Theory and frameworks

Theory and frameworks

Media language 

• Levi Strauss - Strauss argues binary oppositions e.g. good v evil work in narrative to engage an audience to help us to process the real world.

"Structuralism is the study of the hidden rules that govern a structure."

• Barthes
• Neale
• Baudrillard

Industries

• Hesmondhalgh - Media industries follow capitalist pattern controlled by a few conglomerates in order to reduce risk.

"Cultural industries follow the normal capitalist pattern of increasing concentration and integration."

• Curran and Seaton 
• Livingstone and Lunt

Representation

• Gauntlet - 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.

"The media have an important but complex relationship with identities."

• Van Zoonen - 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'. Gender is contextual, its meaning changes with cultural and historical contexts.

"In patriarchal culture, the way women's bodies are represented as objects is different to the representation of male bodies as a spectacle."

• 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, dominant, negotiated, oppositional.

"Representation is not about whether the media reflects or distorts reality, as this implies that there can be one 'true' meaning, but the meanings a representation can generate."

• Butler - Any feminism concerned only with masculinity and femininity excludes other forms of gender and sexuality. This creates 'Gender trouble' for those who do not fit the heterosexual norms.

"Gender is created by how we perform our gender roles - there is no essential gender identity behind these roles, it is created by the performance."

• Hooks - '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 black women should develop an 'oppositional gaze' that refuses to identify with characters.

"Feminism is a movement to end patriarchy: sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression"

• Gilroy - Britain has failed to mourn its loss of empire, creating a '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.

"African diaspora caused by the slave trade has now constructed a transatlantic culture that is simultaneously African, American, Caribbean and British"

Audience

• Bandura - The consumption of media texts has an effect or influence on the audience. IT assumes that audiences are passive and it considered a negative effect. Media can influence audiences directly or through social media. - Media messages can influence without being seen directly.

• Gerbner
• Jenkins
• Shirky
• Hall