access
1. (accessibility) General availability for use: e.g. the percentage of a given population owning or having access to a communications medium/technology. This was a key issue for Cooley in 1909; ...
ACT*
(pronounced act-star).Adaptive Control of Thought, an advanced version of a network model of information processing first put forward in 1976 by the Canadian-born US psychologist John R(obert) ...
advertisement
An attention-grabbing presentation in any medium which typically serves the marketing function of persuading consumers to purchase a product or service but which may also function to raise or ...
advertising appeal
The rhetorical modes of persuasion underlying the implicit psychology of advertisements. Distinctive appeals contribute to brand positioning. For analytical purposes, ad appeals are often broadly ...
advertising formats
1. Widespread conventions of form and/or content that can be discerned in ads within a particular medium. Three key elements in ad formats are product, person, and setting. On television, the ...
allegory of the cave
A story told by Plato in Book VII of The Republic to illustrate the superiority of information derived from reason to that derived from the senses. The allegory takes the form of a dialogue between ...
amplitude modulation
The process whereby a digital signal is sent over a transmission line by changing the amplitude of a sine wave known as a carrier.
analogue transmission
A method of sending information over long distances by encoding it as an analogue signal. This involves modulating a continuous beam of charged electromagnetic particles (most commonly radio waves ...
animal communication
1. The various nonverbal strategies of signalling and information exchange used by animal species. The types of animal communication include vocal calls, visual displays, body movement, the use of ...
asymmetric information
1 An aspect of the agency problem in which managers have superior information to shareholders regarding the state of the shareholders' investment. See signalling hypothesis.2 The situation in which ...
asymmetrical relationships
See also communication network; relational communication; social networks.1. In communication, unequal status or power relations between participants, whose roles are termed superior (or ...
automatic processing
Any information processing that occurs involuntarily and without conscious intention or control, as in the performance of well-practised activities such as seeing, reading, riding a bicycle, playing ...
balanced programming
In television and radio scheduling, a policy of offering diverse content consisting of information, entertainment, and educational material that caters for a broad spectrum of tastes and opinions, ...
baud
A unit for measuring signal speed in a computer or communications system. When the signal is a sequence of bits, the baud rate is given in bits per second (bps). The unit is named after J. M. E. ...
bit
Either of the digits 0 or 1 as used in the binary notation. Bits are therefore the basic unit of information in a computer system.
bottom-up processing
Any form of information processing that is initiated, guided, and determined by input and that proceeds in sequential stages, with each stage coming closer to a final interpretation than the last, as ...
byte
A subdivision of a word in a computer, it usually consists of eight bits. A kilobyte is 1024 bytes (not 1000 bytes). A gigabyte is 230 = 1 073 741 824 bytes.
cascade processing
The implementation of later stages of information processing before the completion of earlier stages. For example, in retrieving the meaning of a printed word, a person may have to identify all the ...
centralized communication network
A communication network in which one group member has access to more communication channels than any other and therefore tends to process more information (2) than the peripheral group members. ...
channel
1 In telecommunications in general, a separate path through which signals can flow.2 In the public switched telephone network (PSTN), one of multiple transmission paths within a single link between ...