All Theories
Below is every specified theory that you are expected to know for your A Level exams. Below is a brief summary of each to help you apply these to the various different aspects of the course.
Click Here for a Quizlet set based on the following.
Click Here for a Quizlet set based on the following.
Semiology – Barthes
The study of signs. Signs consist of a signifier (a word, an image, a sound, and so on) and its meaning - the signified.
Genre Theory – Neale
What genres are, and about how and why they are created, change endure or decline. Neale argues that genre is a process by which generic codes and conventions are shared by producers and audiences through repetition in media products. This means that genes are not fixed, but constantly evolve with each new addition to the generic corpus (the body of products in a genre), often playing with genre codes and conventions or becoming hybrids with other genres. Generic codes and conventions are not just established in media products but in products that refer to these products such as critical writings or advertising and marketing material, what Neale referred to as 'the intertextual relay'.
Structuralism – Levi Strauss
Narrative Theory – Todorov
Postmodernism – Baudrillard
The idea that society has moved beyond modernism - either modernism in art and culture (early 20th century) or modernism in the sense of a belief in progress, which dates back much further. Baudrillard argued that, as modern societies were organised around production of goods, postmodern society is organised around 'simulation' - the play of images and signs. Previously important social distinctions suffer 'implosion' as differences of gender, class, politics and culture dissolve in a world of simulation in which individuals construct their identities. The new world of 'hyperreality' - media simulations, for example, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasy lands - is more real than the 'real', and controls how we think and behave.
Baudrillard's vision, then, is one of supreme nihilism and melancholia: "Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning.... And we are all melancholic". The problem is that "The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference" . When reading Baudrillard on post-modernity, one sometimes gets the sense that we have already lost, that Baudrillard is merely pointing out the various ways that consumer society and the simulacrum have won in their colonization of all "reality."
Baudrillard points to a number of factors contributing to humanity's death knell within the postmodern present, including:
1) The loss of history. As Baudrillard puts it in "History: A Retro Scenario," "History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth." He goes on to say that "The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation"
2) Mediatisation. The fact that movies and television (the media) keep turning to history and to various "retro" recreations of the past is merely a symptom (a reaction-formation, Freud would say) for the loss of history. Indeed, such media works continue the process of forgetting history; as Baudrillard writes of the NBC miniseries Holocaust, "One no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber, but through the sound track and image track, through the universal screen and the microprocessor. Forgetting, annihilation, finally achieves its aesthetic dimension in this way—it is achieved in retro, finally elevated here to a mass level" ("Holocaust" 49). Television, film, and the internet separate us from the real even as they seek to reproduce it more fully or faithfully: "The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than real, that is how the real is abolished"
3) The proliferation of kitsch: Our culture, according to Baudrillard, has been inundated by trashy, kitsch, mass-market products, which contribute to our society of simulation and consumerism: "This proliferation of kitsch, which is produced by industrial reproduction and the vulgarization at the level of objects of distinctive signs taken from all registers (the bygone, the 'neo', the exotic, the folksy, the futuristic) and from a disordered excess of 'ready-made' signs, has its basis, like 'mass culture', in the sociological reality of the consumer society"
4) Consumer society. A culture of consumption has so much taken over our ways of thinking that all reality is filtered through the logic of exchange value and advertising. As Baudrillard writes, "Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer society, as idea. Advertising is the triumphal paean to that idea"
5) The "cool smile". Like Jameson, Baudrillard argues that the parodic, self-conscious, self-reflexive elements of pop-cultural forms only aid in their capitalist complicity: "This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion"
6) Simulacra and simulation. Above all else, Baudrillard keeps returning to his concepts, simulacra and simulation, to explain how our models for the real have taken over the place of the real in postmodern society.
Theories of
Representation – Hall
Representation is not about whether the media reflects or distorts reality, as this implies that there can be one 'true' meaning, but the many meanings a representation can generate. Meaning is constituted by representation, by what is present, what is absent, and what is different. Thus, meaning can be contested. A representation implicates the audience in creating its meaning. Power - through ideology or by stereotyping - tries to fix the meaning of a representation in a 'preferred meaning'. To create deliberate anti-stereotypes is still to attempt to fix the meaning (albeit in a different way). A more effective strategy is to go inside the stereotype and open it up from within, to deconstruct the work of representation.
Hall insists on the role intellectual work can play in helping to regain control of an image dominated world that has drifted beyond the control of ordinary people. Hall believes that ideas matter; that they influence the world "out there."
An image can have many different meanings.
There is no guarantee that images will work in the way we think we do when we create them.
Sometimes his ideas are interpreted to have downplayed the effect of the media. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hall understands that communication is always linked to power.
Hall wants to hold two ideas together:
- That messages work in complex ways
- They are always connected with the way power operates in a society
He examines our everyday world where knowledge and power intersect.
Theories of
Representation – Hall
"This is not an apple" - René François Ghislain Magritte
Theories of Identity –
Gauntlett
The media have an important but complex relationship with identities. In the modern world, it is now an expectation that individuals make choices about their identity and lifestyle. Even in the traditional media, there are many diverse and contradictory media messages that individuals can use to think through their identities and ways of expressing themselves. For example, the success of 'popular feminism' and increasing representation of different sexualities created a world where the meaning of gender, sexuality and identity is increasingly open. The online media offer people a route to self-expression, and therefore a stronger sense of self and participating in the world by making and exchanging. These media are places of conversation, exchange and transformation: 'a fantastically messy set of networks filled with millions of sparks - some igniting new meanings, ideas and passions and some just fading away.' People still build identities, but through everyday, creative practice. However, this practice would be improved by better platforms for creativity.
David Gauntlett at the BFI
‘Theories of identity [associated with representation]’ from me would be the ideas around:
→ People having a route to self-expression, and therefore a stronger sense of self and participation in the world, through making & exchanging online
→ “Media [made by all of us] … can be places of conversation, exchange, and transformation”
→ “a fantastically messy set of networks filled with millions of sparks – some igniting new meanings, ideas, and passions, and some just fading away”.
→ The need for better “platforms for creativity”
So it’s still the idea of people building their own sense of self-identity, but through everyday creative practice.
I say it’s ‘still the idea of…’ because I mean that in Media, Gender and Identity, a decade or more ago, I was talking about people building their own sense of self-identity in the ways they selected and used different kinds of media in their lives; and then, what we are talking about now is still the idea of people building their own sense of self-identity, but through everyday creative practice.
Theories of Identity –
Gauntlett
‘Theories of identity [associated with representation]’ from me would be the ideas around:
→ People having a route to self-expression, and therefore a stronger sense of self and participation in the world, through making & exchanging online
→ “Media [made by all of us] … can be places of conversation, exchange, and transformation”
→ “a fantastically messy set of networks filled with millions of sparks – some igniting new meanings, ideas, and passions, and some just fading away”.
→ The need for better “platforms for creativity”
So it’s still the idea of people building their own sense of self-identity, but through everyday creative practice.
I say it’s ‘still the idea of…’ because I mean that in Media, Gender and Identity, a decade or more ago, I was talking about people building their own sense of self-identity in the ways they selected and used different kinds of media in their lives; and then, what we are talking about now is still the idea of people building their own sense of self-identity, but through everyday creative practice.
Feminist Theory – Van
Zoonen
Click Here
In patriarchal culture, the way women's bodies are represented as objects is different to the representation of male bodies as spectacle. Gender is performative - our ideas of femininity and masculinity are constructed in our performances of these roles. Gender is 'what we do' rather than 'what we are'. Moreover, gender is contextual - its meaning changes with cultural and historical contexts. Van Zoonen disagrees with arguments that the internet, being based on collaboration, is a technology that is true and close to women and femininity. These views are too simple and based on the idea of an essential femininity, whereas there is a rich diversity of ways that gender is articulated on the internet.
Feminist Theory – hooks
In patriarchal culture, the way women's bodies are represented as objects is different to the representation of male bodies as spectacle. Gender is performative - our ideas of femininity and masculinity are constructed in our performances of these roles. Gender is 'what we do' rather than 'what we are'. Moreover, gender is contextual - its meaning changes with cultural and historical contexts. Van Zoonen disagrees with arguments that the internet, being based on collaboration, is a technology that is true and close to women and femininity. These views are too simple and based on the idea of an essential femininity, whereas there is a rich diversity of ways that gender is articulated on the internet.
Click Here
Feminism is a movement to end patriarchy: sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. 'Intersectionality' refers to the intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality to create a 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy', whose ideologies dominate media representations. She argues that black women should develop an 'oppositional gaze' that refuses to identify with characters - the 'gaze' is political for black Americans, as slaves were punished for looking at their white owners.
Feminism is a movement to end patriarchy: sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. 'Intersectionality' refers to the intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality to create a 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy', whose ideologies dominate media representations. She argues that black women should develop an 'oppositional gaze' that refuses to identify with characters - the 'gaze' is political for black Americans, as slaves were punished for looking at their white owners.
Theories of Gender
Performativity – Butler
Gender is created in how we perform our gender roles - there is no essential gender identity behind these roles, it is created in the performance. Performativity is not a singular act but a repetition and a ritual that becomes naturalised within the body. Any feminism concerned only with masculinity and femininity excludes other forms of gender and sexuality. This creates 'gender trouble' for those that do not fit the heterosexual norms. Butler is an important postmodern writer and has influenced Queer theory - theory which deconstructs and aims to destabilise apparently fixed identities based on gender and sexualities.
Judith Butler and
Performativity for Beginners (mostly in her own words)
Film 165A
1. A central
concept of the theory is that your gender is constructed through your own
repetitive performance of gender. This is related to the idea that
discourse creates subject positions for your self to occupy—linguistic
structures construct the self. The structure or discourse of gender for Butler,
however, is bodily and nonverbal. Butler’s theory does not accept stable and
coherent gender identity. Gender is “a stylized repetition of acts . . . which
are internally discontinuous . . .[so that] the appearance of substance is
precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the
mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and
to perform in the mode of belief” (Gender
Trouble). To say that gender is performative is to argue that gender is
“real only to the extent that it is performed” (Gender Trouble).
2. There is no self
preceding or outside a gendered self. Butler writes, “ . . . if gender is constructed, it
is not necessarily constructed by an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who stands before that
construction in any spatial or temporal sense of ‘before.’ Indeed, it is
unclear that there can be an ‘I’ or a “we” who had not been submitted,
subjected to gender, where gendering is, among other things, the
differentiating relations by which speaking subjects come into being . . . the
‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges
only within the matrix of gender relations themselves” (Bodies that Matter).
3. Performativity of gender
is a stylized repetition of acts, an imitation or miming of the dominant
conventions of gender. Butler argues that “the act that one does, the act that one performs
is, in a sense, an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Gender Trouble). “Gender is an
impersonation . . . becoming gendered involves impersonating an ideal that
nobody actually inhabits” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).
4. Biological sex is also a
social construction—gender subsumes sex. “According to this view, then, the social
construction of the natural presupposes the cancellation of the natural by the
social. Insofar as it relies on this construal, the sex/gender distinction
founders . . . if gender is the social significance that sex assumes within a
given culture . . . then what, if anything, is left of ‘sex’ once it has
assumed its social character as gender? . . . If gender consists of the social
meanings that sex assumes, then sex does not accrue social meanings as additive properties, but rather is replaced by the social meanings it
takes on; sex is relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender
emerges, not as a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as
the term which absorbs and displaces “sex” (Bodies
that Matter). Butler also writes “I think for a woman to identify as a
woman is a culturally enforced
effect. I don’t think that it’s a given that on the basis of a given anatomy,
an identification will follow. I think that ‘coherent identification’ has to be
cultivated, policed, and enforced; and that the violation of that has to be
punished, usually through shame” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).
5. What is at stake in
gender roles is the ideology of heterosexuality. “To claim that all gender is
like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that ‘imitation’ is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender
binarism, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and
original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and
repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations. That it must repeat this
imitation, that it sets up pathologizing practices and normalizing sciences in
order to produce and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety,
suggests that heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can
never fully overcome….that its effort to become its own idealizations can never
be finally or fully achieved, and that it is constantly haunted by that domain
of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to
produce itself” (Bodies that Matter).
6. Performativity of Gender
(drag) can be subversive. “Drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative
structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes
heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (Bodies that Matter).
7. But subversion through
performance isn’t automatic or easy. Indeed, Butler complains that people have misread
her book Gender Trouble. “The bad
reading goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my
closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out a piece of
clothing and change my gender, stylize it, and then that evening I can change
it again and be something radically other, so that what you get is something
like the comodification of gender, and the understanding of taking on a gender
as a kind of consumerism. . . . [treating] gender deliberately, as if it’s an
object out there, when my whole point was that the very formation of subjects,
the very formation of persons, presupposes
gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that
‘performativity’ is not radical choice and its not voluntarism . . . Performativity
has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful
gender norms . . . This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap
that one is inevitably in” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum). Butler also writes that “it seems to me that there is no
easy way to know whether something is subversive. Subversiveness is not
something that can be gauged or calculated . . . I do think that for a copy to
be subversive of heterosexual hegemony it has to both mime and displace its
conventions” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).
Gender is created in how we perform our gender roles - there is no essential gender identity behind these roles, it is created in the performance. Performativity is not a singular act but a repetition and a ritual that becomes naturalised within the body. Any feminism concerned only with masculinity and femininity excludes other forms of gender and sexuality. This creates 'gender trouble' for those that do not fit the heterosexual norms. Butler is an important postmodern writer and has influenced Queer theory - theory which deconstructs and aims to destabilise apparently fixed identities based on gender and sexualities.
Judith Butler and
Performativity for Beginners (mostly in her own words)
Film 165A
1. A central
concept of the theory is that your gender is constructed through your own
repetitive performance of gender. This is related to the idea that
discourse creates subject positions for your self to occupy—linguistic
structures construct the self. The structure or discourse of gender for Butler,
however, is bodily and nonverbal. Butler’s theory does not accept stable and
coherent gender identity. Gender is “a stylized repetition of acts . . . which
are internally discontinuous . . .[so that] the appearance of substance is
precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the
mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and
to perform in the mode of belief” (Gender
Trouble). To say that gender is performative is to argue that gender is
“real only to the extent that it is performed” (Gender Trouble).
2. There is no self
preceding or outside a gendered self. Butler writes, “ . . . if gender is constructed, it
is not necessarily constructed by an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who stands before that
construction in any spatial or temporal sense of ‘before.’ Indeed, it is
unclear that there can be an ‘I’ or a “we” who had not been submitted,
subjected to gender, where gendering is, among other things, the
differentiating relations by which speaking subjects come into being . . . the
‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges
only within the matrix of gender relations themselves” (Bodies that Matter).
3. Performativity of gender
is a stylized repetition of acts, an imitation or miming of the dominant
conventions of gender. Butler argues that “the act that one does, the act that one performs
is, in a sense, an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Gender Trouble). “Gender is an
impersonation . . . becoming gendered involves impersonating an ideal that
nobody actually inhabits” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).
4. Biological sex is also a
social construction—gender subsumes sex. “According to this view, then, the social
construction of the natural presupposes the cancellation of the natural by the
social. Insofar as it relies on this construal, the sex/gender distinction
founders . . . if gender is the social significance that sex assumes within a
given culture . . . then what, if anything, is left of ‘sex’ once it has
assumed its social character as gender? . . . If gender consists of the social
meanings that sex assumes, then sex does not accrue social meanings as additive properties, but rather is replaced by the social meanings it
takes on; sex is relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender
emerges, not as a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as
the term which absorbs and displaces “sex” (Bodies
that Matter). Butler also writes “I think for a woman to identify as a
woman is a culturally enforced
effect. I don’t think that it’s a given that on the basis of a given anatomy,
an identification will follow. I think that ‘coherent identification’ has to be
cultivated, policed, and enforced; and that the violation of that has to be
punished, usually through shame” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).
5. What is at stake in
gender roles is the ideology of heterosexuality. “To claim that all gender is
like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that ‘imitation’ is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender
binarism, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and
original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and
repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations. That it must repeat this
imitation, that it sets up pathologizing practices and normalizing sciences in
order to produce and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety,
suggests that heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can
never fully overcome….that its effort to become its own idealizations can never
be finally or fully achieved, and that it is constantly haunted by that domain
of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to
produce itself” (Bodies that Matter).
6. Performativity of Gender
(drag) can be subversive. “Drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative
structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes
heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (Bodies that Matter).
7. But subversion through
performance isn’t automatic or easy. Indeed, Butler complains that people have misread
her book Gender Trouble. “The bad
reading goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my
closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out a piece of
clothing and change my gender, stylize it, and then that evening I can change
it again and be something radically other, so that what you get is something
like the comodification of gender, and the understanding of taking on a gender
as a kind of consumerism. . . . [treating] gender deliberately, as if it’s an
object out there, when my whole point was that the very formation of subjects,
the very formation of persons, presupposes
gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that
‘performativity’ is not radical choice and its not voluntarism . . . Performativity
has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful
gender norms . . . This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap
that one is inevitably in” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum). Butler also writes that “it seems to me that there is no
easy way to know whether something is subversive. Subversiveness is not
something that can be gauged or calculated . . . I do think that for a copy to
be subversive of heterosexual hegemony it has to both mime and displace its
conventions” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).
Theories around
ethnicity and postcolonial theory – Gilroy
The African diaspora caused by the slave trade has now constructed a transatlantic culture that is simultaneously African, American, Caribbean and British - the 'Black Atlantic'. Britain has failed to mourn its loss of empire, creating 'postcolonial melancholia', an attachment to an airbrushed version of British colonial history, which expresses itself in criminalising immigrants and an 'us and them' approach to the world founded on the belief in the inherent superiority of white western civilisation.
Click Here
The African diaspora caused by the slave trade has now constructed a transatlantic culture that is simultaneously African, American, Caribbean and British - the 'Black Atlantic'. Britain has failed to mourn its loss of empire, creating 'postcolonial melancholia', an attachment to an airbrushed version of British colonial history, which expresses itself in criminalising immigrants and an 'us and them' approach to the world founded on the belief in the inherent superiority of white western civilisation.
Click Here
Power and media
industries – Curran and
Seaton
A political economy approach to the media - arguing that patterns of ownership and control are the most significant factors in how the media operate. Media industries follow the normal capitalist pattern of increasing concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to a narrowing of the range of opinions represented and a pursuit of profit at the expense of quality or creativity. The internet does not represent a rupture with the past in that it does not offer a level playing field for diverse voices to be heard. It is constrained by nationalism and state censorship. News is still controlled by powerful news organisations, who have successfully defended their oligarchy.
Click Here
A political economy approach to the media - arguing that patterns of ownership and control are the most significant factors in how the media operate. Media industries follow the normal capitalist pattern of increasing concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to a narrowing of the range of opinions represented and a pursuit of profit at the expense of quality or creativity. The internet does not represent a rupture with the past in that it does not offer a level playing field for diverse voices to be heard. It is constrained by nationalism and state censorship. News is still controlled by powerful news organisations, who have successfully defended their oligarchy.
Click Here
Regulation – Livingstone
and Lunt
Livingstone and Lunt studied four case studies of the work of Ofcom. Ofcom is serving an audience who may be seen as consumers and/or citizens, with consequences for regulation: consumers have wants, are individuals, seek private benefits from the media, use the language of choice, and require regulation to protect against detriment; citizens have needs, are social, seek public or social benefits from the media, use the language of rights, and require regulation to promote the public interest. Traditional regulation is being put at risk by: increasingly globalised media industries, the rise of the digital media, and media convergence.
Livingstone and Lunt studied four case studies of the work of Ofcom. Ofcom is serving an audience who may be seen as consumers and/or citizens, with consequences for regulation: consumers have wants, are individuals, seek private benefits from the media, use the language of choice, and require regulation to protect against detriment; citizens have needs, are social, seek public or social benefits from the media, use the language of rights, and require regulation to promote the public interest. Traditional regulation is being put at risk by: increasingly globalised media industries, the rise of the digital media, and media convergence.
Cultural Industries –
Hesmondhalgh
Cultural industries follow the normal capitalist pattern of increasing concentration and integration - cultural production is owned and controlled by a few conglomerates who vertically integrate across a range of media to reduce risk. Risk is particularly high in the cultural industries because of the difficulty in predicting success, high production costs, low reproduction costs and the fact that media products are 'public goods' - they are not destroyed on consumption but can be further reproduced. This means that the cultural industries rely on 'big hits' to cover the costs of failure. Hence industries rely on repetition through use of stars, genres, franchises, repeatable narratives and so on to sell formats to audiences, then industries and governments try to impose scarcity, especially through copyright laws. The internet has created new powerful IT corporations, and has not transformed cultural production in a liberating and empowering way - digital technology has sped up work, commercialised leisure time and increased surveillance by government and companies.
Click Here
Cultural industries follow the normal capitalist pattern of increasing concentration and integration - cultural production is owned and controlled by a few conglomerates who vertically integrate across a range of media to reduce risk. Risk is particularly high in the cultural industries because of the difficulty in predicting success, high production costs, low reproduction costs and the fact that media products are 'public goods' - they are not destroyed on consumption but can be further reproduced. This means that the cultural industries rely on 'big hits' to cover the costs of failure. Hence industries rely on repetition through use of stars, genres, franchises, repeatable narratives and so on to sell formats to audiences, then industries and governments try to impose scarcity, especially through copyright laws. The internet has created new powerful IT corporations, and has not transformed cultural production in a liberating and empowering way - digital technology has sped up work, commercialised leisure time and increased surveillance by government and companies.
Click Here
Media effects – Bandura
The media can influence people directly - human values, judgement and conduct can be altered directly by media modelling. Empirical evidence best supports direct influence rather than the alternative models of media effects: two-step flow, agenda-setting, no effects, or the media reflecting existing attitudes and behaviour. Media representations of aggressive or violent behaviour can lead to imitation. The media may influence directly or by social networks, so people can be influenced by media messages without being exposed to them. Different media have different effects. The 'new' media offer opportunities for self-directedness.
The media can influence people directly - human values, judgement and conduct can be altered directly by media modelling. Empirical evidence best supports direct influence rather than the alternative models of media effects: two-step flow, agenda-setting, no effects, or the media reflecting existing attitudes and behaviour. Media representations of aggressive or violent behaviour can lead to imitation. The media may influence directly or by social networks, so people can be influenced by media messages without being exposed to them. Different media have different effects. The 'new' media offer opportunities for self-directedness.
Cultivation theory –
Gerbner
Exposure to television over long periods of time cultivates standardised roles and behaviours. Gerbner used content analysis to analyse repeated media messages and values, then found that heavy users of television were more likely, for example, to develop 'mean world syndrome' - a cynical, mistrusting attitude towards others - following prolonged exposure to high levels of television violence. Gerbner found that heavy TV viewing led to 'mainstreaming' - a common outlook on the world based on the images and labels on TV. Mainstreamers would describe themselves as politically moderate.
Exposure to television over long periods of time cultivates standardised roles and behaviours. Gerbner used content analysis to analyse repeated media messages and values, then found that heavy users of television were more likely, for example, to develop 'mean world syndrome' - a cynical, mistrusting attitude towards others - following prolonged exposure to high levels of television violence. Gerbner found that heavy TV viewing led to 'mainstreaming' - a common outlook on the world based on the images and labels on TV. Mainstreamers would describe themselves as politically moderate.
Reception Theory – Hall
Hall's 'encoding-decoding' model argued that media producers encode 'preferred meanings' into texts, but these texts may be 'read' by their audiences in a number of different ways:
• The dominant-hegemonic position: a 'preferred reading' that accepts the text's messages and the ideological assumptions behind the messages
• The negotiated position: the reader accepts the text's ideological assumptions, but disagrees with aspects of the messages, so negotiates the meaning to fit with their 'lived experience'
• The oppositional reading: the reader rejects both the overt message and its underlying ideological assumptions.
Hall's 'encoding-decoding' model argued that media producers encode 'preferred meanings' into texts, but these texts may be 'read' by their audiences in a number of different ways:
• The dominant-hegemonic position: a 'preferred reading' that accepts the text's messages and the ideological assumptions behind the messages
• The negotiated position: the reader accepts the text's ideological assumptions, but disagrees with aspects of the messages, so negotiates the meaning to fit with their 'lived experience'
• The oppositional reading: the reader rejects both the overt message and its underlying ideological assumptions.
Fandom – Jenkins
Fans act as 'textual poachers' - taking elements from media texts to create their own culture. The development of the 'new' media has accelerated 'participatory culture', in which audiences are active and creative participants rather than passive consumers. They create online communities, produce new creative forms, collaborate to solve problems, and shape the flow of media. This generates 'collective intelligence'. From this perspective, convergence is a cultural process rather than a technological one. Jenkins prefers the term 'spreadable media' to terms such as 'viral', as the former emphasises the active, participatory element of the 'new' media.
Fans act as 'textual poachers' - taking elements from media texts to create their own culture. The development of the 'new' media has accelerated 'participatory culture', in which audiences are active and creative participants rather than passive consumers. They create online communities, produce new creative forms, collaborate to solve problems, and shape the flow of media. This generates 'collective intelligence'. From this perspective, convergence is a cultural process rather than a technological one. Jenkins prefers the term 'spreadable media' to terms such as 'viral', as the former emphasises the active, participatory element of the 'new' media.
‘End of Audience’
theories – Shirky
In the 'old' media, centralised producers addressed atomised consumers; in the 'new' media, every consumer is now a producer. Traditional media producers would 'filter then publish'; as many 'new' media producers are not employees, they 'publish then filter'. These amateur producers have different motivations to those of professionals - they value autonomy, competence, membership and generosity. User-generated content creates emotional connection between people who care about something. This can generate a cognitive surplus - for example, Wikipedia can aggregate people's free time and talent to produce value that no traditional medium could match. 'The Audience' as a mass of people with predictable behaviour is gone. Now, behaviour is variable across different sites, with some of the audience creating content, some synthesising content and some consuming content. The 'old' media created a mass audience. The 'new' media provide a platform for people to provide value for each other.