Media Theory and Theorists for G325

1. A2 Revision Session Media Theory and Theoristsfor G325 Section A: Examining your own productions

2. What do you need to be able to do with theorists and theories? • You do NOT need to: • Learn a load of quotes • Explain their theories in great depth • Know them all • You DO need to: • Use a few • Be able to apply them to your work/ case studies • Consider how useful/ not useful they are when discussing your work/ case studies

3. How the media shows us things about society – but this is through careful mediation. Hence re-presentation. • For representation to be meaningful to audiences there needs to be a shared recognition of people, situations, ideas etc. • All representations therefore have ideologies behind them. Certain paradigms are encoded into texts and others are left out in order to give a preferred representation (the preferred syntagm) (Levi – Strauss, 1958).

4. Richard Dyer (1983) posed a few questions when analysing media representations in general. • 1. What sense of the world is it making? • 2. What does it imply? Is it typical of the world or deviant? • 3. Who is it speaking to? For whom? To whom? • 4. What does it represent to us and why? How do we respond to the representation?

5. Rosalind Brunt (1992) details that ideologies are never simply ideas in peoples’ heads but are indeed myths that we live by and which contribute to our self worth. • In terms of documentaries – how are our national, regional identities, historical identities constructed through the mediation of a text? • David Gauntlett (2002) argues that “identities are not ‘given’ but are constructed and negotiated.”

6. Marxist Louis Althusser (1971) looked at the way audiences were ‘hailed’ in a process known as interpellation. This idea is the social/ideological practice of misrecognising yourself based on a ‘false consciousness’ mediated by media representations.

7. Michel Maffesoli (1985) identified the idea of the “urban tribe” – members of these small groups tend to have similar worldwide views, dress styles and common behaviours – leads to the decline of individualism. • Look at the idea of the Collective Identity. • David Gauntlett (2007) argues that “Identity is complicated. Everybody thinks they’ve got one. Artists play with the idea of identity in modern society.”

8. Laura Mulvey (1975) argues that the dominant point of view is masculine. The female body is displayed for the male gaze in order to provide erotic pleasure for the male (vouyerism). Women are therefore objectified by the camera lens and whatever gender the spectator/audience is positioned to accept the masculine POV.

9. John Berger ‘Ways Of Seeing’ (1972) “Men act and women appear”. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. “Women are aware of being seen by a male spectator”

10. Stereotypes • O’Sullivan et al (1998) details that a stereotype is a label that involves a process of categorisation and evaluation. • We can call stereotypes shorthand to narratives because such simplistic representations define our understanding of media texts – e.g we know who is good and who is evil.

11. First coined by Walter Lippmann (1956) the word stereotype wasn’t meant to be negative and was simply meant as a shortcut or ordering process. • In ideological terms, stereotyping is a means by which support is provided by one group’s differential against another.

12. First coined by Walter Lippmann (1956) the word stereotype wasn’t meant to be negative and was simply meant as a shortcut or ordering process. • In ideological terms, stereotyping is a means by which support is provided by one group’s differential against another.

13. Dyer (1977) details that if we are to be told that we are going to see a film about an alcoholic then we will know that it will be a tale either of sordid decline or of inspiring redemption. • He suggests this is a particularly interesting potential use of stereotypes, in which the character is constructed, at the level of dress, performance, etc., as a stereotype but is deliberatIey given a narrative function that is not implicit in the stereotype, thus throwing into question the assumptions signalled by the stereotypical iconography.

14. As part of stereotyping to create meaning in ‘factual’ texts such as news, television theorist John Hartley (1982) argues that aspects such as the presenters’ voices are stereotyped in order to create shorthand meanings for audiences at a particular but of drama, action, light-heartedness etc. • This means they are personalised and this personalisation creates characteristics which become stereotyped for the audience.