Media Effects

Media Effects

• Do media representations of young people effect how they are perceived?
• If so how does this effect occur?
• Hypodermic model
• Cultivation theory - more criminal and violent behaviour, seen on tv, the more likely you are to believe that its real.
• Copy Cat theory - copy what we see on tv, if we see violence were likely to copy it. 
• Moral Panic -

Analysis

• Whose perspective is dominant in each of the texts?
• What do the representations have in common?
• How are the representations different?
• How are parental figures represented?
• How important is social class?

Contemporary British Social Realism

• What do you understand by Contemporary British social realism?
• Social realist films attempt to portray issues facing ordinary people in their social situations
• Social realist films try to show that society and the capitalist system leads to the exploitation of the poor or dispossessed
• These groups are shown as victims of the system rather than being totally responsible for their own bad behaviour

Audience

• Social realist films which address social problems in this country offer a very different version of 'collective identity' than British films which are also aimed at an American audience.
• Social realist films are aimed at a predominantly British audience.
• If many more people see the more commercial films, collective identity is more powerful or the most impact.

Analysing Representation of Collective identity

• When comparing how Britishness and our collective identity is represented in films consider the following questions:
• Who is being represented?
• Who is representing them?
• How are they represented?
• What seems to be the intentions of the representations?
• What is the dominant discourse?
• What range of readings are there?
• Look for alternative discourse

Collective Identity

• the media contributes to our sense of collective identity, many different versions change over time
• representations can cause problems for the groups being represented
• the social context

British Social Realism


Theorist Stuart Hall and Reading the media

• Encoding and Decoding - the relationship between a text and its audience
• Encoding - process which a text is constructed by its producers
• Decoding - process which the audience reads, understands and interprets a text
• Texts are polysemic - may be read differently by different people depending on their identity, cultural knowledge and opinions

Preffered Reading
We interpret the message as the instituation wanted us to and we agree with it.

Negotiated Reading
Audience understand it, but dont nessacarily agree with it.

Oppositional Reading 'counter hegemonic'
Audience argue against the media text and refuse them, they understand it, but wont agree with it at all.


Any Representation is a mixture of:

1. The thing itself
2. The opinions of the people doing the representation
3. The reaction of the individual to the representation
4. The context of the society in which the representation is taking place

Implicit personality theory