Event: Americanizing of
that they are beyond question and need not be
referred to or justifi ed. Exnomination is integral
to the working of ideology, representing the
dominant code of a society. See common sense;
hegemony; myth.
Exotica Interest in, and commodification of,
ethnic diff erences; most strikingly demonstrated
in fashion.
Expectation, horizons of Describes the ‘readi-
ness factor’ of audience in terms of its expecta-
tions concerning a communicative text: is the
audience well-primed for what is to come, or likely
to be resistant out of unawareness, ignorance,
prejudice; and is the audience likely to conform to
the preferred reading or aberrantly decode the
text? (See decode.) Th e German literary critic
Hans Robert Jans uses the phrase in Towards an
Aesthetic of Reception (University of Minneapolis
Press, 1982), referring to each reader of a text as
approaching it with horizons of expectations
shaped by previous literary, cultural and social
experience. A text is interpreted on a basis of
how it accords with or challenges expectations.
Such expectations need to be seen in relation to,
and generally arising from and interactive with,
collective representations.
Expectations People come to have a collection of
ideas about what is expected of them in terms of
their behaviour in certain social situations and,
in turn, of what they should expect concerning
the behaviour of others and of their treatment in
society generally. Research into human percep-
tion has highlighted the important infl uence
expectations have on an individual’s perception
of new information.
Expectations are formed from personal
experience and by information received from
various other sources. Information received
from these other sources may modify previous
expectations, or play a particularly crucial role
in shaping expectations about persons or social
situations of which the individual has no direct
experience. An item of information will be more
readily accepted if it is compatible with existing
ideas and expectations; if it is not, then disso-
nance may occur and the information may be
rejected or ignored.
Th e media are an important source of infor-
mation about many social and political events of
which the individual has little or no fi rst-hand
experience. Several researchers have therefore
sought to investigate the role played by the
media in shaping an audience’s expectations
about certain persons, social groups or social
situations – those related to social unrest, for
example – of which the audience has little or noreporting of key events to give the impression of
an accumulation of such events (hence the sense
of crisis), whereas what is actually happening is
an accumulation of another kind: similar stories,
being gathered together from the past as well as
the present, are being reinvigorated and intensi-
fi ed as they compound information about the
new key event.
Key events thus trigger apparent waves of such
events when in reality only one has occurred:
‘Here one has to take into account that the news
coverage creates a false impression that events
accumulate and problems become more urgent.’
See next entry.
Event: Americanizing of Practice, in the US, of
reporting world events in relation to American
interest or interests. As Susan D. Moeller points
out in Compassion Fatigue: How the Media
Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (Rout-
ledge, 1999), ‘the American fi lter, the notion of
relevance to the United States, is very important’.
Speaking of the American public, Moeller says,
‘Since our knowledge about the lands outside
our borders is minimal, even the abbreviated
version of events which makes it into news has
to be translated for us’. (See ethnocentrism.)
In her conclusion to her analysis of compas-
sion fatigue and how the media can strive to
avoid creating or reinforcing it, Moeller believes
that the Americanizing of events ‘(once called
the “Coca-Colonization” of events) can be a
positive force to attract the public’s attention to
a far-off event, but it should not be the defi ning
characterization of that event’, for ‘once in play,
the Americanization can become a crutch,
simplifying a crisis beyond recognition, and
certainly beyond understanding’.
The author concedes that ‘Americans are
already too self-involved’ and she blames
the media’s ‘entrenched news net and news
priorities’ as the cause ‘of their neglect of certain
events or countries’. See historical allusion.
Excorporation The process by which those
who are not members of the dominant group(s)
within society, for example members of youth
cultures and sub-cultures, utilize the mate-
rial resources provided by the prevailing system
to fashion cultural statements that communicate
their difference from or opposition to the
dominant culture. See bricolage; counter-
culture; style.
Exnomination Roland Barthes uses this term
in Mythologies (Paladin, 1973) to describe the
assumption on the part of the communicator,
usually the mass media, that certain values are
so basic and so widely shared, indeed so natural,