theories Flashcards
David Gauntlett- theory of identity
•audiences are not passive & media products allow the audience to construct their own identities
•audiences can pick & mix which ideologies suit them and completely ignore the elements of the products which they do not agree with, in a process of negotiation
-superhuman
-tide & KOV (advertisement)
-film & tv
Bell Hooks- feminist theory
•feminism is a struggle to end patriarchal hegemony and the domination of women
•feminism is not a lifestyle choice: it is a political commitment
•feminism is for everybody, not just for those that identify as women
•race, class & gender all determine the extent to which individuals re-exploited and oppressed
-advertisements
-video games
-film & tv
-superhuman (?)
Lisbet Van Zoonen- feminist theory
•gender is constructed through codes & conventions of media products, and the ideal of what is male and female changes overtime
•women’s bodies are used in media products as a spectacle for heterosexual male and audiences which reinforces patriarchal hegemony
-advertisements
-video games
-film & tv
-superhuman (?)
Judith Butler- gender performativity
•identity is reinforced & constructed through a series of acts and expressions that we perform everyday
•biological differences dictated by our sex, gender defined through acts
•not a singular act but a repetition & a ritual. it is outlined & reinforced through dominant patriarchal ideologies
Paul Gilroy- postcolonial theory
•postcolonialism is the study and impact that being under direct rule has on former colonies
•these ideas and attitudes continue to shape contemporary attitudes to race & ethnicity
•these post attitudes have constructed racial hierarchies in our society where, for example, white people are by and large given more positive & important roles
•media producers are also guilty of using binary oppositions to reinforce BME people & characterise as other
curran & seaton- power and media industries
•media is controlled by an increasingly small number of companies who are driven by profit & power
•by concentrating media production into the hands of so few companies, there is an increasing lack of variety, creativity & quality
•we need more socially diverse + democratic patterns of ownership to help to create varied media production
-media industries (newspaper, film etc)
Sonia Livingstone & Peter Lunt- regulation
•regulation refers to rules & restrictions that every media industry has to follow
•there is a struggle in recent Uk regulation policy between the need to further the interest of citizens (by offering protection from harmful or offensive material) & the need to further interest the consumer (by ensuring choice, values for money & market competition)
•this increasing power of global media corporations together with the rise of convergent media technologies & development in production, distribution & marketing of digital media have placed traditional approaches to regulation at risk
•online in particular allows producers to completely ignore regulation
Jean Baudrillard- postmodernism
•in postmodern culture, the boundaries between the ‘real’ world and the world of the media have collapsed and that it is no longer possible to distinguish between what is reality & what is simulation
•in post modern age of simulacra, audiences are constantly bombarded with images which no longer refer to anything ‘real’
•we are now in a situation that media images have come to seem more ‘real’ and hen the reality they supposedly represent. this concept is referred to as ‘hyperreality’
•Stuart Hall- theory of representation
•representations are constructed through media language & reflect the ideological perspectives of the producer
•the relationship between concepts & signs if governed by codes
•stereotypes reduce people to few simple traits or characteristics- however it is useful as it allows producers to easily construct media products & audiences to easily decode them
•tend to occurs where there are inequalities of power, as subordinate or excluded groups are constructed as different or ‘other’ e.g through ethnocentrism
David Hesmondhalgh- cultural industries
•’culture’ & ‘industry’ are two terms that are often at odds with one another
•producers try to minimise risk & maximise audiences through vertical & horizontal intergratjon
•they also standardise & format their cultural products e.g through the use of stars, genre
•the largest companies or conglomerates now operate across a number of different cultural industries
•the radical potential of the internet has been contained to some extent by it’s partial incorporate into a large, profit oriented set of cultural industries
George Gerbner- cultivation theory
•being exposed to repeated patterns of representations over long periods of time can shape & influence the way in which people perceive the world around them
•the process of cultivation reinforced mainstream hegemonic values (dominant ideologies)
Stuart Hall- reception theory
•to consume a media product in a process involving encoding by producers & decoding by audiences
•there are millions of possible responses that can be effected through factors e.g upbringing, age, ethnicity
•narrowed this down into three ways:
~preferred reading- dominant, hegemonic position, where the audience understands & accepts ideologies of product
~negotiated- where the ideological implications of producers message is agreed with in general, although the message of negotiated or picked apart by the audience and they may disagree with certain aspects
~oppositional- producers message is understood but the audience disagree with the ideological perspective in every retrospect
Laswell- hypodermic needle theory
•the view that the media are able to mesmerise, influence and even control it’s audiences
•new communication technology e.g radio expanded the mass media previously occupied by the newspapers
•audiences were seen as passive recipients of whatever message was injected by the media and they can be manipulated to react in a predictable, unthinking & conditional manner
•generally acknowledged to be an out of date theory
David Gauntlett- pick and mix theory
•asserts the autonomy of the audience & challenges the notion that audiences are immediately affected by what they read
•audiences are more sophisticated than. this & will select aspects of the media texts that best suit their needs and ignore the rest
clay shirky- end of audience
•new media has had a significant effect on the relations between media and audiences
•just thinking of audiences as passive consumers of mass media content is no longer possible in the age of the internet. now media consumers have become producers who ‘speak back’ to the media in various ways, creating & sharing content with one another
•can be accomplished through comment sections, forums, blogs etc
•can be criticised- arguably the media industries are just as exclusionary as they always have been and audiences are less ‘producers’ than ‘unwitting advertisers’ promoting pre-existing products through retweets etc that could never be financially successful without aggressive monetisation
