media a level theorists (copy)

key theorists for aqa a level media

Barthes

Barthes

• media products convey meaning through ‘codes’

  • if codes are repeated enough times their meaning can become agreed upon by audiences

• also considered the importance of myths as teaching societal values and morals

  • believes that media now fulfils this, as audience now learn values and morals through media instead of myths

Todorov

• theorised a fairly simple narrative structure that most stories follow

• equilibrium

• disruption

• acknowledgment of disruption

• attempt to change

• new equilibrium

• new equilibrium can convey an ideology

• this structure is still partially applicable to modern media, but it’s very common for products to subvert it in order to interest the audience

Neale

• genres are made up of repetition and difference

  • repetition to maintain interest by the audience seeing things they’re familiar with

  • difference to prevent boredom

• genres change over time as they’re fluid

  • form sub-genres and hybrid genres

• hybrid genres can be used to target two different kinds of audience

  • eg rom coms are supposed to target women and men

• industries use genres in order to target a specific audience

Levi-Strauss

• had ideas around structuralism

  • all media is influenced by a web of source materials and it can’t be separated from them

  • knowledge of the structural influences how we understand the meaning from the product

• believed that binary oppositions are a key part of narratives as the conflict drives the story forwards

  • the two concepts that are placed in opposition end up becoming so linked that they are used to shape our understanding of the other

• binary oppositions can be used to convey ideologies

Baudrillard

• lines between ‘real’ and media have become so blurred that it’s difficult for audiences to understand what’s true and what’s not

  • this is called the ‘desert of the real’

• audiences relate more to the images of what’s ‘real’ than what is actual real

  • hyperreality

• also see an implosion of meanings

  • codes have so many meanings nowadays it’s impossible to decode what the intended meaning actually is

Hall

• representations are constructed through media language and reflect the ideological position of the producer

  • as the media industry tends to be ran by white men, minorities are often underrepresented or misrepresented or represented exclusively through stereotypes

• stereotyping reduces people to a few characteristics

  • can be harmful

  • can be good for producers as it allows the audience to understand easily

Gauntlett

• audiences are not passive

  • they can interact with media and create their own

• media does not create identities, instead it reflects them

• media products allow audiences to construct identities based on the identities they see in the media

  • they can pick which aspects they relate to and ignore other parts

Van Zoonen

• gender is constructed through codes and conventions that can change over time

• women’s bodies are used as a spectacle for male heterosexual audiences

hooks

• feminism is a political commitment

• explored ideas of intersectionality

  • other factors such as race, class, age, disability, sexuality along side gender all intersect to result in your social status and to what extent you are exploited

Butler

• gender is a performance and it’s constructed through a repeated series of acts and expressions

• gender is not inherently determined by your sex

Gilroy

• colonial attitudes have continued to shape societal racial hierarchies even after colonies have been freed

• post colonial melancholia is when an empire (specifically England) feels sad after losing the power over their former colonies

• to cope with this they revert to images of Albionic Englishness

• ethnic minorities are often represented as other

• double consciousness is the experience of Black people when they see themselves through the perspective of white media but not fully relating to Black products

• Black culture is constantly changing due to diaspora - there is no fixed culture

  • engages with white culture to form a sort of hybrid

Curran and Seaton

• media is controlled by an increasingly small number of companies who are driven by profit and power

• the lack of diversity in ownership leads to a lack of diversity in products

  • big companies are unwilling to take risks and produce different media so products become formulaic

Livingstone and Lunt

• focused on regulation, which is the act of controlling media products with a set of rules that they must follow

• struggle between citizen based and consumer based

  • citizen based focuses on the good of society and protecting the vulnerable

  • consumer based is focused on protecting the rights of a consumer to have as much choice as possible

• online media is essentially able to ignore all regulation as it’s very difficult to enforce on social media for example

• increasing power of few companies has increased the risk of media escaping regulation

Hesmondhalgh

• producers are constantly trying to minimise risk and maximise profit

• do this through a number of methods

  • horizontal integration - owning different companies at the same point of production

  • vertical integration - owning different companies at different points of production

  • serialisation of products

  • genres

  • use of well known celebrities

• largest conglomerates are able to operate across different industries

Bandura

• did a psychology experiment using a bobo doll in which children were seen to have followed the example of violence they watched

• basically indicates that audiences will passively accept anything they see in the media

• links to ideas that video games can make people violent

Gerbner

• being exposed to repeated messages in the media makes audiences more likely to take them on and accept them

  • this process is called enculturation

• violence is more common in media than real life which can lead to the audience having an overly negative view of the world

• the amount of media you consume will influence how likely you are to accept messages, called the cultivation differential

• if media is similar to the audience’s own life (resonance) then they are more likely to accept it

• if audience all follow the same media then they will likely all accept the same values which is called mainstreaming

Hall

• producers encode meanings, audiences decode meanings, but it’s not set in stone that they will decode it in the way the producer encoded it

• audience members have different lives and any factor of these can influence the way in which they decode media

• theorised the audience can decode media in one of three ways

  • dominant reading

  • negotiated reading

  • oppositional reading

Jenkins

• audiences who particularly love a piece of media will often band together to form a fandom who interact and appreciate the media together

• unlike in past time, the audience has become more able interact and are active participants in the circulation of meanings

• fans can read texts in the way they want to rather than the producer’s intentions which is called textual poaching

• fans can construct identities through their love for the media and their bonds with other people who love the media

Shirky

• new digital media has impacted the relationship between audiences and producers

• audiences can no longer be seen as passive, as with digital technology they now have the ability to ‘speak back’ to the producers and give feedback on the media they consume which can impact the development of the media

• audiences are referred to as ‘prosumer’ as they can simultaneously produce and consume

• there is some criticism of this theory as it’s said that the industry is just as exclusionary as ever and they instead are just advertising pre existing products