Media Theories

Seaton and Curran

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

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

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

bell hooks - Feminist

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

• the idea that feminism is a political commitment rather than a lifestyle choice

• the idea that race and class as well as sex determine the extent to which individuals are exploited, discriminated against or oppressed

Steve Neale - Genre Theory

• the idea that genres may be dominated by repetition, but is 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 (e.g large studio, etc)

George Gerbner - Cultivation Theory

Believes that repeated patterns of representation can shape and influence people's perceptions.

Clay Shirky

'End of Audience'- Cannot be a passive consumer in the age of the internet because of the rise of the prosumer who can create their own.

David Gauntlett

-the idea that the media provide us with 'tools' or resources that we use to construct our identities

-the idea that in the past media conveys a singular, straightforward messages about ideal types of male and female identities, the media today offer us a more diverse range of stars, icons and characters from whom we may pick and mix different ideas.

Laura Mulvey - Male Gaze

-The audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man, objectifying women

Liesbet Van Zoonen- feminist

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

• the idea that the display of women's bodies as objects to be looked at is a core element of western patriarchal culture

David Hesmondhalgh

• the idea that 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)

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

Henry Jenkins

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

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

• the idea that fans construct their social and cultural identities through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images

Todorov's narrative theory

5 steps to every storyline:

1. Equilibrium (normal)

2. Disruption

3. Realisation

4. Restore

5. Equilibrium again

Roland Barthes semiotics

• the idea that texts communicate their meanings through a process of signification

• the 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

• the idea that constructed meanings can come to seem self-evident, achieving the status of myth through a process of naturalisation

Jean Baudrillard

• the idea that in postmodern culture the boundaries between the 'real' world and the world of the media have collapsed so that it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and simulation

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

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

Stuart Hall- theory of representation

• the idea that representation is the production of meaning through language, with language defined in its broadest sense as a system of signs

• the idea that the relationship between concepts and signs is governed by codes

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

• the idea that stereotyping tends to occur where there are inequalities of power, as subordinate or excluded groups are constructed as different or 'other' (e.g. through ethnocentrism).

Claud Levi-Strauss- Structualism

Binary Opposition- Combining two opposites to create meaning

Judith Butler- Feminist Theory

• Identity is performatively constructed by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results (it is manufactured through a set of acts (clothes you wear, mannerisms, voice and language).

• There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender

• Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual.

Livingstone and Lunt - Regulation

• the 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 offering choice, value for money, and market competition)

• the 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

Stuart Hall - Reception theory

• 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

Paul Gilroy - Theories around ethnicity and postcolonial theory

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

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