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Unit 4: Power and persuasion
Quick questions on The system of communication: WACE Year 12 Media Production and Analysis Unit 4
2short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What are communication models?Show answer
Early communication models were linear, picturing a message travelling straight from sender to receiver, with noise as the only interference. This transmission model treats the audience as passive. More useful for media is a model that recognises the audience as active, decoding through their own context, so meaning is negotiated rather than simply delivered. This shift, from sender controls meaning to meaning is completed in interpretation, is the key idea.
What is audience context completes the message?Show answer
The audience does not decode in a vacuum. Their culture, values, knowledge and situation form the context through which they read. The same persuasive message lands differently depending on what the audience brings, which is why one viewer accepts an advertisement at face value while another reads it sceptically. Context is the variable that turns a single encoded message into a spread of decoded meanings, producing dominant, negotiated or oppositional readings.
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