KEY CONCEPTS: REPRESENTATION

'The media do not just offer us a transparent 'window on the world' but a mediated version of the world. They don't just present reality; they re-present it.' (Buckingham, 2003:58)

• Media representations are always constructs, that is, they are made by someone for consumption by an audience. All representations are 'mediated'.
• Studying media involves analysing how representations are made to seem natural or 'true'.
• However realistic a representation may seem - even a photograph - it is a construction not a representation of reality. Think of holiday snaps, wedding photos, celebrity shots, estate agents' photos, cover girls, film posters, advertising material.
• Meaning is made as much by what is excluded as what is included. Some things are more prominent (foregrounded), some less prominent. Composing a shot involves deliberate selection, choice of angles, lighting and so on.
• Writing can anchor (fix) meaning: captions, for example.
• The meaning of a visual media text (moving image, photo etc) is not fixed and contingent; its meaning also depends on the viewer who assigns meanings and interprets the text. Literature students encounter this post-structuralist notion in Roland Barthes's The Death of the Author (1977). 
• "To give a text an Author is to imposes a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final significance, to close the writing." (Barthes 1977)
• Viewers bring with them a set of assumptions and values with which they make judgements. For example, would different cultures think differently about some of the media that you have looked at in class, ranging from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis to films about cultural identity (such as East Is East and perfume adverts?

The Times 12.09.2011: As New York remembers 9/11, a father mourns his lost son.

Analyse the photographs above and below taken at the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in the light of what you have discussed.

Former president George W. Bush, the First Lady and President Barak Obama  pay their respects at the North Pool of the National September 11 Memorial

Now is the time to start widening your media consumption and dipping into media that you might not normally use. Try online newspapers to familiarize yourself with different approaches and to see different representations. Today we used The Times newspaper at this site here.

Definition of Representation