1. G235: Critical
Perspectives in Media
Theoretical Evaluation
of Production
1b) Representation

2. Aims/Objectives
• To reinforce basic representation
theory.
• To have a basic understanding of how
to evaluate your coursework against
key representation theory.
• To produce a narrative answer

3. This is about…
• For your coursework, this will focus on you
analysing how you have represented:
• Place (regional identity)
• People (gender, class, ethnicity, disability,
sexuality, age)
• There must be a comment about the ideas
you have communicated about them
(ideologies) and whether they are
stereotypical or/reinforce
traditional/dominant ideologies or not.

4. 1. Representation – Basic Definition
• Stuart Hall (1980)
• 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.

5. Mediation works in 3 ways
• James Baker (2007)
• 1. Selection: Whatever ends up on the
screen or in the paper, much more will
have been left out.
• 2. Organisation: The various elements will
be organised carefully in ways that real life
is not
• 3. Focusing: mediation always ends up with
us, the audience being encouraged towards
concentrating on one aspect of the text and
ignoring others.

6. Task 1. Mediation
• You have 5 minutes to write down what
you are representing in your production
(Place? People?).
• Pick 1 example write down how you:
• 1. Selected certain elements to mediate
your representation.
• 2. Organised these elements to mediate
your representations.
• 3. How you encouraged your audience to
focus on one aspect to help mediate your
representations.

7. 2. Context of representation
• 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?

8. • James Baker (2007) suggests that there are 3
ways to look at representation:
• The Reflective view
• According to this view, when we represent
something, we are taking its true meaning and
trying to create a replica of it in the mind of our
audience — like a reflection.
• The Intentional view
• This is the opposite of the Reflective idea. This
time the most important thing in the process of
representation is the person doing the
representing to mean (adverts).
.

9. The Constructionist view
As an individual to make up your own mind and
the influences of the society that you live in on
the way that you do so.
• Any representation is a mixture of:
• 1. The thing itself.
• 2. The opinions of the people doing the
representation
• 3. The reaction of the individual to the
representation
• 4. The context of the society in which the
representation is taking place.

10. Task 2. Context/Reception
• Pick 1 example.
• How have you been tried to be reflective
( create a mirror of reality)?
• How have you been intentional
(deliberately encoded point of view)?
• How are your audience meant to respond
to this representation?

11. 3. Ideologies behind representation
Tim O’Sullivan et al. (1998) Ideology – refers to a
set of ideas which produces a partial and
selective view of reality. Notion of ideology
entails widely held ideas or beliefs which are
seen as ‘common’ sense and become
naturalised.
What is important is that, in Marxist terms, the
media’s role may be seen as :
•Circulating and reinforcing dominant ideologies
•(less frequently) undermining and challenging
such ideologies.

12. Ideologies and Representation (MARXISM)
• A hegemonic view of society – fundamental
inequalities in power between social
groups. Groups in power exercise their
influence culturally rather than by force.
• Concept has origins in Marxist theory -
ruling capitalist class are able to protect
their economic interests.
• Representations are encoded into mass
media texts in order to do this – reinforce
dominant ideologies in society – links
therefore to mediation and creating a
preferred meaning for the audience.

13. Task 3. Ideologies
• Pick 1/2 examples.
• What dominant ideologies have you
reinforced in your representations?
• How have you done this?
• If you have challenged dominant
ideologies, how have you done this?

14. 4. Stereotypes and Countertypes
• 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.

15. • First coined by Walter Lippmann 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.
• Richard Dyer (1977) the types produced by
different social groups according to their sense
of who belongs and who doesn't, who is 'in' and
who is not creates stereotypes.

16. • Tessa Perkins (1979) says, however, that
stereotyping is not a simple process. She
identified that some of the many ways that
stereotypes are assumed to operate aren’t
true.
• Perkins argues that if stereotypes were always
so simple then they would not work culturally
and over time.
• Countertypes are representations that
deliberately go against cultural, hegemonic
stereotypes.

17. Task 4. Stereotypes
• Pick 3 examples.
• Did you use stereotypes to represent/tell
stories about place/person/ reinforce
ideology?
• If you have used countertypes, how have
you done this?

18. 5. Representing the social –
Gender/Race/Age
• Gender
• Masculinity and femininity are socially
constructed.
• Ideas about gender are produced and reflected in
language O’ Sullivan et al (1998).
• Feminism is a label that refers to a broad range of
views containing one shared assumption – gender
inequalities in society, historically masculine
power (patriarchy) exercised at right of women’s
interests and rights.

19. • Age
• Representations of age are clearly based on ideas
about binary opposition (Strauss, 1958).
• De Fleur suggested that carefully mediated
representations create social value statements
and they change accordingly over time.
• Youth groups have been ‘demonised’ by the mass
media, creating moral panics (Stanley Cohen,
1972) about youth groups and subcultures.

20. • Race
• Representations of race are clearly based on ideas
about binary opposition (Strauss, 1958).
• Edward Said (1978) that representations of non-
white groups are based on the notion of the
‘other’, constructed as something ‘exotic’ (Hall,
1997).

21. Task 5. Representing the social
• Pick 3 examples.
• Look at the theories from within feminism,
racial, age discourses.
• Did you represent age/gender/race
stereotypically?
• Why did you do this?

22. 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”

23. Gay Gaze
• It can be argued that we can also have a
‘gay male gaze’ (Steve Neale, 1992).
Images which show men in passive,
submissive, sexualised poses – lying down,
looking up at the camera so that the viewer
is dominant can be described as
homoerotic. In this case the male subject
will have hands behind their heads in a
pose which could suggest relaxation but
could also be read as submissive and non-
aggressive.

24. POSTMODERNISM AND
REPRESENTATIONS OF REALITY
• In a media saturated world, the distinction
between reality and media representations
becomes blurred or invisible to us (Julian
McDougall, 2009).
• Modern period came before – people were
concerned with representing reality, but
now this gets mixed around and we end up
with pastiche, parody and intertextuality.
For example, Daniel Strinati (1995) details
that “reality is now only definable in terms
of the reflections of the mirror”.

25. • Jean-Francious Lyotard (1984) and Jean
Baudrillard (1980) share the belief that the
idea of ‘truth’ needs to be deconstructed so
that dominant ideas (that Lyotard argues
are “grand narratives”) can be challenged.

26. • Baudrillard discussed the concept of
hyperreality – we inhabit a society that is
no longer made up of any original thing for
a sign to represent – it is the sign that is
now the meaning. He argued that we live in
a society of simulacra – simulations of
reality that replace the real. Think
Disneyland.

27. Essay
• Analyse one of your media productions in
relation to representation.
• It is vital for this that you have an
understanding of how representations have
been created in existing media texts as you
will need to reference these with explicit
examples as part of your essay.