2. • What are the social implications of media representations?
• The media do not just offer us a transparent ‘window on the world’ but a
mediated version of the world. They don’t just present reality, they re-present
it – David Buckingham
• Branston and Stafford (2001) - soaps rely on archetypal characters and
stereotypes - ensure ready accessibility because stories have universal
appeal about families and communities. Stereotypes depend on shared
cultural knowledge – some part of the stereotype must ring true.
• Stereotypes are always about power: those with power stereotype those
with less power (Dyer, 1979). Can you find evidence to support or critique
these views?
• A soap involves multiple perspectives and no consensus: ambivalence and
contradiction is characteristic of the genre. There is no single 'hero' to
identify with and the wide range of characters in soaps offers viewers a
great deal of choice regarding those with which they might identify which
leaves soaps open to individual interpretations David Buckingham (1987).
• Women were represented as passive objects of the male gaze – Laura
Mulvey 1975 – true when applied to these texts – or false?
3. • Representation: the way reality is ‘mediated’ or ‘re-presented’
to us.
• Collective Identity: the individual’s sense of belonging to a
group (part of personal identity); the idea is that through
participating in social activities –in this case, watching films
and television - individuals can gain a sense of belonging and
in essence an "identity" that transcends the individual.
• “A focus on Identity requires us to pay closer attention to the
ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life
and their consequences for social groups” - David
Buckingham.
• Application of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of Hegemony – much
of the media is controlled by the dominant group in society and
the viewpoints associated with this group inevitably become
embedded in the products themselves (i.e. via representation of
race, class, gender, sexuality, for example), even if the
promotion of these views isn’t conscious – dominant views
come to be seen as the norm.
4. • This is developed in the book Manufacturing Consent
where Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
summarise the process of hegemony thus: The mass
media serve as a system for communicating messages
and symbols to the general populace. It is their function
to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate
individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of
behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional
structures of the larger society.
• Hegemony is a representational strategy of power; it
involves the uses of representations to control people
(to manufacture the consent of the ruled to the rule of
the rulers).
Hence the general marginalisation in the
representation of the working class in British cinema
until the late 1950s in this patriarchal, white, middle
class ‘governed’ society…
5. • Can we resist this representation? Are
audiences passive or active?
• Can audiences be influenced by what they watch?
• There are a number of theories about this.
• The Hypodermic Syringe theory posits that audiences are passive and absorb what
they see in the media and can be influenced by it
• Uses and Gratifications suggests audiences are active viewers and use the media in
various ways to get some kind of gratification that will depend on the viewer.
• Hall and Morley’s Encoding/Decoding model (1973) claims that audience reaction can
be broken uo into four basic groups:
• A preferred reading of a text would imply that the spectator may accept the
dominant values within the text and read it in a way consistent with the intentions of
the producer.
• A negotiated reading means the spectator chooses whether or not they accept the
preferred reading as their own.
• An oppositional reading would mean the spectator completely rejects the preferred
reading.
• An aberrant reading means the spectator picks up an entirely different reading to
that which was intended by the maker.
6. How is identity formed?
Foucault:
• We often talk about people as if they have particular attributes as
'things' inside themselves -- they have an identity, for example, and
we believe that at the heart of a person there is a fixed and true
identity or character (even if we're not sure that we know quite what
that is, for a particular person). We assume that people have an
inner essence -- qualities beneath the surface which determine who
that person really 'is'. We also say that some people have (different
levels of) power which means that they are more (or less) able to
achieve what they want in their relationships with others, and society
as a whole.
• Foucault rejected this view. For Foucault, people do not have a 'real'
identity within themselves; that's just a way of talking about the self -
- a discourse. An 'identity' is communicated to others in your
interactions with them, but this is not a fixed thing within a person. It
is a shifting, temporary construction.
• People do not 'have' power implicitly; rather, power is a technique or
action which individuals can engage in. Power is not possessed; it is
exercised. And where there is power, there is always also
resistance.
7. • A lot of research has been done into audience
consumption and it is possible to find evidence to
support opposing points. British researcher David
Buckingham (2000) has conducted studies into the
nature of children’s consumption of television and
has concluded that children are active consumers:
they can decode what they watch and form
strategies to deal with problematic material; on the
other hand, the Americans, Donnerstein and Linz,
claim their finding suggest passive consumption and
suggest that audiences are directly and negatively
affected by watching violent images.
• In terms of censorship, it’s usually politic within
media studies to suggest that audiences are active
consumers of media products.
8. • Gammon and Marshment (1998) stress the
role of the audience in the construction of
meaning from texts and suggest there is a range
of interpretations offered by any text.
• Henry Jenkins (1992): ‘Fans actively assert
their mastery over the mass-produced texts
which provide the raw material for their own
cultural productions and the basis for their social
interactions.’
• Gary Giddens (1991) claims that mediated
experiences make us reflect upon and rethink
our own self-narrative in relation to others.
9. • Giddens: The self is not something we are born with, and it is
not fixed
• Instead, the self is reflexively made- thoughtfully constructed
by the individual We all choose a lifestyle
• Latterly, a key figure in identity theory has been David
Gauntlett.
• Gauntlett (2002): By thinking about their own identity,
attitudes, behaviour and lifestyle in relation to those of media
figures - some of whom may be potential 'role models', others
just the opposite - individuals make decisions and judgements
about their own way of living (and that of others). It is for this
reason that the 'role model' remains an important concept,
although it should not be taken to mean someone that a
person wants to copy. Instead, role models serve as
navigation points as individuals steer their own personal
routes through life. (Their general direction, we should note,
however, is more likely to be shaped by parents, friends,
teachers, colleagues and other people encountered in
everyday life).
10. • Gauntlett (2002): Media messages are diverse,
diffuse and contradictory. Rather than being
zapped straight into people's brains, ideas about
lifestyle and identity that appear in the media are
resources which individuals use to think through
their sense of self and modes of expression.
• Because 'inherited recipes for living and role
stereotypes fail to function', we have to make our
own new patterns of being, and it seems clear
that the media plays an important role here
(David Gauntlett, 2002).
11. • Media products provide numerous kinds of 'guidance' -
not necessarily in the obvious form of advice-giving, but
in the myriad suggestions of ways of living which they
imply. We lap up this material because the social
construction of identity today is the knowing social
construction of identity. Your life is your project. The
media provides some of the tools which can be used in
this work. Like many toolkits, however, it contains some
good utensils and some useless ones; some that might
give beauty to the project, and some that might spoil it.
(People find different uses for different materials, too, so
one person's 'bad' tool might be a gift to another.)
(Gauntlett, 2002)
• I don't believe that 'experts' can have the final word
about representations, since representations are only
meaningful when processed in the minds of individual
audience members. – David Gauntlett (2008) (an
expert, who is, of course, trying to have the final word…)
12. So what is ‘Collective Identity’?
Collective Identity: the individual’s sense of belonging to
a group (part of personal identity); the idea is that
through participating in social activities –in this case,
watching films and television - individuals can gain a
sense of belonging and in essence an "identity" that
transcends the individual.
Collective Identity: not just representations by
mainstream media but self-construction by users of the
media and communities formed from shared identity:
age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, cultural values,
political ideas etc. We can see this fairly obviously on
internet fan sites and blogs related to the soaps, such as
http://coronationstreetupdates.blogspot.com/
http://www.corrieblog.tv/ http://www.corrie.net/
13. • I think the way forward is to acknowledge Collective
Identity exists but that it seems to difficult measure or
ascertain HOW FAR British soap operas and film have
helped to create a sense of collective identity.
• Audience response to soaps, for example, is rich and
varied, as befits active viewers, but if Giddens and
Gauntlett and current identity theory are correct, then it
seems likely that audiences do, indeed, use these
particular media examples to form a sense of identity, but
along with many other aspects of life too.
• As to how much the media reflects collective identity as
opposed to constructing it, I think you would need a
detailed breakdown of the intentions of the film-makers,
many of whom, let’s face it, have an agenda, often a
political one driven by a leftish/liberal middle class view of
what representation of working class life should be like;
this political agenda and, therefore, certain themes, are
less likely to be present in television soap opera which is
attempting to be more ‘commercial’ and appeal to a larger
audience within a set viewing pattern.
14. • Once we acknowledge the idea of
collective identity and that audiences do
draw on various aspects of their lives,
including what they watch on television
and in the cinema, we have to look at the
issue of whether representation of the
working class is different in soaps and film
and has it changed over time.
• And of course it is and it has in several
respects, but you’re going to have to
SHOW how!
