Page 158 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

METAPHOR

tions such as News Corp, which not only owns entire media industries
in television, print and cinema, but also owns some of the sporting
clubs and competitions whose matches draw viewers and readers to
those media outlets.
Since the 1990s, with convergence among the content media,
telecommunications and interactive computing, the situation has
changed radically. Newmedia, for instance computer games, are
interactive between users and manufacturers, with a proportion of
content actually coming from consumers, who are as much partners as
clients of media content providers. In other words the one-to-many
model of media has been superseded, and now‘content’ has integrated
with telecommunications and computer interactivity, allowing ‘many-
to-many’ communication, including private individual to private
individual.
The implications of this change for journalism, television and the
‘mass’ media are still being thought through, although the virtually
limitless archiving capacity of the Internet, combined with the global
scale of its potential reach, is already being exploited with sites for
every specialist interest under the sun. Journalists are transforming into
editors (manipulators of existing information) rather than gatherers.
Television has evolved into various post-broadcast forms, including
‘media’ that use webcams to transmit private life into cyberspace, there
to become public spectacle.

METAPHOR

A rhetorical term when one thing stands for another. Metaphors
become embedded in languages to such an extent that some linguists,
e.g. Roman Jakobson (1960), have argued that they are one of the
fundamental mechanisms for meaning-creation (the other is meto-
nym). Humans make sense of the world, of themselves and of their
interactions by extending to unknown or new phenomena the
characteristics of known ones, thus capturing new experience in terms
of something already known. The embeddedness of metaphor is
intriguing, since it is unclear howfar metaphors of spatial organisation
(e.g., up, down, higher, lower), for instance, condition people’s
thinking about each other’s rank. Symbolic and social life is completely
suffused with metaphor: there is really no such thing as ‘plain English’.
The choices made to produce almost any lexical string depend on
embedded metaphor – indeed, ‘lexical string’ is a metaphor; ‘depend’ is
a metaphor (Latin: ‘hang from’); ‘embedded metaphor’ is a metaphor.

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