All media are produced and consumed in a social context. This course looks at a number of contexts including the market place, the home, and the cinema to examine how audiences are constructed. In addition, the significance of national differences in decoding messages is assessed. The purpose of contextual analysis is twofold. In the first place, it shows how audiences make sense of media messages. In the second, it shows the importance of culture to the process of making meaning from messages. This leads to an understanding of cross-cultural communication.
