Theories Flashcards
1
Q
Todorov: Narratology
A
- An ideal narrative is organised using the story structure of equilibrium, disruption, recognition, solution and a new equilibrium.
- Equilibrium: the story constructs a stable world at the outset of the narrative. Key characters are presented as part of that stability.
- Disruption: destabilise the story’s equilibrium.
Solution: Lead protagonists attempt to repair the disruption caused. - New equilibrium: disruption is repaired and stability restored, but it is different from the beginning.
- Character transformation: A character undergoes a change that the audience witness throughout.
- Flexi narrative: multiple 3 act structures happen within a single text (e.g episodes)
- Sub Plots: smaller arcs, often side characters, which can be separate or can support overarching plot.
- Multi- Equilibrium: multiple disruption/new equilibrium created
2
Q
Steve Neale: Genre
A
- Genres separate media texts, these genres are made up of similarities and differences.
- The similarities mean the product fits into a genre while the differences make each product unique and make the product seem like it’s worth consuming by the audience.
- Neale says that though genres may be seen as being limited by familiar tropes, they are also marked by difference, variation, and change.
3
Q
Strauss: Structuralism (Binary Opposition)
A
- The media is structured into oppositional forces, allowing the audience to categorise and decode meaning. For example, light and dark - connoting good and evil.
- This allows: clear explanation of ideas, creation of compelling narratives through conflict, creation of identifiable character types through exposure,
audience understanding of a viewpoint. - Additionally, it allows the creation of normal and abnormal through the opposing forces.
4
Q
Stuart Hall: Representation
A
- Stuart Hall acknowledges the imitative capacity of the media.
- Media products are composed through the selection and ordering of elements. Media does not offer us accurate or objective reflections of the world, but rather produce versions of reality that are shaped by the subjective viewpoints of their creators. For example, the bias of a news outlet.
- Hall argues the audience’s ability to decode meanings in media imagery is produced as a result of our continued exposure to media products and stereotypes.
- Media stereotypes reflect social attitudes. Hall argues that media stereotypes reflect the wider views of society
- The media contributes to the construction of stereotypes. Media stereotyping significantly shapes social attitudes regarding specific groups
- Stereotypes can be reshaped or repurposed. Hall also identifies that media stereotypes can be guided towards positive representations of key social groups
widespread use guides audiences to associate specific groups with negative traits.
5
Q
Van Zoonen: Feminist
A
- A core element of western patriarchal culture is the display of women as spectacle to be looked at, and subjected to the gaze of the male audience
- Women are sexual objects to sexually appeal to men.
masculinity is constructed to be the socially dominant gender and, as a result, is more likely to be constructed as an active participant within media texts. - A clear gender imbalance exists in media production opportunities, with women often sidelined to administrative rather than technical or creative roles.
6
Q
bell hooks: Feminist
A
- Female representation ignores the black female experience or paints black women overly sexualy and negatively , stigmitising sex - Jezebel.
- Portrays black women in submissive, domestic roles rooted in slavery and colonialism - Aunt Jemima
- Black women as emotional, aggressive and unable to control themselves. Used as comedic relief or shock value. Vilify black women who do not conform to the stereotype of subservience.
7
Q
Stuart Hall: Reception
A
- Individual audience members will interpret media texts in different ways according to their established values and beliefs.
- Preferred Reading: The audience accepts what they see/hear/read and agree with the media producer’s message.
- Negotiated Reading: The audience may accept some of what the producer is presenting to them but may disagree with some aspects.
- Opposed Reading: The audience disagrees entirely with everything the media producers are saying.
8
Q
Roland Barthes: Semiotics
A
- Semiotics: Producers encode the text through media language codes and signs and audiences decode the text in order to take meaning from it.
- The Enigma Code: Refers to any element that is not fully explained and hence becomes a mystery to the audience
- The Action Code: Refers to an element of the media product that indicates something else is going to happen.
- The Semantic Code: Refers to the connotations created within the text that gives additional meaning over the basic denotative meaning.
- The Symbolic Code: Organises meanings into broader and deeper sets of meaning often based on the use of binary oppositions. Typically done through the use of antithesis, where new meaning arises out of opposing ideas.
- The Cultural Code: All meanings and values that are encoded within a text and decoded by the audience are dependent on social and cultural contexts. - Tide
9
Q
Gauntlett: Identity
A
- Gauntlett argues that the sheer diversity of new products and channels , both niche and mainstream, facilitates the process of identity editing by audiences.
- The theorist cites the growth of self-help manuals during the 1990s as evidence of our collective desire to manipulate the way we engage with the world at large.
10
Q
Curran and Seaton: Industry
A
- The media is driven by the twin forces of creativity and business. Media creatives are tasked to give us exciting, innovative and aesthetically pleasing products, while the media’s ‘business managers’ are responsible for ensuring the profitability and commercial viability of products.
- Commercial Media: Profit-driven motives take precedent over creativity; money wins, while both audiences and audience share determine content. Jean Seaton explains ‘Commercial broadcasting is based not on the sale of programmes to audiences, but on the sale of audiences to advertisers’. In order to secure long-term advertising revenue, broadcasters create content that is designed to attract economically affluent audiences who are able to buy the products that are promoted during advertising slots. As a result, peak time television schedules are dominated by lighter entertainment formats, while less popular minority interest products are sidelined to secondary channels or late night slots.
- Without suitable controls, commercial media companies readily abandon commitments to public service broadcasting and content diversity. The pursuit of mass audience appeal has produced a landscape that is dominated by format-driven products.
11
Q
Paul Lazerfield: Two Step Flow
A
- An audience gets information from the media but there are opinion leaders that interpret it first and this interpretation gets passed on to the audience.
- Opinion Leaders: The people we trust to tell us what media products to consume.
12
Q
Bandura: Violence
A
- Bandura’s psychological experiments led him to conclude that behaviours are acquired as a result of two processes: direct experience and modelled learning.
- Direct experience: Individuals learn or replicate aggressive acts as a result of their experiences of aggression. Children may learn to be aggressive from the behaviour their parents model or they might reject violent behaviours as a result of parent-induced punishments and sanctions.
- Modelled learning: Bandura intuited that direct experience alone could not account for all of our human traits. Behaviours must therefore be learned by watching the actions of others - through what Bandura called ‘vicarious learning’ ; a way of learning that allows individuals to learn from the experience of others.
13
Q
Gerbner: Cultivation
A
- This theory states that we as an audience are “cultivated” over a period of time in order to think or feel a certain way about a media text.
- We become familiar with brands, logos and the ideology it’s attached to. E.g fast food is usually associated with McDonald’s.
- Media communications, principally television-based media, have replaced a set of pre-existing symbol systems that had dominated the cultural and social lives of individuals up until the early twentieth century. - Mass media has become the dominant socialising force of our age.
