New Challenges in the European Area Young Scientist’s 1st International Baku Forum

1. New Challenges in the European Area Young Scientist’s 1st International Baku Forum The Relevance of Media Coverage Bashar Ibrahim AlHadla

2. The central concept of media audience is the relationship between the sender and the receiver. The relationship in the mediated and especially mass-mediated communication, always involves a spatial and social distance between the participants.

3. Bridging the gap of distance is done by a “complex web of conventions and understandings shared between communicators and audiences”. --- So, understanding means the mutual comprehension process between the sender and receiver.

4. Still, the web, for most people, present the society-wide and cross-cultural communication as problematic. So, a solution that tackles human psyche is needed. The researchers proposed a new understanding theory under the name of ‘Reception Theory’

5. Reception Theory says: the messages proposed by the sources are always being decoded by the audiences “according to their own perspectives and wishes, although often within some shared framework of experience”

6. The shared experience is what is calledBackground Knowledge thatis organised in our long-term memory in structures known asschema. (schema is a pre-existing knowledge structure in memory, or what is generally called norm) Norm is thereduction of “choices a person has to make about how to behave” and the expectation about “how others in the culture will behave”.

7. Evoking a different schema from the one intended by the communicator leads to miscommunication; i.e., irrelevance. Miscommunication is tackled by Sperber and Wilson - the founders of the ‘Relevance Theory’. (the relevant interaction of somebody’s existing beliefs/thoughts with the information given in a special context)

8. Relevance can be achieved by modifying the context by having some effect on it – contextual effect (stimulus) The less processing effort being done to recover a fact, it is the greater relevance So, Relevance = Contextual Effects / Processing Effort

9. In a successful communication, maximal relevance is not sought, it is the optimal relevance. How to reach out the optimal relevance? Sperber and Wilson suggest the combination of ostensive behaviour (evidence of one’s thoughts), with the guarantee of relevance (what is most relevant to people).

10. For Sperber and Wilson Perception: ostention + relevance = principle of relevance They said: “We believe that it is this principle of relevance that is needed to make the inferential model of communication explanatory.”

11. Principle of Relevance is best achieved by the appropriate choice of words for according to Sperber and Wilson “the intended concept is the very one encoded by the word, which is therefore used in its strictly literal sense.”

12. Conclusions: 1- Media communicators are best be understood by making themselves relevant to their audience. 2- The news has us in mind even before it is written, as Michael Schudson stated in his book, The Power of News. 3- Revealing the connection between people’s information sharing and perception. Thank you