Theories Flashcards
Todorov: Narratology
- 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
Steve Neale: Genre
- 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.
Strauss: Structuralism (Binary Opposition)
- The media is structured into oppositional forces, allowing the audience to categorise and decode meaning.
- 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.
- All stories work through oppositional arrangements - through the construction of characters or narrative incidents that clash.
- The use of oppositional forces to organise stories is prompted by humankind’s innate bias towards organising the world using binary thinking.
- Binary oppositions are often presented through obvious juxtapositions in themes and visuals such as good vs. evil and light vs. dark.
Stuart Hall: Representation
- 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.
- Stereotyping tends to occur where there are inequalities of power. This is because media representations are controlled by dominant groups and so it is their view that is commonly portrayed.
- The media contributes to the construction of stereotypes: media stereotyping significantly shapes social attitudes regarding specific groups.
- The process of transcoding occurs when new meanings are grafted onto existing presentations in order to challenge existing negative stereotypes. There are three main ways to shift negative stereotypes.
- Appropriated representations: By commandeering negative stereotypes, their meaning can be devalued or subverted.
- Counter typical representations: This process combats negative connotations by producing representations that reverse stereotypes.
- Deconstructed representations: Stereotype contestation can be achieved by narratives that explain or lay bare the effects of stereotyping.
Van Zoonen: Feminist
- 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.
- The widespread practice of objectifying women degrades and dehumanises females, while giving male viewers an unspoken exploitative power that spills into real world relations.
- Similarly, media forms that deal with issues connected to traditionally female roles - motherhood or domesticity - tend to be made by women.
- As a result, children’s television, educational programming and consumer journalism tend to be made by female practitioners, while more serious media output - news, political journalism and drama - are dominated by male media makers.
- To allow the male form to be subject to a female gaze is censored or controlled because the act of looking castrates power.
- To look or to gaze, she argues, is to assume a position of power whereas to be looked at suggests passivity and weakness.
- The dominance of men within society leads the media to produce radically different presentations of males than it does of females.
- Zoonen’s argument about sexualised male imagery in the media is that the male form in contemporary Western culture is predominantly depicted in ways that allow the male subject to retain authority over the spectator.
bell hooks: Feminist
- 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.
Stuart Hall: Reception
- 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.
Roland Barthes: Semiotics
- 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.
Gauntlett: Identity
- 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.
Curran and Seaton: Industry
- 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.
Paul Lazerfield: Two Step Flow
- 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.
Bandura: Violence
- 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.
Gerbner: Cultivation
- 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.
- 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.
Buadrillard: Post Modernism
- Phase 1 - Early Modernity produces authenticity and a collectively agreed set of truths about the world we live in.
- Phase 2 - Modernity. During modernity, Baudrillard argues, the authenticity and collective truths of early modernity began to ‘dissimulate’, breaking down into competing versions of reality.
- Phase 3 - Postmodernity. Baudrillard argues, mass media forms now dominate culture, replacing the single voice of religion with the multi-channel, multi-media whirlwind of contemporary mass media. Baudrillard believes this is the age of ‘hyperreality’ in which cultural products no longer reference the deeper unified significations that religion once provided. In the postmodern era, culture is fragmented, its meaning and instructions are temporary, its messages commercialised and authentic.
- Baudrillard identifies the following effects of postmodernity: The media is everywhere, Our private spaces have been invaded, Authenticity is impossible to find or keep, Repetition and duplication effects
- Hyperreality: Baudrillard suggests that we are unable to separate the real world from that which is manufactured (often by news companies) by the media. In this sense we live in a world that is beyond reality or hyperreal.
- Inertia: the constant stream of media that we are subjected to paralyses us or makes us unable to feel or act in a way that creates deep meaning.
- Meaning implosion: the sheer volume of media and the multiplicity of voices within the contemporary media landscape produces a cocktail of opinion and counter opinion that audiences cannot disentangle.
- Media blending: media forms in the postmodern age blur - the narrative strategies of news, for example, become absorbed into fiction and vice versa. (can link to genre theory)
Gilroy: Post Colonialism
Concept 1 - Racial Binaries, Otherness and Civilisationism.
- Black communities are constructed as an ‘other’ to white culture and are associated with criminal activity and lawlessness.
- The media reflects civilisationist attitudes through simplistic reportage and the demonisation of Muslims - media products nurture fear and the idea that Muslims and Europeans are incompatible.
Concept 2 - The Legacy of Empire and British Identity.
- A deep seated postcolonial melancholia infects the media as a result of Britain’s diminishing global importance.
- Postcolonial melancholia prompts a nostalgic construction of Englishness.
- Postcolonial melancholy produces a sense of English rootlessness and an anxiety surrounding British identity.
Butler: Gender Performativity
Concept 1 - Gendered identities are constructed through repetition and ritual.
- Male and female identities are not naturally configured but rather constructed by traditional binary identities.
- Gender does not exist inside the body. Rather, our gendered identities are realised through our desires, sexual contacts and physical expressions of love, constituted as a result of our behaviours.
- Gender is not solely determined by primary experiences during childhood; it is something we continuously form and reform throughout our lives.
- Our genders are culturally rather than naturally formed
- Our genders are not stable but are constructed through repeated actions.
Concept 2 - Gender subversion and gendered hierarchies.
- Absent representation: The sheer lack of alternative representations in the media helps reinforce heteronormativity/male power as the norm.
- Abjected representations: Heterosexuality and male power are reinforced through the suggestion that alternatives to those identities are disturbing, repellent or unnatural.
- Parodic representations: Media representations of homosexuality often use exaggerated masculine or feminine behaviours in a comedic way, through, for instance, overly camp presentations of gay men.
Livingstone + Lunt: Regulation
Concept 1 - Citizen and consumer models of media regulation
- The consumer based approach: Regulation champions consumer choice, Relies on consumer-led policing of programme content, The state plays a minor role in determining media regulation.
- The citizen-based approach: Constructs a media model based on civic republicanism, Citizen-based regulation foregrounds content issues, Encourages a media landscape that can critique governmental power
Concept 2 - Regulation in the globalised media age
- The difficulties of internet regulation stem from the following: The relatively recent expansion of online services, Tech giants do not author their own content, Online media providers lie beyond the reach of UK regulation, The internet is decentralised, Online anonymity.
Hesmondhalgh: Commercial Media Risks
- Commercial media operates in the interests of maximising profits and minimising risks.
- Products exist as a result of their economic context: Similarly to any other business product, media content is manufactured to create profit, or, in the case of public service broadcasting, to maintain audience engagement. Media-making decisions are almost always guided by the needs of commerce as opposed to creativity.
- The media industry is a high risk business: The impossibility of predicting audience tastes coupled with the high costs of production and the effects of mass competition mean that the business of making commercially successful media is very difficult. The media industry is, therefore, compelled to be structured in highly specific ways with risk minimisation playing a crucial role in directing the design and marketing of media content.
- Media businesses are reliant upon changing audience consumption patterns.
- The media industry is reliant on marketing and publicity functions.
- Media products have limited consumption capacity - the ‘one off’ nature of production means that the huge sums of money invested to create media products results in a, usually, one-time reward for each consumer of the product. Of course, a
product can be consumed many times by an audience but most of the time a product is consumed a singular time.
Jenkins: Fandom
Concept 1 - Fan appropriation
- Recontextualisations, Expanded series timelines, Refocalisations, Crossovers, Personalisations, Eroticisation
- textual poaching can be used by marginalised fans to explore alternative readings to mainstream culture
Concept 2 - Audience-producer convergence in the digital age
- Digital technologies have given fans a new range of tools to express their voice.
- Digital networking has enabled an ever-widening diversity of professional media to have fan followings.
- Fan engagement can be realised in real time.
- producers use their fans digital labour to promote and market media
- contemporary media producers deliberately construct material to engage fan interest
Concept 3 - Fans use participatory culture to effect wider social change
- allows individuals to share and develop ideas with a like-minded community
Shirky: End of Audience
Concept 1 - Everybody makes the media
- highlights revolutionary impact of digital technology in speeding up media production processes
- media consumption patterns have changed from a broadcast model that involves one sender and many recipients to a many to many model
- traditional media uses a filter then publish model to provide quality content
- internet has resulted in publish now filter later model due to lower production costs and reduced entry barriers to media production
Concept 2 - Everyday communities of practice
- audiences actively shape their own rules of engagement with professional media products
- digital technologies have resulted in an explosion of communities of practice
