FRONT ROW: MARK LAWSON

Time to listen in to what BBC radio 4 has to offer. Media students should not neglect radio: it is easy to listen again using BBC iPlayer and there is a wealth of useful archive information in the form of interviews.

Mark Lawson talks to Michael Caine 
Last broadcast on Tue, 27 Oct 2009

Today we hear Michael Caine describing his early work in cinema, including his initial success in the States, where his accent and class didn't count against him.

We discuss the development of British cinema and television, and the films of the 1960s and 1970s, and discuss film in relation to social class and regionality.

We watch extracts from Educating Rita and analyse how the opening sequence establishes class through sound codes, mise-en-scene, accent and camera angles.

Watch 'Educating Rita'

MARK KERMODE FILM REVIEWS
Listen to Mark Kermode podcast on BBC Radio 5 LIve

 

IDEOLOGY

What is ideology? It is the ideas that lie behind a media text, the agenda that drives its producers.
Ideology is the body of ideas or set of beliefs that underpins an institution or way of behaving and creates social relations. Different sets of beliefs are held by different groups in society and the most prevalent beliefs are those held by the dominant (ruling) groups.

Look here for helpful explanations of terms such as dominant ideology (hegemony), preferred readings, oppositional reading:
Mediaknowall


Watch scenes from East Is East (Damien O"Donnell, 1999). How might different audiences respond, depending on their values?
East Is East trailer

In 1971 Salford fish-and-chip shop owner George Khan expects his family to follow his strict Pakistani Muslim ways. But his children, with an English mother and having been born and brought up in Britain, increasingly see themselves as British and start to reject their father's rules on dress, food, religion, and living in general.

CALLING ALL!

"Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." Althusser (2001) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

How is identity formed? How do people become who they are? How do they form value systems?

Louis Althusser (1918-1990) the French philosopher built on work by Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan relating to people's social roles and the way in which they form a sense of identity, class and individuality. For him, it is impossible to escape ideology, to avoid being subjected to it.

Althusser's uses the term interpellation (calling or hailing, holding or detaining for questioning) to refer to the process of how people step up into existing social positions; people are constituted or constructed by pre-existing social structures (this is a structuralist stance). The power of the mass media is to position the person (called the subject) in such as way that their representations are taken to be reflections of everyday reality.

The term  interpellation is best understood through Althusser's example: a police officer shouts "Hey, you!" in public. An individual turns round and 'by this mere one-hundred-and-eight degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.' Althusser (1972: 174)

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

AS MEDIA STUDIES

 Our AS Media Studies course is OCR H140. We do two modules: a portfolio of creative work and an examination.

YOUR EVALUATION

Here are the 7 questions you must answer in your evaluation:

1.  In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

AUDIENCE RECEPTION THEORY

Introduction to two models of audience theory:

Media Effects model: the idea that people will simply copy things that the have seen in the media.

1. The hypodermic syringe model
2. Two-step flow theory

Read Media Knowall on audience theory

Read 'Ten Things Wrong with the Effects Model' by David Gauntlett Professor of Media and Communications at the school of Media, Arts and Design at The University of Westminster

Read Ruination once again - case studies in the media effects

Read Role models and personal identity

Uses and Gratifications model: McQuail, Blumler and Brown (1972) identified four needs that audiences seek to have gratified by the mass media :

1. diversion (we enjoy escapism, entertainment, release)
2. surveillance (we need information about what is happening in the world
3. personal relationships (we like feeling part of a social group; we feel companionship)
4. personal identity (we explore and reinforce our values through comparison with others)