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

closure media n. a satisfactory conclusion, particularly to a narrative. mmo

codes media n. systems that organize the transfer of meaning or information by articulating together various kinds of signal (including characters, sounds, signs, symbols, or words) and specifying the rules that convert one signal into another form or representation. Codes, additionally and separately, may consist simply of rules or guidance for conduct or behavior: the chivalric code regulated the conduct of medieval knights; the Hays code defined the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behavior in motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States from 1934 to 1968. mmo

cold media media n. a term suggested by the Canadian cultural and media theorist, Marshal McLuhan (1911-1980) and used in opposition to ‘hot media’ to distinguish between types of medium by their degree of high or low definition. A cold or ‘cool’ medium is low definition and requires more involvement by the user in its decoding. A hot medium is high definition and therefore requires less decoding effort. Typical examples of cold media are cartoons and television (in the latter case before the advent of the high definition flat screen). Film and radio by contrast are, for McLuhan, examples of hot media because their sensory qualities depend on a well-defined perceptual stimulus. The binary opposition of hot and cold has attracted some criticism but is derived from McLuhan’s central claim that ‘the medium is the message’ – in other words, that the sensory properties of the medium itself rather than whatever content it carries should be an important focus of study. mmo

collocation lang n. the tendency of words to co-occur in everyday discourse. Thus, dark collocates strongly with night, in so far as they tend to co-occur. The same could said of the relationship of deadly to nightshade or nuclear to weapon. The study of meaning, using this approach, investigates the meaning of a word in terms of its patterns of collocation, on the principle (enunciated by R. Firth, a British linguist who first formulated the notion of collocation) that ‘you shall know a word by the company it keeps’. (Compare Wittgenstein: ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’.) Collocation does, however, imply statistical profiles of patterns of co-occurrence. These have proved notoriously difficult to produce until recently when it has become possible to apply sophisticated computational techniques to a very large corpus of data. Recent dictionaries – for instance, the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary – have been developed using such techniques. mmo