Page 226 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

SPEECH ACT

opposes city and country: the country is signified as more pure and
innocent than the urban lifestyle. Such myths are specific to certain
cultures, and they are arguable: ‘countryside’ may connote something
quite different to a confirmed city-dweller. Whilst the process of
signification is universal, the meanings that are generated in the process
will be culturally specific.

See also: Referent, Semiotics, Sign
Further reading: Fiske (1990)

SIT UP/SIT BACK

A common-sense way of distinguishing ‘passive’ screen consumption
as an audience member for leisure entertainment (sit back), from
‘active’ interaction with a screen with keyboard, as a user, for either
entertainment or instrumental purposes (sit up). The boundary
between these modes is eroding rapidly with interactive digital
television, datacasting and video-/sound-streaming. People can
interact (via remote control devices) even as they sit back; they can
be entertained, by streamed video, DVD or gaming, as they sit up.
Thus the apparent distinction serves usefully to connect the two
modes of ‘sitting’, or audiencing, superseding broadcast-era presump-
tions about audiences and consumers as inactive.

SPEECH ACT

The action performed by an utterance as part of an interaction. The
concept developed out of the work of the philosopher J. L. Austin,
who demonstrated that many utterances are significant not so much in
terms of what they say, but rather in terms of what they do. Indeed, in
the case of many utterances it makes more sense to ask, ‘What is this
utterance trying to do?’ than to ask, ‘Is what it says true or false?’ – as
may be seen if we consider the following fairly unremarkable examples
of everyday utterances:
‘I bet he won’t turn up.’
‘Stop here on the left.’
‘Hello.’
‘Please keep your seat belts fastened.’
‘Okay.’

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