Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

synchronous communication media n. direct communication where the communicators are time-synchronized so that all parties involved in the communication are co-present at the same time. This includes, but is not limited to, a telephone conversation (but not texting), a company board meeting, video conferencing, a chat room event and instant messaging. Asynchronous communication, by contrast, does not require that all parties involved in the communication be co-present at the same time. Some examples are e-mail messages, discussion boards, blogging, and text messaging over cell phones. mmo

talk media n. apparently unscripted exchange of utterances between conversationalists, broadly synonymous with ‘chat’: a serious object of study since most of social life depends upon it. Ubiquitous in broadcasting across a range of formal and informal genres, including ‘talk shows’, ‘chat shows’ and ‘talk radio’. mmo

taste media n. a structured preference for certain kinds of aesthetic objects or experiences over others. The term plays an important role on the work of the French anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), especially in his work Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste (1984). In this work he proposed that “taste classifies and classifies the classifier”: in other words, taste judgments reflect the social position of those who make them as much as distinctions in the objects or experiences that are the target of them. Indeed, in a class society the exercise of taste is also the exercise of different degrees of cultural capital that separate and maintain the hierarchical distinctions between groups. mmo