Revision
51 of 51 terms
In plain terms: The people who watch a media product — not the same as 'everyone' or 'society'.
Precise: The specific viewers a product is made for and the actual viewers who engage with it, including segments, fans and critics.
Example: Alone's audience includes bushcraft enthusiasts as well as general streaming viewers seeking authenticity.
Common confusion: Treating 'audience' as a synonym for 'society' or 'the public' — a top examiner-flagged error.
In the exam: Name a specific audience and what it expects, then explain how the genre is shaped to meet or challenge that.
Related: target audience, audience response
In plain terms: The feeling that what we are watching is real and unstaged.
Precise: A constructed impression of reality produced through conventions (self-filming, imperfect footage, visible hardship), not a guarantee of truth.
Example: Alone's shaky, self-shot footage is an authenticity code; the show is still cast, ruled and edited.
Common confusion: Assuming 'authentic-looking' means 'unconstructed'.
In the exam: Argue that authenticity is a commercial value the genre manufactures, then show how.
Related: mediation, convention
In plain terms: An unresolved moment that makes you keep watching.
Precise: An editing device that withholds an outcome at a segment or episode break to drive retention.
Example: Outlast cuts away before a confrontation resolves, pulling binge viewers into the next episode.
Common confusion: Calling any exciting moment a cliffhanger — it specifically withholds resolution.
In the exam: Link cliffhangers to commercial retention, especially under streaming/binge models.
Related: narrative construction, platform
In plain terms: A decision made to make or save money, or to manage risk.
Precise: Production and distribution choices driven by profit, risk, retention, branding, scheduling, casting and adaptation.
Example: A repeatable Survivor format reduces risk by reusing a proven structure with new casts.
Common confusion: Reducing the whole strand to 'producers want money'.
In the exam: Explain commercial pressure as 'controlled innovation': enough novelty to stand out, enough familiarity to attract an existing audience.
Related: format, franchise, political economy
In plain terms: A recognisable, repeated feature of a genre.
Precise: A shared, expected element of a genre's text, style or structure that audiences and producers both recognise.
Example: The confessional is a convention across all three survival shows.
Common confusion: Confusing a convention (a genre pattern) with a one-off plot event.
In the exam: Use conventions as genre evidence; track how they stay, change or intensify across texts.
Related: genre, repetition and difference
In plain terms: Cutting back and forth between two or more things happening separately.
Precise: Parallel editing between simultaneous strands to build comparison, suspense or rivalry.
Example: Outlast cross-cuts between teams to escalate competition and moral contrast.
Common confusion: Confusing it with a simple cut or a flashback.
In the exam: Show how cross-cutting constructs relationships the contestants may never have had on screen.
Related: editing, media language
In plain terms: Sound that exists in the world of the show, versus sound added on top of it.
Precise: Diegetic sound has a source inside the scene (wind, breathing, a snapping twig). Non-diegetic sound is added in post-production for the audience only (score, stings, narration).
Example: Alone is dominated by diegetic sound — a bear huffing at the tent fabric — while Survivor layers non-diegetic tribal drums under the walk into Tribal Council.
Common confusion: Assuming diegetic sound is 'unmediated'. It is still selected, mixed and amplified; foregrounding it is a choice.
In the exam: Argue that withholding non-diegetic score is itself a technique: it removes the audience's emotional safety net to simulate unmediated threat.
Related: media language, authenticity
In plain terms: A documentary movement of around 1958–62 that tried to observe without interfering.
Precise: An observational documentary practice — Primary (Drew Associates, 1960) is the defining example — made possible by two technologies arriving together: lightweight portable 16mm cameras, and portable synchronous sound recording. It aimed to capture behaviour without director intervention.
Example: The visual grammar of survival reality — handheld following, available light, no obvious staging — descends directly from this tradition.
Common confusion: Treating it as the 'origin' of reality TV. It is one of several antecedents; the game-show and social-experiment strands matter just as much.
In the exam: Use in a change argument to show that the genre's 'raw' look is an inherited convention, not evidence of an absence of construction.
Related: convention, authenticity, reality television
In plain terms: The give-and-take between repeating what works and changing just enough to stay interesting.
Precise: The commercial feedback loop in which industry produces recognisable codes, audiences expect a specific experience, texts fulfil and slightly tweak that expectation, and the resulting pleasure reinforces demand.
Example: Outlast changes one rule — you must be on a team to win — and keeps every other convention intact: the minimum viable difference that still sells the format as new.
Common confusion: Reducing it to 'producers want money'. The point is that BOTH sides are managing risk, which is why difference stays small.
In the exam: Use as the bridge between the commercial and change strands: this is where industry pressure becomes formal convention.
Related: repetition and difference, commercial consideration, genre cycle
In plain terms: How contestants are removed from the competition.
Precise: The mechanism by which participants exit — by vote, tap-out, medical removal or team failure.
Example: Survivor uses a group vote; Alone uses tap-out; Outlast uses team-based failure.
Common confusion: Assuming all elimination works the same way across the genre.
In the exam: Track how the meaning of elimination changes — from social ritual to inward endurance to hybrid team failure.
Related: ritual, convention
In plain terms: Producers build meaning in (encode); audiences read it out (decode), sometimes differently.
Precise: Stuart Hall's model: texts are encoded with a preferred meaning; audiences produce dominant, negotiated or oppositional readings.
Example: Outlast may encode a 'villain', but some viewers decode that person as simply playing by the rules.
Common confusion: Treating audience response as uniform and intended.
In the exam: Use to explain why audiences disagree about contestants and how that disagreement fuels engagement.
Related: audience response, representation
In plain terms: Suffering that the production has deliberately designed into the format.
Precise: The systematic application of psychological pressure, physical deprivation and isolation to ordinary people placed in controlled environments, producing raw emotion that is then synthesised into structured entertainment.
Example: Outlast's coastal Alaskan setting delivers relentless wet and cold — miserable rather than lethal, which keeps players desperate but in the game.
Common confusion: Treating hardship as something that simply happens to contestants. Location, rules and supply levels are all production decisions.
In the exam: Use to argue that 'authenticity' in this genre is manufactured: the danger is real, and it is also designed.
Related: authenticity, convention, mediation
In plain terms: Specific detail used to support a claim about the genre.
Precise: Precise textual or secondary detail that demonstrates a genre pattern, not merely an event.
Example: 'Self-filming is an authenticity convention in Alone' is genre evidence; 'a man caught a fish' is plot.
Common confusion: Mistaking plot summary for genre evidence.
In the exam: Select evidence that shows a pattern across at least two texts.
Related: primary evidence, secondary source
In plain terms: The idea that texts in a genre overlap like relatives, without all sharing one feature.
Precise: A model of categorisation (Wittgenstein, applied to media by Daniel Chandler) in which no single text carries every defining feature; membership rests on a network of overlapping traits.
Example: Alone shares no competition conventions with Survivor — no vote, no host, no tribe — yet remains the same genre through hardship, the authenticity claim and the edited arc.
Common confusion: Using it to avoid definition altogether. You still have to argue which resemblances are load-bearing.
In the exam: Deploy against the objection 'it doesn't have X so it isn't really the genre', then move to which traits actually carry the category.
Related: prototypicality, genre, subgenre
In plain terms: The repeatable structure of a show that can be reused or sold.
Precise: The rules, stages and identity of a programme that can be reproduced across seasons or licensed internationally.
Example: Survivor's format (tribes, challenges, Tribal Council) is adapted around the world.
Common confusion: Confusing format (structure) with genre (a wider system of expectations).
In the exam: Explain why a repeatable format is commercially valuable and how it manages risk.
Related: franchise, genre, commercial consideration
In plain terms: A text people treat as the 'first' or defining example of a genre.
Precise: A text retrospectively credited with establishing a genre's conventions. The label is useful shorthand but dangerous: genres emerge from many texts, cycles and industries, not a single origin.
Example: Survivor (2000) is often treated as foundational to survival competition — but it drew on documentary, game show and social-experiment traditions.
Common confusion: Examiners repeatedly flag 'X is the first…' claims that launch a text-by-text history instead of genre analysis.
In the exam: If you call a text foundational, say what it consolidated and from where — then return to the genre.
Related: genre, genre cycle, convention
In plain terms: A branded family of products built from one successful property.
Precise: An intellectual property extended across seasons, adaptations and merchandise under a recognisable brand.
Example: Survivor is a franchise with many international versions; it is not itself a genre.
Common confusion: Calling a franchise a genre — a top examiner-flagged error.
In the exam: Never present one franchise as the genre; use it as evidence within the genre.
Related: format, genre
In plain terms: A type of media defined by shared, recognisable features and expectations.
Precise: A system of conventions, production choices and audience knowledge that groups texts and is continually contested and revised.
Example: Survival reality competition is a genre; Survivor, Alone and Outlast are products within it.
Common confusion: Confusing a product, franchise or platform category with a genre.
In the exam: Keep the genre — not one show — as the subject of every paragraph.
Related: convention, subgenre, franchise
In plain terms: The way a genre rises, becomes familiar, then changes to stay fresh.
Precise: A heuristic describing phases of innovation, consolidation and revision in a genre over time.
Example: Authentic-survival formats emerged partly as a response to familiar social-game reality TV.
Common confusion: Treating cycles as a fixed law rather than a useful pattern.
In the exam: Use as a frame for change, but avoid claiming an inevitable march of progress.
Related: repetition and difference, hybridisation
In plain terms: Mixing features from different genres or formats into something new.
Precise: The blending of conventions from multiple genres/formats to refresh appeal and manage risk.
Example: Outlast hybridises Alone-style hardship with Survivor-style social strategy.
Common confusion: Calling a hybrid a brand-new, unrelated genre.
In the exam: Explain hybridisation as controlled novelty that keeps recognisable pleasures.
Related: subgenre, genre cycle
In plain terms: A 'so what?' — a likely consequence of an argument.
Precise: A reasoned consequence for the genre, producers, audiences or other media that follows from your analysis.
Example: If authenticity is escalating, an implication is increased pressure on contestant safety.
Common confusion: Tacking on a generic 'impact' sentence instead of deriving a consequence.
In the exam: Develop implications from your argument; this is central to Excellence.
Related: evidence, statement
In plain terms: When one text refers to or borrows from another.
Precise: The shaping of a text's meaning by its relationship to other texts and genre traditions.
Example: Survival shows borrow documentary and adventure-film visual codes.
Common confusion: Confusing intertextuality with simple similarity.
In the exam: Use to explain where borrowed conventions come from.
Related: hybridisation, convention
In plain terms: An in-between place, cut off from normal life, where ordinary rules stop applying.
Precise: A constructed threshold environment — an island, a sealed house, a stretch of Alaskan bush — into which participants are placed so that social norms loosen and behaviour intensifies.
Example: Big Brother's camera-filled house and Outlast's Alaskan drop-zone do the same structural job: remove people from society so conflict becomes inevitable.
Common confusion: Thinking the wilderness is simply a setting. It is the mechanism — the reason the psychology works.
In the exam: Use to connect the social-experiment strand of the genre's history to the environment convention in the present.
Related: engineered hardship, convention, reality television
In plain terms: A convention the genre cannot survive without.
Precise: A structural convention whose removal converts the format into a different genre — in survival reality: environment as antagonist, the authenticity claim, and narrative editing. Contrast with decorative conventions, which can be changed freely.
Example: Remove the hostile environment and the format reverts to Big Brother; remove the belief that the suffering is real and the tension vanishes entirely.
Common confusion: Treating every convention as equally important. Sorting them is what turns a list of features into an argument.
In the exam: Use to give a change essay a spine: show that what changed across the three texts was mostly decorative, which is exactly why the genre survived.
Related: convention, genre, hybridisation
In plain terms: A signal that tells the audience what kind of thing they are about to watch.
Precise: A trait that signals a genre (Derrida) — a cowboy hat in a Western, a torch-snuffing in Survivor. The mark is not the genre itself; it is an invitation to read the text a certain way.
Example: Outlast opens on wilderness aerials and a survival brief — marks inviting an endurance reading — before revealing a team rule that makes betrayal compulsory.
Common confusion: Mistaking the signal for the substance. Counting marks does not settle which genre a text belongs to.
In the exam: Use to reframe a definition question as a question about signalling: what is this text inviting its audience to expect?
Related: convention, genre, family resemblance
In plain terms: The techniques a media product uses to make meaning.
Precise: Camera, editing, sound, graphics, mise-en-scène and narrative choices that construct meaning.
Example: An ominous score plus a reaction shot can frame a contestant as a threat.
Common confusion: Listing techniques without explaining their effect.
In the exam: Always pair a technique with its effect and its genre significance.
Related: convention, mediation
In plain terms: The way reality is shaped as it is turned into media.
Precise: The process by which events are selected, framed and edited, so no media 'reality' is unconstructed.
Example: Even self-filmed Alone footage is mediated through casting, rules and editing.
Common confusion: Believing 'reality TV' shows reality directly.
In the exam: Use to argue that less visible construction is not less construction.
Related: authenticity, media language
In plain terms: How a show builds a story out of events.
Precise: The arrangement of characters, goals, obstacles, turning points and resolution to shape meaning and suspense.
Example: A 'winner's edit' constructs a contestant's arc from the first episode.
Common confusion: Confusing the constructed narrative with what 'really happened'.
In the exam: Show how narrative construction directs audience judgement.
Related: editing, character
In plain terms: Showing that a claim is partly true — knowing where it stops being true.
Precise: Engagement with the limits, conditions and counter-cases of a claim, especially the absolute words in exam statements ('only', 'must', 'guarantee', 'very few').
Example: 'Audience change is a driver of genre change — but not the only one: self-filming technology enabled changes nobody demanded.'
Common confusion: Nuance is not fence-sitting; you still argue a clear position, then locate its boundary.
In the exam: The E7/E8 descriptors literally require responding to the statement 'with nuance'.
Related: statement, implication, thesis statement
In plain terms: A one-sided bond with someone on screen who does not know you exist.
Precise: An emotional attachment an audience forms with a media figure as though the relationship were mutual, intensified by direct address and sustained exposure.
Example: Alone's video diaries speak straight into the lens with nobody else present, forging an intimacy that makes a tap-out feel like a personal loss to the viewer.
Common confusion: Treating it as an audience defect. It is engineered by conventions — the confessional exists partly to produce it.
In the exam: Link a specific convention to the bond it manufactures, then to the commercial value of a returning audience.
Related: audience response, convention, media language
In plain terms: Where and how a show is delivered (broadcast TV, streaming, etc.).
Precise: The distribution context (broadcast, cable, streaming) that shapes scheduling, structure and release model.
Example: Outlast's streaming release supports binge structure and serial cliffhangers.
Common confusion: Treating a platform category (e.g. 'Netflix shows') as a genre.
In the exam: Link platform logic to changes in episode structure and pacing.
Related: commercial consideration, cliffhanger
In plain terms: How money, ownership and industry pressures shape what gets made.
Precise: An approach analysing how commercial ownership and market forces influence media production and form.
Example: Streaming retention goals encourage continuous interpersonal conflict.
Common confusion: Reducing it to 'greed' rather than structural pressures.
In the exam: Use as a lens for the commercial strand even without naming one theorist.
Related: commercial consideration, format
In plain terms: Evidence taken directly from the media texts themselves.
Precise: Detail drawn from the programmes (conventions, techniques, format features) you are analysing.
Example: Survivor's torch-snuffing ritual is primary evidence.
Common confusion: Confusing primary (from the text) with secondary (about the text).
In the exam: Anchor every paragraph in primary evidence, supported by secondary where useful.
Related: evidence, secondary source
In plain terms: How typical a text is of its genre.
Precise: The degree to which a text matches the mental model audiences hold for a category. Prototypical texts are the standard case; others sit at fuzzy edges without leaving the category.
Example: Survivor is the prototype of survival reality competition; Alone sits at the edge, which is precisely what its marketing exploits.
Common confusion: Assuming 'less prototypical' means 'lower quality' or 'not really the genre'.
In the exam: Use to explain why a text can be marketed as both familiar and radically new at the same time.
Related: family resemblance, genre, subgenre
In plain terms: Programming featuring real people in constructed situations.
Precise: A broad super-genre of unscripted-claim formats; too wide to be the focus of a 91251 essay on its own.
Example: Survival reality competition is one narrow genre within reality television.
Common confusion: Writing about 'reality TV' generally instead of the specific genre.
In the exam: Narrow from reality TV to survival reality competition early and stay there.
Related: genre, subgenre
In plain terms: Genres repeat familiar features but add difference to stay fresh.
Precise: Steve Neale's idea that genre pleasure comes from balancing recognisable conventions with variation.
Example: Each survival show keeps confessionals and prizes (repetition) but changes how you win (difference).
Common confusion: Naming Neale without applying the balance to evidence.
In the exam: Use as a central tool to explain why and how the genre changes.
Related: convention, genre cycle
In plain terms: How people, places or ideas are portrayed in media.
Precise: The constructed portrayal of groups, identities or environments, carrying values and assumptions.
Example: Survival TV often represents wilderness as empty and available to be conquered.
Common confusion: Drifting into representation/social issues without linking back to genre.
In the exam: Only use representation when it directly serves a genre argument.
Related: mediation, encoding / decoding
In plain terms: A repeated ceremony that marks a key moment.
Precise: A formalised, recurring sequence (e.g. Tribal Council) that structures the format and audience expectation.
Example: Survivor's vote and torch-snuffing is a defining ritual.
Common confusion: Confusing a ritual with any repeated shot.
In the exam: Explain how ritual makes novelty manageable and brand recognisable.
Related: convention, elimination
In plain terms: Memorising an essay or scaffold and pouring it onto whatever statement appears.
Precise: Reproducing pre-learned paragraphs, orders and evidence regardless of the chosen statement. Every NZQA report from 2021–2025 identifies this as the most reliable way to underperform.
Example: Identical planning pages appearing across schools — examiners notice, and the essays cap at Achievement.
Common confusion: Learning material thoroughly is not rote learning; the trap is memorising the arrangement of material.
In the exam: Rehearse the method (decode → position → select evidence), never a finished essay.
Related: statement, thesis statement, evidence
In plain terms: Material about a text, such as reviews, data or academic writing.
Precise: Evidence produced about the media (criticism, ratings, interviews, scholarship) used to support understanding.
Example: A reputable review of Outlast's ethics can support an audience argument.
Common confusion: Treating personal opinion or unsourced summary as a credible secondary source.
In the exam: Use carefully selected secondary evidence to deepen Merit/Excellence reasoning.
Related: primary evidence, evidence
In plain terms: The claim about the genre you choose to respond to in the exam.
Precise: An NZQA-provided proposition about an aspect of a genre that you argue for or against consistently.
Example: 'As a genre evolves, its conventions will also evolve.'
Common confusion: Memorising one essay rather than responding to the chosen statement.
In the exam: Integrate the statement's language throughout, not just at the end of paragraphs.
Related: thematic paragraph, implication
In plain terms: A smaller, more specific type within a genre.
Precise: A distinct cluster of conventions within a larger genre (e.g. solitary-endurance survival).
Example: Alone helped establish a solitary-endurance subgenre of survival reality.
Common confusion: Confusing a subgenre with an entirely separate genre.
In the exam: Use subgenres to show internal change without leaving the genre.
Related: genre, hybridisation
In plain terms: The specific group a show is designed to attract.
Precise: The intended audience segment producers aim a product at through content, scheduling and marketing.
Example: Alone targets viewers who value competence and authenticity over social drama.
Common confusion: Confusing the target audience with the actual or total audience.
In the exam: Connect target audience to specific production and commercial choices.
Related: audience, commercial consideration
In plain terms: A system that sorts things into categories and sub-categories.
Precise: A hierarchical classification of texts (macro genre → genre → sub-genre → micro-genre). Chandler warns that “there are no undisputed ‘maps’ of the system of genres within any medium” — one critic's sub-genre is another's main genre.
Example: Reality television → competition reality → survival reality competition → solitary-endurance survival. Every boundary in that chain is arguable.
Common confusion: Presenting a taxonomy as fact. Classification is an argument, and the tidier the map, the more it distorts.
In the exam: State that the boundary is contested, take a position, and show what your classification reveals that the alternative hides.
Related: genre, subgenre, hybridisation
In plain terms: A paragraph organised around an idea, using several texts.
Precise: An essay paragraph built around a claim/theme that draws evidence from multiple texts, not one show at a time.
Example: A paragraph on 'how elimination changed' uses Survivor, Alone and Outlast together.
Common confusion: Structuring an essay one programme at a time — a top examiner-flagged error.
In the exam: Build each paragraph around an idea and bring in multiple texts.
Related: statement, evidence
In plain terms: One sentence stating your position on the exam statement.
Precise: A contestable claim, usually in the introduction, that answers the statement directly and previews the argument's logic. The 2024 report singled out thesis-driven essays as the successful ones.
Example: 'Audience change genuinely drives genre change — but in survival reality it works alongside technology and platform economics, which this essay weighs in turn.'
Common confusion: A topic announcement ('This essay will discuss…') is not a thesis; it takes no position.
In the exam: Write the thesis before anything else in planning; every topic sentence should serve it.
Related: statement, nuance, thematic paragraph
In plain terms: Squeezing hours or days of footage into a few minutes of screen time.
Precise: An editing convention that condenses long stretches of raw material into short sequences, eliminating the tedium of survival and constructing a heightened reality where crisis and resolution arrive at a digestible pace.
Example: Alone montages several days of starvation, boredom and repetitive tasks into a sixty-second run of physical decay.
Common confusion: Describing a montage without naming what the compression conceals — the waiting, the repetition, the hours where nothing happens.
In the exam: Use for the genre's central paradox: the most authentic thing in the footage is the first thing removed.
Related: media language, narrative construction, authenticity
In plain terms: A recognisable, repeated device or situation within a genre.
Precise: A recurring narrative device, character type or situation that audiences recognise — smaller than a convention system, bigger than a single moment. The 2023 paper glossed and tested this word directly.
Example: The elimination trope recycled: Survivor's vote → Alone's tap-out → Outlast's exile and walk-aways.
Common confusion: Tropes vs conventions: conventions define the genre; tropes circulate within (and across) genres.
In the exam: If a statement mentions tropes, name one precisely and track its recycling across at least two texts.
Related: convention, repetition and difference, hybridisation
In plain terms: Numbers about how many people watched and how.
Precise: Ratings, streaming rankings or engagement metrics used (carefully) as audience evidence.
Example: A streaming Top 10 placement can indicate reach, but not why people watched.
Common confusion: Adding statistics without explaining their significance.
In the exam: Only use viewing data you can source, and always explain what it shows.
Related: audience response, secondary source
In plain terms: The mood, worries and preoccupations of a particular time.
Precise: The 'spirit of the age' — social issues and events shaping what audiences care about. The 2024 paper glossed it as 'relevant social issues or events of the time'.
Example: Post-2008 scarcity anxiety and authenticity-hunger giving Alone's premise cultural traction.
Common confusion: Zeitgeist claims collapse into 'society said so' unless routed through the actual audience and a producer decision.
In the exam: Link zeitgeist → audience expectation → producer response → convention. All four links, every time.
Related: audience, representation, genre cycle
Base Camp · 5–15 min
Reading a definition is not the same as being able to produce it. The crossword generates a fresh grid from these terms every time — pick the word bank you are weakest on.
Play it →
In plain terms: Using alliances, persuasion and deception to get ahead in a game.
Precise: Interpersonal game-play — alliance-building, manipulation, voting — that can outweigh practical survival.
Example: Survivor is frequently won on social strategy rather than bushcraft.
Common confusion: Assuming survival shows are mainly about practical skill.
In the exam: Track how the balance of social strategy vs practical survival shifts across texts.
Related: convention, character