Page 98 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

ETHNIC/ETHNICITY

plague both the media and its audience, because the underlying agenda
is always to suggest that if the media can be changed, the audience will
become more civilised (like the researchers and their sponsors).
See also: Audiences, Content analysis, Discourse, Violence

Further reading: Gauntlett (1998)

ENTERTAINMENT

A regime of universally intelligible mainstream output from the leisure
and content industries. Entertainment seems a common-sense term,
but as deployed in contemporary media it comprises a complex
condensation of individual gratifications, textual forms and industrial
organisation.
Entertainment’s production costs are high, so like other cultural or
creative industries it is driven towards audience maximisation and the
reduction of unit costs. The ‘ideology’ of such a regime is that these
commercial imperatives merely supply the demands of the consumer:
the form of entertainment reflects what is wanted. While strenuous
efforts are indeed made to keep entertainment products both novel
and appealing, it is also the case that such products are organised
around an industrial mode of production, typically ‘mass’ commu-
nication of standardised content to a consumer who has little input
into it. Hence entertainment is not so much an escape from the
everyday cares of capitalism, but a highly advanced expression of them.

ETHNIC/ETHNICITY

Of peoples from other cultures. From ‘ethnic’ cuisine and crafts to
subordinated national groups living in nation-states, the word ‘ethnic’
is a category for everything that fits outside of the dominant group or
culture, especially when the latter is white, Western, mainstream
culture. If you go into your supermarket you may find lentils on the
‘ethnic’ shelves. But in its darkest manifestation, ethnic has become a
euphemism for genocide – ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Although ethnicity as a concept has been used to disavowand
overcome racist discourses, its use within the social sciences has often
been used interchangeably and problematically with concepts of race.
Ethnicity is conventionally understood to mean common, or shared,
characteristics attributed to common descent. As the term ethnicity

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