Media Representations

GQ is a men's fashion and style magazine which provides entertainment, sport and culture news, reviews and comment. The gender roles are portrayed in completely opposite lights here. First of all, both magazines feature either a woman or a male model on the front cover. The man (Tinie Tempah) is dressed in a full body suit looking smart and handsome. On the hand hand. Lana Del Ray has been photographed completely naked wearing nothing but a bracelet and a necklace. Tinie will attract the male audience as he is a male himself, but Lana will most likely attract them so much more from the way her body has been presented on this magazine. Women are stripped naked to please the men that will be buying this magazine. Why couldn't she wear clothes and be photographed looking elegant like Tinie was? The Male Gaze Theory is evident here as women have been presented as sexual objects for male entertainment (Mulvey, 1991). Jonathan Schroeder (1998) also quoted "to gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze". GQ couldn't have put these theories into better practise if they tried, when it comes to the way women are represented in their magazines in comparison to men. 

Poldark years difference

(1975) Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory - the male is holding the woman's chin up directing her attention towards him. He is intensely staring at her face whilst she appears vulnerable with wide eyes, uncomfortable, and crossing her arms over her chest to initially 'protect' herself. 

(2015) The female gaze theory by Miriam Hanson can be applied to this photograph because the man is positioned in the centre of the frame which focuses the viewers attention on his physique. His ripped body is exposed with his charming smile and curly hair, all attributes that could potentially cause a female to indulge over his appearance. 

Body image - This is the way we think and feel about the size, shape, weight and overall appearance of our bodies.

Body dimorphic disorder - it's a mental disorder characterised by an obsessive preoccupation that some aspect of ones own appearance is severely flawed and warrants exceptional measures to hide of fix it. 

When people think about problems with body image they think about young women. Historically, woman have been subjected to greater objectification in the media - girls are constantly fed the message  that the only way they can succeed is by being attractive. 

According to eating disorders charity BEAT, 1.6 million people in the UK are affected by an eating disorder, of which around 11% are male. 

The rising amount of males suffering from eating disorders and abusing steroids is link to media representation of men. 

Contemporary Media Issues

The 9/11 was a moment in History that resulted in a disequilibrium taking place for the representations of Muslims. Following this devastating tragedy, the FBI reported a 1,700 percent increase of hate crimes against Muslim Americans between 2000 to 2001 (Anderson, 2002). During the process of adjusting to the aftermath of 9/11, Muslim Americans faced an upsurge in negative stereotypes expressed by the larger society (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 2003) and Muslim immigrants, more than any other immigrant group, were met with negative attitudes. Since then, increased racial and religious animosity has left Arabs, Middle Eastenders, Muslims, and those who bear stereotyped physical resemblance to members of these groups, fearful of potential hatred and hostility from those of other cultures. It has been established that discrimination toward Muslim Americans was present before the attacks on September 11, which may relate to Islam being frequently portrayed by the media as intrinsically intolerant and violent (Giger & Davidhizar, 2002). Consistent with the accessibility principle, it is possible the higher amounts of media coverage immediately after the attacks presented vast amounts of negative images related to Muslims and Arabs in general, thus leading to greater but temporary prejudices towards this group (CAIR, 2001).

In this BBC clip (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06g55y0) of testing whether or not Britain is racist, I think it is clear that segments of it do relate to islamophobia. In the section where a Muslim woman walks down the street with her head scarf on, she recieves help from the public in shops and doesn't get abusive comments thrown her way from members of the public. In the section where she then puts on a Burka, the streets suddenly become a very intimidating and frightening area for Muslims who wear burkas. She gets told to go back to her "own country" and gets a lot of funny looks from the people she passes. Islamophobia is evident in the reactions of the public as they discriminate this woman for the way she dresses.

Notes

When I made my film opening, I did it to say something, so that the audience would have a sense of what you wanted to say, of what you wanted to communicate. I did this through using a series of signs and symbols, such as colour, clothing, camera shots and angles, muse-en-scene. 

Semiotics in a nutshell:

This is a study of signs and symbols, there is a sign, an object that is called signifier. 

The meaning that is given to that is called the ignited. This is not fixed and can change with time or the society or culture that it is viewed in. And here we have denotation and connotation. Denotation is what you see and connotation is the meaning that you give to what you see e.g white is a symbol for purity and virginity, red is a symbol of love or danger/blood. 

Codes and conventions:

There is so much that happens t an unconscious level, or even conscious level, that you are already aware of in your work such as genre, conventions, narrative conventions, codes about camera angles, dark lighting etc.  It is not just about you going through those and saying how you used them, what you denoted (the signifier) to create meaning, the connotation that you hope you audience will attribute to them. 

Theorists:

Fiske (1982) - "denotation is what is filmed, connotation is how it's filmed" 

Saussure (1983) - Audience can look at a media text from a syntactic pointy of view, just describing what they see, or from a representational or symbolic point of view where the attribute meaning to what they see.

Barthes (1967) - An audiences' understanding of media texts comes from heir understanding and knowledge of frequently told myths or stories. He argues that the organisation of signs encodes particular messages and ideologies. 

Chandler (2005) - Says that semiotics is important because it helps us not take 'reality' for granted as something that can exist without human interpretation.

Stuart Hall - Argued that meaning is not fixed by the producer, and the audience is not passive, gave us different readings, the proffered reading is where the audience reads it the way that you wanted them to. 

ANSWER PLAN

 So the media language you use is trying to construct a meaning that you wish the audience to read, and if you are talking about this years work, the language should be consistent across all three products so there is to be a sense of branding and one campaign. 

So using the four micro elements, mise-en-scene, camerawork, editing and sound, pick three examples for each where this helps you create meaning and construct the whole representation thing.

You can also talk about the micro elements, genre, narrative, representation and use them as a source of theorists, as they are all relevant.

Quadrophenia (1979) - Notes

The males seem to be more aggressive
Don't know any of the characters f the women
The main girl that's spoken is the one who works in a grocery store who Jimmy likes
It's a very male film
Lots of drugs, reckless behaviour, alcohol and smoking.
The teenagers are portrayed as being just stereotypical teens - having a good time, getting unto mischief and getting off with girls
They all had jobs (working class)

Notes

Collective Identity: The sense of belonging to a group that people have.

London Riots (2011): 

Mark Duggan - stopped by police and shot.
Protests happened - Police set out a black police officer - he was verbally abused for his race - crowd became increasingly restless and then what triggered the riots was one18 year old girl there something at the police officer - riots started and riots spread.

Stan Cohen 

• Moral Panics - Leads from deviant behaviour - everyone gets involved 
• Deviance amplification - This idea is that one deviant act leads to more deviant acts which are likely to be reported because a spiral is created. 
• Folk Devils - 

David Gauntlett

• "Identities are not 'given' but are constructed and negotiated" - What you see in the media you will take out and put it together to form your own identity or will construct what you think it is for that group. 

George Gerbner 

• Cultivation Theory - He looked into people who watched a lot of TV specifically and said that these people over estimate the amount of crime in the real world. By consuming a lot of TV/Media people will over estimate the meanness of the world - one that we need protecting from. It's an audience effect that any one text has minimal impact on the audience, but watch the same thing again and again will change their opinion. 

David Buckingham 

• "A focus on identity requires us to pay close attention to the diverse ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life, and their consequences for both individuals and for social groups." - You consume more media now than you ever did before. Mass media tends to project a negative representations of youths through the imagery and language used during reports. The people who produce the media may be an older generation with traditional values. 

Gramsci

• Media is run by a very small elite group that wish to maintain their status and their position. 

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Hegemony

The news is a reflective representation

Positive social media campaigns:

One of the self representations was the 'Not in my name' campaign where people posted their faces without makeup.

Steve Anderson, creative director of debate show Free Speech for BBC 3 states that "younger people are becoming a lot more empowered because of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging." - He goes on to say that the power is transferring away from older people in charge.

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Items that represent the youth:

      - What contributes to my identity

iPhones
Alcohol
Drugs
Football
Bikes
One Direction
Sam Smith
Ed Sheeran
Ellie Goulding
Nike trainers
Segways
YouTube

Notes

Hypodermic syringe: It's like the media content is injected into you; if they tell you to write you will write; the audience is entirely passive. It's a crude model that suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data. 

Two-Step Flow Theory: The hypodermic model quickly proved too clumsy for media researches seeking to more precisely explain the relationship between audience and text. As the mass media became an essential part of life in societies around the world and did NOT reduce populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation was sought. 

Uses & Gratifications Theory: The audience are not passive and will select things that they want to watch based on what they need; it might be that the audience want information or want to escape from a long and heavy media lecture for example.

Researchers Blumler and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use text for the following purposes (i.e. uses and gratifications)

Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.

Personal relationship - using the media for emotional and other interaction, e.g. substituting soap operas for family life. 

Personal identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from text.

Surveillance - informations which could be useful for living e.g. weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains. 

Reception Theory: Stuart Hall - said there are different ways that audiences ail read texts - they'll read them the right way; the way the producer intended them to be read which is called the preferred reading - they'll take bits and disregard other bits or read it the complete opposite way. 

Narrative Theory: 

Meaning - Roland Barthes - texts may be 'open' or 'closed' Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel  meaning are called narrative codes. 

Structure - Tvzetan Todorov - texts are constructed around the vas ice scaffolding of equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium. 

Character - Vladimir Propp - produced a character typography of characters and their actions (31 character types in all).

Conflict and resolution - Claude Levi-Strauss - recognised the constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. In order to understand what it's like to be something, you have to understand what it's like to not be something. Useful way to construct narrative because you're looking at oppositions. 

 

Collective Identity

Women are represented in an explicit way e.g being objectified - those in Blurred Lines and Chandelier have nude coloured clothing on. In Chandelier, the 11 year old dancer has a nude tutu, whilst the women in Blurred Lines are wearing nude knickers, with their breasts exposed. 

The women in Blurred Lines have been used in this music video in order to allow the music video to be viewed by millions of people. The amount of views a video on YouTube gets if it is American, decides whereabouts in the charts the song is ranked in; the more YouTube views, the higher it is in the charts. 

We are no longer in a spectatorial society (where you just watch), but rather a participatorial one where the audience can participate in the making of media products (parodies) - Henry Jenkins.

The content in media products goes through the process of selection or rejection, where specific content for the video is selected in order for it to be the most attractive in targeting a large amount of audience. All media in this world has been mediated. 

The 'male gaze' of Laura Mulvey suggests that the camera positions the audience in the position of a male heterosexual, so that they can visualise women how men see them. 

This is England

Historical
Has real life clips montaged at the beginning, linking with the fiction footage that follows
Woody's skin head gang isn't stereotypical, they're more friendly and welcoming
2 groups of skinheads - woody's group interested in boots and hair style
Combo's group - the guy was 32, messing around with a 12 year old boy is weird, don't know what Smeg was doing with a 12 year old boy at 16. Blame the problems in the country on immigrants. Several of them left woody's group to go into Combo's group; sense of belonging. They wanted to understand the problems that the country was having - mention of currency, world affairs. Combo wasn't wrong when talking about the Forklands - invented war in terms of Maggie Thatcher - a group of Irelands off the Argentinia coast - not shown any interest whatsoever in them - until Phillips company discovered oil and the Argentinia group said they want them back. Thatched used that to her advantage and used it to unify her country when talking about the armed forces.
Young groups shown as being very naive when it comes to politics and global economy. Cannot be coincidence that it was combo who had the far right view and combo turning out to be the emotion immature one; his meeting with lol in the car - he had slept at 29 with a drunk 16 year old which isn't good , then when he went away and made a box for her and thought it was the best night of his life, he then couldn't handle that rejection shows how emotionally inferior he was; first sign that something wasn't quite right with combo. Goes downhill onwards, wants the weed from Milky, then they go back and Milky was talking about family and what he had and how good it was and how he thought he had a good dad even though his dad was working and never there - you could see that something was not quite right. He asked "What makes a bad dad?" makes the audience guess what dad Combo had wasn't such a good dad after all. Then losing the plot turning into some sort of psychopath and inflicting terrible injuries on him and turning on his own people - last bit at the end "leave those two alone they did nothing too you" - Combo was talking to himself; emphasises him being schizophrenia. 

Genre

• Steve Neale declares that 'genres are instances of repetition and difference' (Neale 1980, 48)
• Difference is absolutely essential to the economy of genre (Neale, 1980)
• Tzvetan Todorov argued that 'any instance of a genre will be necessarily different' (cited in Gledhill 1985 60) 

Lacey considers that there are a 'repertoire is elements' that work together to suggest genre and that these are a useful framework to use for analysis. 

Setting

Character

Narrative

Iconography

Style

But did not see genres as fixed but as dynamic and changing over time.

Fluid not fixed

• There are no 'rigid rules of inclusion and exclusion' (Gledhill 1985)
• 'Genre… are not discrete systems, considering of a fixed number of listable items' (Gledhill 1985)
• It is difficult to make clear cut distinctions between one genre and another: genres overlap, and there are 'mixed genres' such as comedy thrillers (Chandler 2000)

Burton suggests that each text in a given genre shares particular key elements to make up the generic formula, these include: protagonists, stock characters, plots and stock, situations, icons, background and decor, themes.

~

1B answer: 

The media product that I am going to be writing about in relation to genre is my first one that I done in the first year, which is my film opening. The genre of this piece is 'romance' which was set around Christmas time, where I was able to be extremely creative with narrative, colour and props in order to conform to the theme of Christmas and genre of romance, in order for it to attract it's existing target audience. Steve Neal said that 'genres are instances of repetition and differences' which means that particular conventions of existing romance movies had to be featured and repeated in mine. For example, I used a female character as the protagonist, as females are the main target audience for the genre of romance, therefore enabling my media product to have the potential at being just as successful as previous ones through the use of the main character. I also used her as the narrator throughout the two minute film opening in order to tell the story of the flashbacks on screen.