Page 210 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

REALISM

be seen. In communication and cultural studies, and in the media, it is
important to followthe development of debates, policies and coverage
of race, but not to assume that race describes any essential properties or
attributes.

See also: Diaspora, Ethnic/ethnicity, Identity politics, Orientalism,
Representation

Further reading: Baker et al. (1996); Carrington (2001); Gilroy (1987, 1993); Gray
(2000)

READER/READERSHIP

Readerships are the product of media industries: they are populations
gathered without regard to otherwise powerful distinctions of
territory, demographics and wealth and constituted as the readership
of newspapers, which is then available to serve as a metonym for the
nation or society as a whole. Readerships (which in this usage includes
audiences) are the largest communities ever assembled, albeit virtually.
This is why the term ‘reader’ or ‘readership’ has often been used to
describe audiences for audio-visual as well as print-based media.
The public is, first and foremost, a reading public, and audiences
engage in ‘reading’ – i.e. an active, literate encounter with semiotic
materials – not only via traditional print literacy but also in relation to
audio-visual media such as television and film. Readers and audiences
are the ‘product’ of media in a more commodified sense, their
aggregated purchasing power being sold to advertisers by media
organisations.

REALISM

A mode of representation of the world, both material and
psychological. Historically, it was understood to imply a sense of
objectivity in the arts, sciences and in literature. However, realism may
also be used in a wider sense, as for example when intellectual
movements such as Marxism and feminism, and textual systems such as
journalism, are cast as ‘realist’ endeavours (as opposed to as textual or
metaphysical knowledge). Realism is therefore intimately bound up
with modernism.
In media analysis, realism may be understood not as an aim but as a
convention. It aims to naturalise the modes of production that are

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