Definitions

=Definitions - Useful to CCIT Students=
 * Please feel free to contribute! I think this would be good so everyone could come back and use these definitions for academic papers and for studying for tests! * (try to keep in alphabetical order for easy access)


 * Barriers of Entry:** challenges a company must overcome to enter a market


 * Chapbooks:** cheap productions catered to a broad audience during the time of Gutenberg's Press


 * Conglomerates:** made of diverse parts of several media industries


 * Convergence:** the integration of mass media, computers and telecommunications


 * Diffusion:** spreading of innovations


 * Digital Compression:** reducing numbers into bits of information


 * Duopoly:** when two companies dominate a market


 * Economies of Scale:** when the unit cost decreases as production increases


 * Fiber Optic System:** use of light instead of electricity for quick communication


 * Gatekeeping:** decides what will appear in the media


 * Hegemony:** the dominant ideology of groups within a society


 * Intellectual Property:** creative work


 * Interactive:** communication that uses feedback to modify a response (think of a video game)


 * Law of Supply and Demand:** the relationship between the supply of products and the demand of consumers


 * Monopoly:** when one company dominates a markey


 * Marginal Cost:** the incremental costs of an additional copy or reproduction


 * Narrowcasting:** targets a small specialized audience


 * New Journalism:** investigative news in the nineteenth ccentury


 * Oligopoly:** when a few firms dominate a market


 * Packet Switching:** breaking up digital information into small packets allowing faster speed to a specific address


 * SMCR:** stands for source-message-channel-reciever; exchange of information from source to reciever with a return of feedback to the source


 * Syndication:** rental or licensing of media products

Definitions Courtesy of:
LaRose, Straubhaar. __Media Now: Understanding Media, Culture, and Technology.__ Toronto: Wadsworth, 2004.