Page 127 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

INDIVIDUAL

the grain of mainstream entertainment. Such independence may
imply:
. different, alternative or oppositional processes of production (for
instance, working against traditional divisions and hierarchies of
labour);
. different aesthetics (experimentation at the level of image, narration
and structure, promoting attention to meaning-construction, rather
than to ‘show-and-tell’ plots with ‘tennis-match dialogue’);
. a self-reflexive concern with the practitioner’s role as well as with
subject matter or financial returns;
. different relations with audiences (getting away from ‘bums on
seats’ towards active engagement with audiences as spectators or as
participants);
. serving a defined audience ‘constituency’ rather than the ‘mass’
(e.g., women, workers, a region or community, people involved in
political, social or environmental action).

In addition, independent has been used to describe sources of funding.
The term is a euphemism for ‘capitalist’ or ‘commercial’ in the British
broadcasting scene, where the main commercial channels in both
television and radio (ITV and ILR) and their regulatory bodies (the
ITC and Radio Authority) are dubbed independent – presumably
because of state ownership. At the same time the ‘independent film
sector’ uses the term to help secure public funds from bodies such as
the Arts Council, the British Film Institute and local councils for low-
budget, non-commercial production. Hence the same term has been
found useful at the opposite extremes of the film world.

INDIVIDUAL

A synonym for a person. The word is derived from a medieval
conceptualisation of the nature of God – three persons but indivisible.
People were ‘individual’ because they had indivisible souls. By
extension it is an adjective for that which cannot be divided further – a
term of contrast to collectivities or generalities of various kinds: an
individual tree as opposed to a wood. When used as a noun and
applied to people, ‘individual’ is used in a way that the OED has
dismissed as ‘nowchiefly a colloquial vulgarism, or a term of
disparagement’. But, of course, it is in just this sense that the term

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