Theorist’s Flashcards
Roland Barthes
Semiotics codes- Text communicate their meanings through a process or signification.
Semantic- connotations of a text
Promretic- elements of media products which imply something is going to happen
Referential- any codes that refer to a certain culture or ethnicity
Hermeneutical- anything that will intrigue an audience read on.
Symbolic- an item/image that symbolises something
Steve Neale
Genre theory
- Genre may be dominated by repetition, but are also marked not difference, variation and change
- Genres change, develop, and vary as they borrow from and overlap with one another.
Repetition- codes that have been repeated multiple times e.g horror movies conventions
Difference- same genre (horror) but they don’t do the same thing
Claude Levi-Strauss
Structuralism:
- Texts can be understood through an examination of their underlying structure
- Meaning is dependent upon pairs of oppositions
- The way in which these binary oppositions are resolved can have ideological significance.
Stuart Hall
Representation theory:
- Representation is the production of meaning through language, that is defined in its broadest sense of a system of signs.
- relationship between concepts and signs is governed by codes.
- Stereotyping tends to occurs where there are inequalities of power.
David Gauntlett
Identity theory:
- Media provide the audience with ‘tools’ or resources that we use to construct our identities.
- in the past media tended to convey singular, straightforward messages about ideal types of make and female identities.
- The media today offer us a more diverse range of stars, icons and characters whom we may pick and mix different ideas.
Tzetvan Todorov
Narrative theory:
- All narratives share basic structure that involves a movement from one state of equilibrium to another.
- These two states of equilibrium are separated by a period of disequilibrium.
- The way in which narratives are resolved can have particular ideological significance.
Jean Baudrillard
Postmodernism theory:
- In postmodernism culture the boundaries between the ‘real’ world and the world of media have collapsed and can be no longer be distinguished.
- In a postmodern game of simularca we are immersed in a world of images with no longer are ‘real’
- Media images have come to seem more ‘real’ that the reality they are supposed to represent (hyperreality).
Liesbet Van Zoonen
Feminist theory:
- Gender is constructed through discourse and that its meaning varies according to cultural and historical context.
- The display of woman’s bodies are as object to be looked at is a core element of western patriarchal culture.
- In mainstream culture the visual and narrative codes that are used to construct the male body as a spectacle differ from those used to objectify the female body.
bell hooks
Feminist theory:
- Feminism is a struggle to end sexist/patriarchal oppression and the ideology of domination
- Feminism is a political commitment rather than lifestyle choice.
- Race and class as well as sex determine the extent to with individuals are exploited, discriminated against or oppressed.
Paul Gliroy
Post-colonialism and ethnicity theory:
- Colonial discourses continue to inform contemporary attitudes to race and ethnicity in the post colonial era.
- Civilisation constructs racial hierarchies and sets up binary oppositions based on notions of otherness.
Clay Shirky
The end of audience:
- Internet and digital technologies have had a profound effect on the relations between media and individuals
- Conceptualisation of audience Mayberry as passive consumers of mass media is no longer tenable in the age of the internet
- As media consumers have now become producers who speak back to the midlands in various ways, as well as creating and sharing content.
Albert Bandura
Media Effects:
- Idea that media can implant ideas in the mind of the audience
- The idea media representations of transgressive behaviour can lead to the audience imitating those forms of behaviour
George Gerbner
Cultivation Theory:
- Exposure to related patterns of representation over long periods of time can shape to influence the audience in the way they perceive audience.
- Cultivation reinforces mainstream values
Curran and Seaton
Power and media industries:
- Media is controlled by a small number of companies driven by the logic of profit and power.
- Media concentration generally limits or inhibits variety, creativity and quality
- More socially diverse patterns of ownership help to create the conditions for me varied and adventurous media productions.
Judith Butler
Theories of gender performativity
- Identity is performatively constructed by the very expressions that are said to be its results
- There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender
- Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and ritual
Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt
Regulation:
- There us an underlying struggle in recent UK regulation policy between the need to further the interests of citizens and the need to further the interests of consumers.
- The increasing power of global media corporations together worth the rise of convergent media technologies and transformations in the production, distribution and marketing of digital media, have placed traditional approaches to media regulation at risk.
David Hesmondhalgh
Cultural Industries:
- Cultural industry companies try to minimise risk and maximise audiences through vertical and horizontal integration and by formatting their cultural products. ( through the use of stars, genres, and serials)
- The largest companies or conglomerates now operate across a number of different cultural industries.
- Radical potential of the internet gas been contained to some extent by its partial incorporation into a large profit-orientated set of cultural industries.
Henry Jenkins
Fandom:
- Fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings
- Fans appropriate texts and read the in ways that are not dully authorised by the media producers.
- Fans construct their social and cultural identities through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images and are part of participatory culture that has a vital social dimension
