Tuesday, 11 March 2014
Monday, 10 March 2014
Media Language
Media lang from ecclestona The date for Saussure 1857 - 1913 (incorrect in the slideshare)
Charles Sanders Peirce (is also spelt incorrectly in the slideshare)
Charles Sanders Peirce (is also spelt incorrectly in the slideshare)
How to use theorists and theories for the exam
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
How to use theorists… Quote Summarise Comment
Assume your reader knows about the theory/ theorist. Don ’t explain the theory; use it.
A Todorovian analysis would argue…
Mulvey ’s notion of the Male Gaze provides a useful way of understanding the video in that…
Steve Neale ’ s statement that Genre is “ made up of repetition and change ” could be useful here because…
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
How to use theorists… Quote Summarise Comment
Assume your reader knows about the theory/ theorist. Don ’t explain the theory; use it.
A Todorovian analysis would argue…
Mulvey ’s notion of the Male Gaze provides a useful way of understanding the video in that…
Steve Neale ’ s statement that Genre is “ made up of repetition and change ” could be useful here because…
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
1(b) Representation Essay Plan
Definition: Re – presentation
The presentation of a form of reality in a media text.
—Representation is always a re-presentation, in which elements of reality are selected, organized and narrated.
—Media produces ‘mediates’ reality – it selects it and shows us only what the producer wants.
Media producers have no choice but to be selective in their choice of material, however naturalistic their approach so….
texts will always represent individuals, groups and issues, whatever the intentions of the producer.
What is being represented in a film trailer or music magazine?
-A form of reality?
-The artist?
-A theme within the narrative?
-A movement – feminism?
Stereotypes - why have they proved popular with:
—With audiences?
—With institutions (marketing and creative)?
How could stereotypical representations be seen as:
—Lazy?
—Dangerous?
—Offensive?
—Misleading?
David Gauntlett - constructing identity : Audiences and representation
Gauntlett says that we reconfirm or challenge our identity through watching media texts.
—We use texts as toolbox to check own identity
Gauntlett described the Social construction of identity: how can you work out who you are through what you see in a media text? Your identity is not fixed: you will be shaped by what you watch.
--Identity as project – audience chooses the tools
-Conflicting media messages about identity
So.. When we watch or read a text we compare ourselves to the stereotypes presented within it.
Look at the use of stereotypes in your music magazine or film trailer. How far could you say your music magazine or film trailer encourages audiences to reconfirm or challenge who they are when reading your magazine/ watching your trailer?
Laura Mulvey - the male gaze
One theory in media studies is the idea of the ‘male gaze’. This explores the idea that the camera ‘sees’ images through male eyes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViwtNLUqkMY
“The message though was always the same: buy the product, get the girl; or buy the product to get to be like the girl so you can get your man” in other words, “‘Buy’ the image, ‘get’ the woman”
—What could this mean?
—Why might it be the case?
—How might this be evident in your music video?
Naomi Wolf – 3rd Wave feminism
and the Beauty Myth
—Wolf argues that an idealised form of Beauty devised by large
multinational companies including the pharmaceutical industry is the currency
which women are judged by
—'No
matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she
is saying’ Apply this to your
work….
Are your female musicians shown as ‘beautiful’ are their looks, style and personal relationships discussed more than their music? In your film trailer did you use binary opposites with your heroines shown as ‘beautiful’ and your villains shown as ‘ugly’?
Are your female musicians shown as ‘beautiful’ are their looks, style and personal relationships discussed more than their music? In your film trailer did you use binary opposites with your heroines shown as ‘beautiful’ and your villains shown as ‘ugly’?
Judith Butler - gender performance
—Butler argues that gender is a performance.
—It is what you do at particular times, rather than about who you are.
Apply this to your work….
Do the absence of male characters change the way you view the female characters?
Do the female characters behave typically feminine?
Feminism / Post feminism
—Feminism = a movement (c. 1960s) promoting the rights of women to be equal to men and arguing that women should no longer dress and behave as men wish them to.
Post-feminism = movement arguing that women have now achieved equality and should be free to dress and behave as they wish without doing so for the benefit of men.
Example: Girls Aloud.
Post-feminist icons?
Objects of male gaze?
Exploited or powerful?
Role models for women?
Verismilitude = the imitation of reality (techniques)
—Representation is always a re-presentation, in which elements of reality are selected, organized and narrated.
—By nature, media ‘mediates’ reality – it selects it and shows us only what the producer wants.
The media makes use of various ‘scripts’ – like stereotypes for events rather than people
e.g. news programmes expect certain images and events to occur in coverage of protests, war, natural disaster, murder inquiries.
Fictional narratives use certain representations of issues and events
E.g. relationships and break-ups, car chases, trials, police investigations, holidays.
Consider in your work how far you have created verisimilitude using:
(a) Mise-en-scene Classic Realism? (as if the camera is not there)
(b) Editing Are we overly conscious of the editing? Does it seem fluent – continuity editing?
or Does the editing form part of the narrative? Is it dramatic? Does it create pace and excitement?
(c) Narrative Does the narrative flow as a chronological sequence of events? Does it present all aspects of the action to the audience? Are events constructed from one viewpoint – is this realistic? Do we move from equilibrium to disequilibrium? Is this realistic?
Stuart Hall - encoding and decoding texts
—Particular representations become established through repetition in the media e.g. villain characters / antagonists
-they develop a ‘common sense’ status through their ‘performative nature’
-Hall focuses on issues of race and culture but his theory can be applied to any representation
How you might construct your answer:
Introduction: Definition. Which product will you use to discuss? What is being represented within your music magazine or film trailer? A form of reality? The artist? A theme within the narrative? A movement – feminism?
Paragraph 1: Stereotypes
What stereotypes or countertypes have you represented? How have you done this (tie in with media language) What are the risks/benefits for audiences/institutions? Are there any stereotypes that are under represented/ misrepresented?
Gauntlett’s theory of reconfirming or challenging our identity through watching media texts. Using texts as toolbox. How does this relate your own work?
Paragraph 2: The attempt to create Verisimilitude
How far have you represented reality within your text? Why did you decide to do this? Explain how media selects and mediates reality. Consider how you made use of a narrative that ‘scripts’ reality. How did you create this reality / non reality through editing, mise-en-scene and narrative?
Paragraph 3: Stuart Hall - Preferred Readings and encoding/decoding texts
How might different audience ‘readings’ of texts affect how the representation of the text is formed. Stuart Hall’s theory of representations becoming established through ‘repetition’ and a ‘common sense status’ through the ‘performative nature’ of texts (we know what a car chase feels like because we have seen in within a media text).
Paragraph 4: Gender representation
Judith Butler Gender as a performance – masculine or feminine?
Laura Mulvey The Male Gaze
Conclusion
How have you made use of the issue of representation in your text? What are the advantages of representation within a media text for audiences? What limitations are there?
Post-feminist icons?
Objects of male gaze?
Exploited or powerful?
Role models for women?
Verismilitude = the imitation of reality (techniques)
—Representation is always a re-presentation, in which elements of reality are selected, organized and narrated.
—By nature, media ‘mediates’ reality – it selects it and shows us only what the producer wants.
The media makes use of various ‘scripts’ – like stereotypes for events rather than people
e.g. news programmes expect certain images and events to occur in coverage of protests, war, natural disaster, murder inquiries.
Fictional narratives use certain representations of issues and events
E.g. relationships and break-ups, car chases, trials, police investigations, holidays.
Consider in your work how far you have created verisimilitude using:
(a) Mise-en-scene Classic Realism? (as if the camera is not there)
(b) Editing Are we overly conscious of the editing? Does it seem fluent – continuity editing?
or Does the editing form part of the narrative? Is it dramatic? Does it create pace and excitement?
(c) Narrative Does the narrative flow as a chronological sequence of events? Does it present all aspects of the action to the audience? Are events constructed from one viewpoint – is this realistic? Do we move from equilibrium to disequilibrium? Is this realistic?
Stuart Hall - encoding and decoding texts
—Particular representations become established through repetition in the media e.g. villain characters / antagonists
-they develop a ‘common sense’ status through their ‘performative nature’
-Hall focuses on issues of race and culture but his theory can be applied to any representation
How you might construct your answer:
Introduction: Definition. Which product will you use to discuss? What is being represented within your music magazine or film trailer? A form of reality? The artist? A theme within the narrative? A movement – feminism?
Paragraph 1: Stereotypes
What stereotypes or countertypes have you represented? How have you done this (tie in with media language) What are the risks/benefits for audiences/institutions? Are there any stereotypes that are under represented/ misrepresented?
Gauntlett’s theory of reconfirming or challenging our identity through watching media texts. Using texts as toolbox. How does this relate your own work?
Paragraph 2: The attempt to create Verisimilitude
How far have you represented reality within your text? Why did you decide to do this? Explain how media selects and mediates reality. Consider how you made use of a narrative that ‘scripts’ reality. How did you create this reality / non reality through editing, mise-en-scene and narrative?
Paragraph 3: Stuart Hall - Preferred Readings and encoding/decoding texts
How might different audience ‘readings’ of texts affect how the representation of the text is formed. Stuart Hall’s theory of representations becoming established through ‘repetition’ and a ‘common sense status’ through the ‘performative nature’ of texts (we know what a car chase feels like because we have seen in within a media text).
Paragraph 4: Gender representation
Judith Butler Gender as a performance – masculine or feminine?
Laura Mulvey The Male Gaze
Conclusion
How have you made use of the issue of representation in your text? What are the advantages of representation within a media text for audiences? What limitations are there?
Updated from - http://g325criticalperspectives.blogspot.co.uk
Tuesday, 4 March 2014
Encoding Decoding Stuart Hall - repetition and interpretation
In "Encoding/decoding", Hall suggests media messages accrue a common-sense status in part through their performative nature. Through the repeated performance, staging or telling of the narrative of "9/11" (as an example; but there are others like it within the media) a culturally specific interpretation becomes not only simply plausible and universal, but is elevated to "common-sense".
According to Hall, "a message must be perceived as meaningful discourse and be meaningfully de-coded before it has an effect, a use, or satisfies a need". There are four codes of the Encoding/Decoding Model of Communication. The first way of encoding is the dominant (i.e. hegemonic) code. This is the code the encoder expects the decoder to recognize and decode. "When the viewer takes the connoted meaning full and straight and decodes the message in terms of the reference-code in which it has been coded, it operates inside the dominant code". The second way of encoding is the negotiated code. "It acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground-rules, it operates with ‘exceptions’ to the rule".The third way of encoding is the oppositional code also known as the globally contrary code. "It is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine to decode the message in a globally contrary way." "Before this message can have an ‘effect’ (however defined), or satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded."
Hall challenged all four components of the mass communications model. He argues that (i) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; (ii) the message is never transparent; and (iii) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. For example, a documentary film on asylum seekers that aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight, does not guarantee that audiences will decode it to feel sympathetic towards the asylum seekers. Despite its being realistic and recounting facts, the documentary form itself must still communicate through a sign system (the aural-visual signs of TV) that simultaneously distorts the intentions of producers and evokes contradictory feelings in the audience.
Distortion is built into the system, rather than being a "failure" of the producer or viewer. There is a "lack of fit", Hall argues, "between the two sides in the communicative exchange". That is, between the moment of the production of the message ("encoding") and the moment of its reception ("decoding").
Media, Identity and Gender
The pdf book Media, Gender & Identity by David Gauntlett is an excellent very readable book which covers a number of theorists and re-examines and critiques their work - Angela McRobbie and Judith Butler included.
Pages to read
Intro P 6- 14
Queer Theory Butler p 105 - 116
McRobbie p138 - 139 and p143 - 145
Summary of magazines p154-155
Role models & Girl Power p160 - 165
Role model summary p174
Pages to read
Intro P 6- 14
Queer Theory Butler p 105 - 116
McRobbie p138 - 139 and p143 - 145
Summary of magazines p154-155
Role models & Girl Power p160 - 165
Role model summary p174
What is Queer Theory?
QUEER THEORY AND FLUID IDENTITIES
QUEER THEORY, DESPITE one interpretation of its name, is not a theory of homosexuality (although it does have some things to say about that). It is an approach to sexuality and, more generally, identity, which builds on some of the ideas developed by Foucault (
This really is odd, though, because almost everybody regards Butler as the creator of modern queer theory. She owes a debt to Foucault and other earlier figures, but the thing we call 'queer theory' today definitely starts with Gender Trouble by Judith Butler.
THE EASY BULLET POINT SUMMARY
We'll need to look at each of these points in more detail to fully understand their meaning and implications, but here's the simple summary of what queer theory is about:
• Nothing within your identity is fixed.
• Your identity is little more than a pile of (social and cultural) things which you have previously expressed, or which have been said about you.
• There is not really an 'inner self'. We come to believe we have one through the repetition of discourses about it.
• Gender, like other aspects of identity, is a performance (though not necessarily a consciously chosen one). Again, this is reinforced through repetition.
• Therefore, people can change.
• The binary divide between masculinity and femininity is a social construction built on the binary divide between men and women – which is also a social construction.
• We should challenge the traditional views of masculinity and femininity, and sexuality, by causing 'gender trouble'.
http://coleshillmediasite.weebly.com/uploads/4/6/0/1/4601434/media_gender_and_identity.pdf
Media Gender and Identity David Gauntlett
QUEER THEORY, DESPITE one interpretation of its name, is not a theory of homosexuality (although it does have some things to say about that). It is an approach to sexuality and, more generally, identity, which builds on some of the ideas developed by Foucault (
This really is odd, though, because almost everybody regards Butler as the creator of modern queer theory. She owes a debt to Foucault and other earlier figures, but the thing we call 'queer theory' today definitely starts with Gender Trouble by Judith Butler.
THE EASY BULLET POINT SUMMARY
We'll need to look at each of these points in more detail to fully understand their meaning and implications, but here's the simple summary of what queer theory is about:
• Nothing within your identity is fixed.
• Your identity is little more than a pile of (social and cultural) things which you have previously expressed, or which have been said about you.
• There is not really an 'inner self'. We come to believe we have one through the repetition of discourses about it.
• Gender, like other aspects of identity, is a performance (though not necessarily a consciously chosen one). Again, this is reinforced through repetition.
• Therefore, people can change.
• The binary divide between masculinity and femininity is a social construction built on the binary divide between men and women – which is also a social construction.
• We should challenge the traditional views of masculinity and femininity, and sexuality, by causing 'gender trouble'.
http://coleshillmediasite.weebly.com/uploads/4/6/0/1/4601434/media_gender_and_identity.pdf
Media Gender and Identity David Gauntlett
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