A2 Revision Session
Media Theory and Theorists
for G325
Section A: Examining your own
productions
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 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.
• All representations therefore have ideologies
behind them. Certain paradigms are encoded
into texts and others are left out in order to
give a preferred representation (the preferred
syntagm) (Levi – Strauss, 1958).
• 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?
• Rosalind Brunt (1992) details that ideologies
are never simply ideas in peoples’ heads but
are indeed myths that we live by and which
contribute to our self worth.
• In terms of documentaries – how are our
national, regional identities, historical
identities constructed through the mediation
of a text?
• David Gauntlett (2002) argues that “identities
are not ‘given’ but are constructed and
negotiated.”
• Marxist Louis Althusser (1971) looked at the
way audiences were ‘hailed’ in a process
known as interpellation. This idea is the
social/ideological practice of misrecognising
yourself based on a ‘false consciousness’
mediated by media representations.
• Michel Maffesoli (1985) identified the idea of
the “urban tribe” – members of these small
groups tend to have similar worldwide views,
dress styles and common behaviours – leads
to the decline of individualism.
• Look at the idea of the Collective Identity.
• David Gauntlett (2007) argues that “Identity is
complicated. Everybody thinks they’ve got
one. Artists play with the idea of identity in
modern society.”
• Laura Mulvey (1975) argues that the
dominant point of view is masculine. The
female body is displayed for the male gaze in
order to provide erotic pleasure for the male
(vouyerism). Women are therefore objectified
by the camera lens and whatever gender the
spectator/audience is positioned to accept the
masculine POV.
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”
Stereotypes
• 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.
• First coined by Walter Lippmann (1956) 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.
• First coined by Walter Lippmann (1956) 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.
• Dyer (1977) details that if we are to be told that
we are going to see a film about an alcoholic then
we will know that it will be a tale either of sordid
decline or of inspiring redemption.
• He suggests this is a particularly interesting
potential use of stereotypes, in which the
character is constructed, at the level of dress,
performance, etc., as a stereotype but is
deliberatIey given a narrative function that is not
implicit in the stereotype, thus throwing into
question the assumptions signalled by the
stereotypical iconography.
• As part of stereotyping to create meaning in
‘factual’ texts such as news, television theorist
John Hartley (1982) argues that aspects such
as the presenters’ voices are stereotyped in
order to create shorthand meanings for
audiences at a particular but of drama, action,
light-heartedness etc.
• This means they are personalised and this
personalisation creates characteristics which
become stereotyped for the audience.