Media Theorists

• media provide us with ‘tools’ or resources that we use to construct our identities

• past the media tended to convey singular, straightforward messages about ideal types of male and female identities, the media today offer us a more diverse range

Challenges Hall's thinking that the audience are passive and the media is all powerful

• system of signs

• relationship between concepts and signs is governed by codes

• stereotyping, as a form of representation, reduces people to a few simple characteristics or traits

• stereotyping tends to occur where there are inequalities of power, as subordinate or excluded groups are constructed as different or ‘other’ 

The media is a powerful entity that shapes us. We are passive in this process.

• In mainstream culture the visual and narrative codes that are used to construct the male body as spectacle differ from those used to objectify the female body.

• display of women’s bodies as objects to be looked at is a core element of western patriarchal culture

• gender is constructed through discourse, and that its meaning varies according to cultural and historical context

The media acts to create specific ideas about men and women and how it treats the representation of each, differently. The male gaze is central to her thinking.

• feminism is a struggle to end sexist/patriarchal oppression and the ideology of domination

• feminism is a political commitment rather than a lifestyle choice

• Intersectionality - all parts of your identity (eg. race, ethnicity, gender, class) determine the extent to which an individual is oppressed, exploited & discriminated against

Might view particular media texts as acting to further feminism or not. Does the text reinforce patriarchy or does it challenge it?

• colonial discourses continue to inform contemporary attitudes to race and ethnicity in the postcolonial era

• idea that civilizationism constructs racial hierarchies and sets up binary oppositions based on notions of otherness.

Asks us to consider the role of the media in constructing ideas about racism. He believes that racism is a product of a colonial past that  shapes the present and the manner in which white European ethnicity/race is placed in a hierarchy above other races.

• identity is performatively constructed by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results (it is manufactured through a set of acts)

• there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender

• performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual

questions whether gender actually exists in the manner we believe it does in the wider culture and society. She believes we learn to perform our gender - gender is not something which is naturally occurring.

• audiences acquire attitudes, emotional responses and new styles of conduct through modelling

• media representations of transgressive behaviour, such as violence or physical aggression, can lead audience members to imitate those forms of behaviour

He believed that the audience would be very likely to copy these acts.

• exposure to repeated patterns of representation over long periods of time can shape and influence the way in which people perceive the world around them (i.e. cultivating particular views and opinions)

• cultivation reinforces mainstream values (dominant ideologies)

idea that audiences will be cultivated into a way of thinking - they will take on board repeated messages presented to them by producers.

• communication is a process involving encoding by producers and decoding by audiences

• three hypothetical positions from which messages and meanings may be decoded:

•  the dominant-hegemonic position: the encoder’s intended meaning (the preferred reading) is fully understood and accepted

• the negotiated position: the legitimacy of the encoder’s message is acknowledged in general terms, although the message is adapted or negotiated to better fit the decoder’s own individual experiences or context

• the oppositional position: the encoder’s message is understood, but the decoder disagrees with it, reading it in a contrary or oppositional way.

Reception Theory recognises that audiences do have the power to resist the messages they are presented with by the media. They can read in opposition to it.

• Internet and digital technologies have had a profound effect on the relations between media and individuals

• The conceptualisation of audience members as passive consumers of mass media content is no longer tenable in the age of the Internet, as media consumers have now become producers who ‘speak back to’ the media in various ways, as well as creating and sharing content with one another.

believes everything has changed as a result of the power and influence of the internet. Audiences take an active role in the mediation process. Arguably, in social media, they are at the heart of the process itself.

• fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings

• fans appropriate texts and read them in ways that are not fully authorised by the media producers (‘textual poaching’)

• fans construct their social and cultural identities through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, and are part of a participatory culture that has a vital social dimension.

considers the importance of fandom and how fans are an active and involved part  of how the media produces texts now.

• media is controlled by a small number of companies primarily driven by the logic of profit and power

• idea that media concentration generally limits or inhibits variety, creativity and quality

• idea that more socially diverse patterns of ownership help to create the conditions for more varied and adventurous media productions.

Identify how the media is concentrated in the hands of a powerful few.

These few are determined to use the media to make money and keep hold of power.

• idea that there is an underlying struggle in recent UK regulation policy between the need to further the interests of citizens (by offering protection from harmful or offensive material), and the need to further the interests of consumers (by ensuring choice, value for money, and market competition)

• idea that the increasing power of global media corporations, together with 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

Suggest that the power of the media needs to be checked by the state to protect its citizens.

• cultural industry companies try to minimise risk and maximise audiences through vertical and horizontal integration, and by formatting their cultural products(e.g. through the use of stars, genres, and serials)

• idea that the largest companies or conglomerates now operate across a number of different cultural industries

• idea that the radical potential of the internet has been contained to some extent by its partial incorporation into a large, profit-orientated set of cultural industries

The media use certain approaches to engage audiences that also result in them maintaining their market position. He also suggests that the internet will not lead to a shift in power that many others do.

• texts communicate their meanings through a process of signification

• idea that signs can function at the level of denotation, which involves the ‘literal’ or common-sense meaning of the sign, and at the level of connotation, which involves the meanings associated with or suggested by the sign

meaning is constructed through signs. He also suggests that this meaning can be at a simple level of denotation and at a deeper level of connotation.

• 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 reality and simulation

• idea that in a postmodern age of simulacra we are immersed in a world of images which no longer refer to anything ‘real’

• idea that media images have come to seem more ‘real’ than the reality they supposedly represent (hyperreality).

Baudrillard believes that we live in a false reality created by the media - it

achieves this through a simulation of the real

• idea that texts can best be understood through an examination of their underlying structure

• idea that meaning is dependent upon (and produced through) pairs of oppositions

• idea that the way in which these binary oppositions are resolved can have particular ideological significance.

Binary opposites create narrative drives and tensions in media texts.

• idea that all narratives share a basic structure that involves a movement from one state of equilibrium to another

• the idea that these two states of equilibrium are separated by a period of imbalance or disequilibrium

• the idea that the way in which narratives are resolved can have particular ideological significance

Suggests that underlying the narratives of media texts is a cycle in which the narrative will go through a series of distinct and identifiable stages.

• the idea that genres may be dominated by repetition, but are also marked by difference, variation, and change

• the idea that genres change, develop, and vary, as they borrow from and overlap with one another

• the idea that genres exist within specific economic, institutional and industrial contexts

Genres have a relationship with the audience in which they want and expect repeated elements from other texts but also need and demand differences that make them interesting and novel.