Sender/receiver
and the diverse ways in which such messages
are interpreted. At the same time they refl ect
the shift of emphasis away from a preoccupation
with sending to a fuller recognition of the power
that rests in reception; hence the importance
of research into audience uses of media. See
decode; encode; semiology/semiotics.
Sensitization Th e process by which the media
can alert the public, and specifi c social groups,
to the fact that certain social actions are taking
place, or to the possibility that certain social
actions might take place. Stanley Cohen, for
example, concludes in ‘Sensitization: the case of
the Mods and Rockers’ in Th e Manufacture of
News: Deviance, Social Problems and the Mass
Media (Constable, 1973; 3rd edition, 2002),
edited by Cohen and Jock Young, that media
coverage of the Bank Holiday activities of the
Mods and Rockers gangs, at certain southern
holiday resorts in the mid-1960s, played a
signifi cant role in ‘reinforcing and magnifying a
predisposition to expect trouble: “Something’s
going to happen”’.
Cohen argues that once this perception had
been established, there was a tendency to inter-
pret new, similar incidents in the same manner
so that fairly trivial events, normally overlooked,
received media attention. Thus, ‘through the
process of sensitization, incidents which would
not have been defi ned as unusual or worthy of
attention ... acquired a new meaning’. In this
particular case sensitization was the fi rst step
in a process of media coverage which, Cohen
argues, signifi cantly aff ected the course of real
events. See moral panics and the media.
Sentence meaning, utterance meaning In
his two-volume work, Semantics (Cambridge
University Press, 1977), John Lyons makes a useful
distinction in the matter of ‘meaning’ versus ‘use’
in our employment of language. Sentence mean-
ing is directly related to the grammatical and
lexical (choice of words) meaning of a sentence,
while utterance meaning includes all ‘secondary’
aspects of meaning, particularly those related to
the context in which a linguistic exchange takes
place. It is this distinction, between sentence and
utterance meaning, that allows a person to say
one thing and actually mean something else.
Set A state of mental expectancy which is
grounded in pre-formed ideas about some
future event. Th e impact of a message is always
infl uenced, to some extent, by the mental set of
the receiver. See schema (plural, schemata).
Seven characteristics of mass communica-
tions See mass communications: seven
characteristics.argues in his chapter ‘Shopping for pleasure’ in
Reading the Popular (Unwin Hyman, 1989) that
‘the department store was the fi rst public space
legitimately available to women’ and the ‘fashion-
able commodities it off ers provide a legitimated
public identity and a means of participating in
the ideology of progress’.
For Fiske ‘the meanings of commodities do not
lie in themselves as objects, and are not deter-
mined by their conditions of production and
distribution, but are produced fi nally by the way
they are consumed’. While he readily agrees that
resistance from the bottom up in society is diffi -
cult and rarely likely to be eff ective beyond the
micro-level of everyday life, this is not a reason
to deny its existence. He writes, ‘Scholarship that
neglects or devalues these practices seems to me
to be guilty of a disrespect for the weak that is
politically reprehensible.’
Big companies may make style, in clothes or
more broadly in lifestyle, but such styles are not
followed slavishly. Rather they are appropri-
ated: ‘Women, despite the wide variety of social
formations to which they belong, all share the
experience of subordination under patriarchy
and have evolved a variety of tactical responses
that enable them to deal with it on a day-to-
day level. So, too, other subordinated groups,
however defi ned – by class, race, age, religion, or
whatever – have evolved everyday practices that
enable them to live within and against the forces
that subordinate them.’
Fiske refers to people as forging their own
meanings out of the signifi ers available to them,
exerting semiotic power, and though working
only at the micro-level of society ‘may well act
as a constant erosive force upon the macro,
weakening the system from within so that it is
more amenable to change at the structural level’.
See agora; audience: active audience;
networking: social networking.
Sender/receiver In early transmission models
of the communication process, a message was
seen to be conveyed, simply, from a sender to
a receiver. Transmitter was also used, while the
linguist Roman Jakobson preferred Addresser
and Addressee (see jakobson’s model of
communication, 1958). The terms author/
reader and encoder/decoder recognized both the
complexity and the interactive nature of commu-
nication, and the role of codes and encoding in
that process. In these cases due weight was given
to the text which was encoded and decoded
as well as the context in which the encoding/
decoding took place. Such terms acknowledge
the critical nature of the reception of messages