Media Effects/ Theory

Media Effects

• Do media representations of young people effect how they are percieved?

Media is particularly influencial as is covers mass areas such as newspapers, films, televison and so on.

• If so how does this effect occur?

- Hypodermic model
Idea that information is directley injected in to the consumer and accepted. This suggests that the way the media represent youths is immediatley accepted and remembered and therefore influences opinions aimed at British youths.

 

- Cultivation theory
The theory that the mass audience consuming television are directley influenced. People who watch a lot of television have exaggerated opinions of society and this is therefore applicable to the representation of british youths. For example, Harry Brown is particularly over exaggerated as are many other television programmes, meaning that people who watch a lot of these sort of influences are going to have negative opinions of youths.

 

- Copycat theory
This suggests that the consumer will copy what they see. This is applicable to both adults and youths. Youths may copy violent behaviour they see in films because of the way they see their age group being represented. Adults my also copy the attitudes they see of adults in films towards youths.

-Moral Panic
This theory suggests that when a group appears that challeneges cultural hegemony and reflects the fears and anxieties of adults belonging to "social normality", the media step in and exaagerate the representations. This group then appear as "folk devils" in society, which is applicable to may contemporary media texts where the representations of youths are over exaggerated. For example, when 'yobs' started to be represented negatively, people began to panic about youths, which was where the law stepped in and introduced ASBO in an attempt to remain cultural hegdemony

Contemporary British Social Realism

• What do you understand by contemporary british realism?
• Social realist films attempt tp portray issues facing ordinary people in their social situations
• Social realist films try to show that society and the capitalist system leads to the exploitation of the poor or dispossed
• These groups are shown as victims of the system rather than beiign totally responsible for their own behaviour
• 'These places represent an everywhere of britian where relationships are broken down and where people have become isoltaed and disconnected. Their britishness is their culturally specific adress to audiences at home' (Murray 2008)

 
Audience

• Social realist films whicha adress social problems in this country offer a very different version of cellective identity than british films which are also aimed at an American audience. Films like Notting Hill and Love Actually reach a much bigger audience than low budget social realist films
• Social realist films are aimed at a predominantly British audience
• If many more people see the more commercial films, consider which version of our collective identity is the more powerful or has the most impact

 Analysing Representations of Collective Identity

• When comparing how britishness and our collective identity is represented in films consider the following questions:
• Who is being represented?
• Who is representing them?
• How are they ebing represented?
• What seems to be the intentions of the representastions?
• What is the dominant discourse? (world view offfered by film)
• What range of readings are there?
• Look for alternative discourses

Collective Identity

• The media contributes to our sense of collective identity but there are many diffferent versions that change over time
• Representations can cause problems for the groups being represented because marginalized groups have litttle control over their representation/ stereotyping
• The social context in which film/ TV programme is made influences the messages/ values/ dominant discourse of the film

British Social Realism

• Relate to contemorary example - Fish Tank/ Harry Brown/ Attack the Block/ Eden Lake
• Compare to more commercial products and exaplain the difference. Use Love Actually/ Notting Hill
• Consider what representation is most powerful in contructing a collective identity for Britishness in view of audience size

Encoding - Decoding (Stuart Hall, 1980): Active Audience Theory

• Encoding -decoding is an attractive audience theory developed by Stuart Hall which examines the relationships between text and it's audience
• Encoding is a process by which a text is constructed by it's producers
• Decoding is the process by which the audience reads, understands and interprets text
• Hall States that texts are polysemic, meaning they may be read differently by different people, depending on their identity, cultural knowledge and opinions

Preffered Reading/ Dominant hegemonic

• When an audience interprets the message as it was meant to be understood, they are operating in dominant code.
• The position od professional broadcasters and media producers is that the messages are already signified within the hegmonic manner to which they are accustomed.
• Professional codes for media organizations sevre to contribute to this type of indsutrial phycology.
• The producers and the audience are in harmony

Negotiated reading

• Not all audience may underatand what media producers take for granted. There may be some acknowlwedgment of differences in understanding
• Decoding within the negotiatted version contains a mixture od adpative and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hengmonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract) while at the mopre restrcited situationl (situated) level it makes it own ground rules

Oppositional Reading

• When media consumers understand the contextual and literary infections of a text yet decode the message by a completely oppositiional means. This is globally contrary to postion/oppositional reading
• The detotalization of that text enables them to rework it to their preffered meaning. This requires operating with an opposition code which can underatnds dominant hegmonic postions.

Any Representation is a Mixture of:

• The thing itself
• The opinions of the pople doing the representation
• The reaction of the individual to the reperesentation
• The context of the society in which the representation takes place

Stereotyping

• Why do we sterotype?

It's puts people in to categories and boxes so we can categorise them easily. producers fall back on sterotyping so we can immediatley identify characters and beging to relate to them quickly.

• The fact that we see the world naturally in this kind of way with connections between character traits allows the media to create simplistic representations which we find believable. Implict personality theory explains this process...

• As humans we use out own unique store house of knowledge about people when we judge them
• Our past experience is more important than the true features of the acutal personality that we are judging - traits exist more in the eye of the beholder than they do in society
• We have each a system of rules that tells us which characteristics go with other characterisitics
• We categorise people into types (eg workaholic, feminist etc) to simplify the taks of person perception
• Once we have in our minds a set of linked traits which seem to us to go together, they form a pattern
• Once a few of the traits seem to fit our prototype we will imediatley bundle onto the person the rest of the traits from the prototype
• We find people who do not fit into our prototypes we form very strong impressions of them
• All of this happens naturally in our mind sbeforte the media have the chance to simplify and distort. We do a lot of business of stereotyping ourselves. It is almost as if we

Indentity

• Is this then what helps us to create out own identity?
• Dio we judge people in the same wayas we categorise films in to genres?
• How do we create our own identity?