Media Effects

Hypodermic model - The media injecting their idea's into our society
Cultivation theory - If you see enough violence amongst british youth the more likely you are to believe its happening
Copy cat theory - Influnced what you see, so you copy what you see
Moral panic - Creates a panic within society

Contempory British social realism

What do you undersrtand by contempory 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 leeds to the explanation of the porr or dispossessed

These groups are shown as victims of the system rather than being totally responsible for their own bad behaviour

'These places represent an everywhere of Britain, where relationships are broken down and where people have become isolated and disconnected. Their britishness is their culturally specific address to audiences at home'. (Murray, 2008)

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 American audience. Films like Notting Hill and Love Actually reach a much bigger audience than the lower budget social realist films.

Social realist films are aimed at a predominantly British Audience

If many more people see the more commercial films, consider which version of our collective idendity is the more powerful or has 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 being represented?

What seems to be the intentions of the representations?

What is the dominant discourse? (World view offered by the film).

What range of readings are there?

Look for alternative discourses

Collective Identity

The media contributes to our sense of 'collecitve identity' but there are many different versions that change over time

Representations can cause problems for the groups being represented because marginalized groups have little control over their representation / stereotyping.

The social context in which the film / TV programme is made influences the messages / values / dominant discourse of the film

British soical realism - Films generally made on a lower budget, attempt to portray ordinary issues and ordinary people.

Encoding - Decoding (Stuart Hall, 1980) - Active Audience Theory

Encoding-decoding is an active audience theory developed by Stuart Hall which examines the relationship between a text and its audience

Encoding is the process by which is constructed by its producers

Decoding is the process by which the audience reads, understands and inteprets a text

Hall states that texts are polysemic, meaning they may be read differently by different people, depending on their identity, cultural knowledge and opinions

Hall states that there are three ways to read a text:

Preffered Reading/Dominat Hegemonic

When an audience interprets the message as it was ment to to be undertsood, they are opertating in the dominant code. The position of proffesional broadcasters and media producers is that messages are already signified within the hegemonic manner to which they accusotmed. Proffesional codes for media organizations serve to contribute to this type of industrial pyshcolohy. The producers and the audenice are in harmony, understasnfinh communication and sharing mediated signs in the established.

Negotiated reading

Not all audiences may understand may undertsand the media producers take for granted. There may be some acknowledgement of differences in undertsnading

Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppisitonal elements; It acknowledges the legitmacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract) while at a more restriced level, it makes its own grand rules - it operates with exceptions to the rules

Oppostitional reading/'counter-hegemonic'

When media consumers undertsands the contextual and literary inflections of a text yet decode the message by a completely oppisitonal means. This is the globally contrary position/oppositional reading

Any representation is a mixture of itself:

The thing itself

The opinions of the people doing the representation

The reaction of the individual to the representation

The context of the society in which the representation is taking place

Sterotypying

Why do we stereotype?

The fact that we naturally see the world in this kind of shorthand way, with connections between different character traits, allows the media to create simplistic representations which we find believavble. Implicit personalitly theory explains  this process.

'Its almost as if we conspire with the media to misunderstands the world'