High and low context communication
activities of ‘enemy’ peoples to Nazis, and to use
past terminology such as ‘holocaust’ and ‘death
camps’.
Following the terrorist assault on the US
Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in New
York on 11 September 2001 (9/11), and the subse-
quent build-up to war by the US and UK, the
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was compared
in the media – varyingly and queryingly – with
the pugnacious war-leader Winston Churchill,
the nineteenth-century PM William Gladstone
(whose mission was to ‘pacify Ireland’) and the
gunboat-happy British Foreign Secretary Lord
Palmerston. Blair’s public performance follow-
ing the London bombings of July 2005 was
similarly described as Churchillian and recalling
the London Blitz during the Second World War.
Such use of analogies and metaphors is seen
generally to serve to place events into contexts
familiar to the public. However, in Compassion
Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine,
War and Death (Routledge, 1999), Susan D.
Moeller issues a cautionary note on this practice.
‘Th e eff ect,’ she believes, has been ‘that read-
ers and viewers’ have come to ‘overlook the
complexity’ of reported confl icts, and ‘to believe
in the simplicity of comparisons’.
Historical revisionism Term addressed specifi -
cally to attempts in the US and Europe to write
out of history the genocide of the Th ird Reich of
Adolph Hitler; to deny that the atrocities ever
took place.
Hollywood Centre of the US fi lm industry, located
in California, providing maximum sunshine for
outdoor shooting and some magnifi cent scenery.
In 1908 The Count of Monte Cristo, begun in
Chicago, was completed in California and the
fi rst Hollywood studio was established in 1911.
Within a year another fifteen film companies
had set up in business. Th e Hollywood studio
system reached its peak in the 1930s; its fortunes
have since fl uctuated, at fi rst knocked sideways
by the advent of TV, then restored by a simple
philosophy of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’.
Today Hollywood plays a key role in the US
television industries, while its fi lm enterprises
are profi tably supplemented by global sales of
movies on video and DVD.
▶Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age:
Beyond the Silver Screen (Polity Press, 1994); David
Bordwell, Th e Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style
in Modern Movies (University of California Press,
2006; also a University Press Audiobook, 2010); James
Walters, Alternative Worlds in Hollywood (Intellect,
2008); Matthew Alford, Reel Power: Hollywood
Cinema and American Supremecy (Pluto Press, 2010).boards of directors, etc. See organization
cultures.
High and low context communication See
communication: intercultural communi-
cation.
Highbrow Someone considered to be a member
of the intellectual and cultural elite, whose
tastes are, by definition, considered to be
aesthetically superior to those of the majority, is
deemed a highbrow. Highbrow tastes are limited
to the few. Th e terms middlebrow and lowbrow
are used to indicate a level of intellectual capac-
ity of cultural appreciation judged against the
standards of the highbrow elite. See cultural
capital.
High fi delity See gramophone.
High-speed photography One of the wonders
of modern technology, but a preoccupation
of photographers from the earliest pioneering
days, the high-speed fl ash process slows down,
or magnifi es, time: the splash of a drop of water,
the trajectory of a bullet, can be reduced to slow
motion that permits astonishing revelations.
Foremost among developers of ultra-high-speed
electronic fl ash photography as a tool of scien-
tifi c analysis was the American Harold Edgerton,
inventor of the stroboscope.
Th e term stroboscopic photography, or strobe
photography, refers to pictures of single or
multiple exposure taken by fl ashes of light from
electrical discharges, permitting objects moving
at their natural speeds to be observed in slow
motion – the rate of the slow motion depending
on the frequency of the strobe and object. When
the fl ash frequency exactly equals that of the
rotation or vibration, the object is illuminated in
the same position during each cycle, and appears
stationary.
In contrast to high-speed photography, time-
lapse photography, by taking pictures at timed
intervals of seconds, minutes, hours or days,
speeds up, or telescopes, time. In a few moments
of fi lm we can see the germination of a seed, the
hatching of an egg, or blow-fl y maggots consum-
ing a dead mouse. Both high-speed and time-
lapse photography are employed most widely to
answer two questions: how is it done, and what
went wrong? See photography, origins.
Historical allusion The practice in news
reporting of making reference – alluding to
- events in the past perceived as being similar
to current events, recognized by audience as
such, and potentially capable of adding to the
news value of a story. For example, a conve-
nient (and often all-too-easy) way to demonize
an ‘enemy’ leader is to compare him to Hitler, the