Page 170 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

NASDAQ

as the point of viewthat leads to a preferred reading of the text. The
resolution of these questions will often involve putting forward
dominant cultural beliefs.
In the presentation of a narrative, what types of individuals are
chosen as heroes, victims, villains or innocents may reproduce
common cultural assumptions about such individuals. Accusations of
stereotypes arise in analysis of narrative presentation, especially in
relation to raced or gendered characters. It is narrative’s use of shared
cultural assumptions that leads to the suggestion that all narratives are
ideological.
Narrative analysis is applicable to more than traditional film
practices. It is a central function in photographic images and print
advertising, where the reader of an image is invited to make sense of
what happened before the image was captured and what will happen
after.
Narrative is also applicable to non-fictional genres such as television
news. In a similar way to soap operas, news does not explicitly begin
with a stable situation, but rather assumes there has been one. The
nightly news broadcast can be thought of as presenting the ongoing
disruptions to this presumed equilibrium through the representation of
question and answers. Like other narratives the techniques used in
television news are ‘meaningful because they are conventional rather
than natural’ (Taylor and Willis, 1999: 67). Attention to the narratives
of news reporting reveals that they negotiate cultural values and beliefs
in a way that is directly comparable to fictional narrative.
See also: Discourse, Genre, Myth, Representation, Structuralism

Further reading: Bordwell and Thompson (2001)

NASDAQ

The world’s largest electronic stock exchange or securities market,
founded in the US and launched in 1971. Its business is capital
formation by share trading. Nasdaq was the focus of the ‘dot.com’
boom and subsequently the ‘tech wreck’ of 1999–2000. It remains
the barometer for the ‘neweconomy’: companies in the private and
public sector trading including electronics, e-commerce, the
Internet, interactive technologies and applications. Nasdaq had its
big bubble (boom and bust) year in 1999–2000 and was restructured
and floated as a for-profit company later in 2000. In the meantime it
had linked with new and existing stock exchanges in Hong Kong,

155