. the main signs and symbols that you see/hear), structure (the way a text is put together and the shape it takes) and theme (the issues and ideas it deals with). Audience: Select text based on genre/Have systems of expectations/identify with repetition and may shape their own identity Producers: Market texts according to genre/Standardise production practice according to genre conventions, which cuts costs Genre can provide structure and form which can allow a great deal of creativity and virtuosity, especially when a genuine reworking of generic conventions comes along Genre provides key elements for an audience to recognise, so that they may further appreciate the variation and originality surrounding the representation of those elements.

4. Propp, suggests characters and actions

6. Audience Audience theory provides a starting point for many Media Studies tasks. Whether you are constructing a text or analysing one, you will need to consider the target audience and how that audience will respond to that text. Hypodermic Needle Model: This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers. It assumes that the audience are passive and heterogenous. This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents, politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media text, for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent behaviour and will then act them out themselves. The Two Step Flow: The information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm. Uses & Gratifications: During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society: surveillance/correlation/entertainment/cultural transmission