Theorists and Theories

Media Theories - Postmodernism

Narrative

Tim O’Sullivan argued ‘that all media texts tell us some kind of story. Through careful mediation, media texts offer a way of telling stories; the story of us as a culture or set of cultures.

Kate Domaillie (2001) stated that every story ever told can be filtered into one of eight narrative types. Each of these narrative types has a source, an original story upon which the others are based. These stories are as follows:

1. Candide
2. Cinderella
3. Love
4. Circe
5. Faust
6. Orpheus
7. Romeo and Juliet
8. Tristen and Iseult

Without love, there would not be us. Love is the ultimate narrative. Achilles: the fatal flaw that leads to the destruction of the previously flawless person.

Sven Carlsson (1999) suggested that music videos in general, videos fall into two rough groups: performance and conceptual clips.

Performance contains filmed performance.

Bordwell and Thompson (1997) deterred the difference between story and plot.

Structure of narrative:

•  Linearity of cause and effect within an overall trajectory of enigma resolution.
• High degree of narrative closure.
• A fictional world that contains verisimilitude especially governed by spatial and temporal coherence.

Todorov (1977) studied the equilibrium of diegesis.

Boy + Girl then disruption (enigma) then quest the a resolution (re-equilibrium) = the cause and the effect.

Claude Lévi Strauss (1958) stated ideas about narrative amount to the fact that he believed all stories operated to certain clear binary opposites e.g. good vs evil.

Michael Shore (1984) argues that music videos are recycled styles: ‘surface without substance.’

Examples of recycled styles are:

• Happy Days (1970’s)
• Buddy Holly – Wheezer (1984) using the format of Happy Days.
• Happy Days was set in 1950’s America.
• Dressed as 1950’s college students.
• Original footage from Happy Days.
• Our understanding of the look is based purely and simply on other media products.
• ‘Looks are more important than the meaning.’

Andrew Goodwin (1992) emphasises that the meaning can be created from the individual audio-viewers musical personal musical taste to sophisticated intertextuality then uses phenomena of Western Culture.

Genre

‘Genre’ is a critical tool that helps us study texts and audience responses to texts by dividing them into categories based on common elements e.g. conventions. All genres have subgenres.

Barry Keith Grant (1995) stated that objects/ideas become characteristics.

Steve Neale (1995) stresses that “genres are not ‘systems’, they processes of systematization” E.g. costumes, locations, props, transport, narrative spheres of action. He suggests that genres are dynamic. Genres have to change in order to reflect the ideology of that era.

Examples of Steve Neale’s argument:

1. Nosferatu (1920) shows genre of horror and showed the first viewing of Dracula. Directed by F.W. Murnau
2. Interview with the Vampire (1994) illustrates that the colour has changed over time however vampire’s conventions haven’t changed. Costumes have changed and the narrative focus is on the vampire.

Jason Mitchell (200...) argues that genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience and cultural practices as well.

Examples:

1. Jay Z – 99 ProblemsGenre – rapThis is shown through low angles to show they are dominant. Urban setting. Discriminating women ‘bitch’. Dances, caps. A convention of a particular lifestyle before rap was a genre. Experience of the blacks being hassled by police men.
2. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Can’t StopGenre – rock, punk rockShown through performance, reject normal life style, fun, creative. Have to make a video as they are signed to a label. Making fun of making videos.

Rick Altman (1999) stated there are three types of pleasures:

1. Emotional pleasure: emotional pleasures offered to the audience of genre film are significant when generating a strong audience response.
2. Visceral pleasure: physically feeling.
3. Intellectual pleasure: there’s a storyline

Christian Metz (1974) said genres go through four stages:

1. Experimental stage – writing
2. Classic stage – classic conventions
3. Parody stage – made fun of
4. Deconstruction stage – taken apart and added elements e.g. hybrid.

Richard Dyer (1975) states that music videos are postmodern, whereas the main purpose of a music video is to promote a star persona.

Themes and Genre

David Bordwell (1989) stated ‘any theme may appear in any genre’.
Horror films are basically just modern fairy tales.
Fear of the unknown: the monster is the monstrous other.
Sex = death: sex is immoral and must be punished.
The breakdown of society: fear or secret desire of society.
The duality of mans personal journey: conflict between a man’s civilized side and his savage.

David Buckingham (1993) argued that ‘genre is not simply “given” by the culture: rather it is in a constant process of negotiation and change.’

Religion and The Enlightenment Period is a meta-narrative and therefore organises structures of society.

Emmanuel Kant (17^th Century) worked during the enlightenment period; he established the change from religious reasons to scientific reasons. He stated ‘God made man in his own image.’ Gallilea developed telescopes (the start of the enlightenment) and therefore proved, with science, that the earth is round and the earth travels around the sun.

Karl Marx challenges the class system.

Nietczhe says ‘mankind does not need religion’ and ‘man killed dog’.

Marshall McLuhan stated ‘The medium is the message’

Timothy Leary stated that media texts all ‘Turn on, tune in and drop out.’ E.g. take drugs, they hit high, drop out of mainstream society.

Media Theories – Collective Identity

‘A group of people wanting to fit in with an ideology (they share the same values and beliefs).’

Representation Theory

Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory
Laura Mulvey looks at how the audience view women who are presented in the media. She states that women are there to be seen and that the use of the camera portrays women as sexual objects through shot types and movement. She states that there are three approaches to how the audience view women:

1. How men look at women
2. How women look at themselves
3. How women look at other women

Mulvey focuses on:

• Emphasising curves of the female body
• Referring to women as objects rather than people
• The display of women is how men think they should be perceived
• Female viewers view the content through the eyes of men
• Women are often sexualised and seen as objects and viewed based on sexual desire and the way they look

Examples

• Calvin Harris ft John Newman – “Blame” portrays women as objects, displays women in a way to please men, women view the content through eyes of a man and women are portrayed as “ideal”
• Lily Wood & Robin Schultz – “Prayer in C” supports Mulvey’s theory, there are shots of female bottoms therefore portraying females as objects.

Laura Mulvey’s theory is proved correct; women are seen as sexual objects in the media. Throughout the majority of music videos, women are seen as sexual objects to males. However, women may want to be portrayed this way, they may find it liberating. The media has created ideology that shows females want to be seen as “ideal”. The media has influenced how women are represented and it is hard to change one perception.

Richard Dyer – Star Theory
Richard Dyer established the idea that icons and celebrities are constructed through institutions for financial reasons and are built to target a specific audience or group of people. Dyer’s theory can be broken down into 3 sections:

• Audience and institutions – stars are made to make money for that purpose alone. Audiences want to consume what they think is the ideal. The institution then modifies the stars image around that target audience. They make a star on what they think the audience want.
• Constructions – the star is built for an audience and is not an actual person; a persona is created for the audience to identify. So stars can differentiate between different stars and why they like them or not. The star is built specifically with someone’s signature.
• Hegemony (cultural beliefs) – leadership or dominance especially by one step or social group over them. We relate to the star because they have a feature that we admire or share with them. This develops from an admiration into an idolization.

Quotes:

“A star is a constructed image, represented across a range of media and mediums”

“Stars are commodities that are produced by institutions”

“Stars represent and embody certain ideologies”

Tessa Perkins – Stereotypes
Tessa Perkins argued that stereotyping is not a simple process and contains a number of assumptions that can be challenged. These assumptions are:

1. Stereotypes are not always negative – ‘youths’ e.g. hoodie culture. Groups of young youths may scare older generations e.g. if a tramp collapsed on the floor no one would help him however if a business man collapsed on the floor, he will receive help.
2. They are not always about minority groups or less powerful – we make assumptions about the upper class minority
3. They can be held about one groups – Wyke College is stereotyped to be stuck up however we also stereotype others in little groups at Wyke e.g. famous people
4. They are not rigid or changing – over a period of time, stereotypes can change. They take time and they are extremely hard to change e.g. blonde bimbos
5. They are not always false – stereotypes must hold some truths or else where would they come from? E.g. actresses are seen as false

Assumptions we make are based on groups of people. We base our assumptions from the media. We have not experience different types of people therefore we make stereotypes to understand them more. Stereotypes usually lead to negative behaviour e.g. if a tramp collapsed on the floor no one would help him however if a business man collapsed on the floor, he will receive help.

Audience Theory

Uses and Gratification Theory
The uses and gratification theory discusses how certain media texts make us feel. The uses and gratification model represented a change in thinking as researchers began to describe the effects of the media from the point of view of audiences.

The model looks at the motives of the people who use the media, asking why we watch the TV programmes that we do, why we bother to read newspapers, why we find ourselves so compelled to keep up to date with our favourite soap or consume films.

The theory makes the audience active as they choose what they want to consume, they are not forced into consumption e.g. you only watch the films you want to watch as you are in control of your choices. The media simply create the product.

The theory argued that audience needs have social and psychological needs which generate certain expectations about the mess media and what they are exposed to.

The audience is the active participant therefore it allows them to make choices in relation to what they consume making one’s self in control of what they consume. This does assume an active audience making motivated choices making the audience in control of their own consumption.

The underlying idea behind the model is that people are motivated by a desire to fulfil. This theory is broken down into four areas:

1. Surveillance is based around the idea that people feel better having the feeling that they know what is going on in the world around them e.g. the news. Surveillance is about awareness, knowledge and security. E.g. Green Day  - ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ is about 9/11
2. Personal identity explains how being a subject of the media allows us to confirm the identity and positioning of ourselves within our society.
3. Personal relationships comes into two parts:- Relationships with the media – we can form a relationship with the media and also use the media to form a relationship with others- Using media within relationships – how we can sometimes use the media as a springboard to form and build upon relationships with real people. Media can be the start of conversations
4. Diversion – we watch/consume to escape our real lives.

Stuart Hall’s Reception theory
The reception theory states that media texts are encoded by the producer meaning that whoever produces the text fills the product with values and messages. The text is then decoded by spectators. Different spectators will decode the text in different ways, not always in the way the producer intended.

There are three decisions the spectators can make:

1. Dominant Ideology (agree with the producer) – the audience view the media text in the way that the producer intended e.g. a hand bag looks shiny and new therefore encourages the female to buy the hand bag. Reasons why people may agree can be that they are from the same background/culture, they are of the same age, the narrative is easy to understand and the text is relevant to the audience’s society.
2. Negotiated Ideology (agree but bits can change) – the compromise between the dominant and the oppositional readings, the audience accepts the views of the producer but also has their own input and understanding in relation to the text. Reasons why the audience may want to change the text: different life experiences, don’t understand the narrative and theirs ages may vary.
3. Oppositional Ideology (disagree with the producer) – the audience rejects the preferred reading and creates their own reading of the text. They don’t agree with the messages created for the audience. Reasons why the audience may disagree: the text is too controversial, the audience may disagree with the meanings, the audience may not like the genre, the audience my not understand the narrative and the text may not reflect society accurately.

The Hyperdermic Needle Theory
An injection of information to make us believe everything we see. Several factors contributed to this “strong effect” theory of communication, for example the growing use of radio and television for advertisements and propaganda.

The Hyperdermic Needle Theory suggests the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and informally by ‘injecting’ them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a response.

Opinion is a big fault in this theory as it doesn’t consider the middle man between the media and the audience.

It expresses the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating an idea because the receiver of audience is powerless to resist the impact of the messages.

People are seen as ‘passive’ and are seen as having a lot of media material “shot” at them. People end up thinking what they are told because there is no other source of information.

David Gauntlett stated ‘Identity is complicated. Everybody thinks they have one.’

Stan Cohen – Moral Panics and Folk Devils
Folk Devils are people or a person who is a menace to society.

Moral panics are the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order.

“A moral panic occurs when a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”

There are five areas that create a moral panic, these are:

1. Concern – awareness of a negative impact on society
2. Hostility – “folk devil”, “us”, “them”
3. Consensus – wide group of people accept the threat
4. Disproportion – exaggeration of crime
5. Volatility – can easily disappear as soon as they come

Real Life moral panics: Jimmy Saville, Baby P, Drug Culture and London Riots.

Cohen says that teenagers are folk devils. Moral panics are a snap shot of time in which the majority of society place blame. The Mods and The Rockers were seen as moral panics. The press can manipulate and exaggerate the news.

Karl Marx (Marxism)
Marxism is how dominant social groups are able to reproduce their social and economic power. All societies have an economic base. This is seen to be the central core and focus of any society – what makes if function. In Western cultures, this economic base is essentially capitalist – in other words, based on the pursuit of wealth. The problem is, this does not benefit us all – the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. A capitalist society is split:

• Bourgeoisie which is the powerful institutions/people
• Proletariat which is the poor institutions/people

Web 2.0 manages to challenge the bourgeoisie because we can express our point of views. Marx’s superstructure is the institutions that exist in a society such as those linked to the law, education, politics and the media. They partly exist to convince people that the way the country works is the right way. If there wasn’t a hierarchy, there wouldn’t be order.

Althusser
Althusser says we are subject of what we are made to believe. Ideology has been created for us and we can only consume what we’re made to believe, by doing so we are ultimately subjects of ideology that has already been created for us. We accept ideology and how its created as we build our ideas on previous assumptions created on what we have made ourselves to believe.

Ideology is not a “false consciousness”, rather ideology structures what we do and what makes reality. Althusser is a structuralist and said that we cannot live outside of culture or ideology. It provides meaning to our lives, the systems that we live through. We have no reality beyond our ideologies. We ‘adopt’ an identity from a shared set within society.

For Althusser, it is impossible to access the “real conditions of existence” due to our reliance on language. Our language structures our experience of the world and our language is a consequence of the social world. We have no way of engaging with the world apart from language. We can only see the representation of reality not reality itself.

However through a vigorous study  of economics, history and sociology, we can come close to perceiving ideological systems and how we are placed in specific sets of relations by those systems. By adopting a set of beliefs or ideologies from a system of beliefs we come to think that our beliefs are our own and that they originate from ourselves i.e. my beliefs emerge from my conscious decisions. I have free will and can choose what I want to do.

However Althusser argues that the beliefs are not really our own, they are social. We are taking part is shared societal ideas but think they are own our private ideas. We internalise social beliefs and see them as our own. The beliefs and ideologies come to use through the ideological state, the devices by which ideology is transmitted.

Our consciousness, what we are emerges from these. We exist from a system of beliefs and we internalise these beliefs and they become our own. We then in turn play a part in reproducing therefore people are the producers and determine how society is ruled.

Hegemony
Hegemony tends to more often refer to the power of single groups in society to essentially lead and dictate the other groups of the society.  This may be done through communications, through influences of voters or of government leaders.

In the media, the institutions essentially make the audience view the world from their point of view.

Gramsci Hegemony
Gramsci Hegemony is the way in which those in power control us. Dominant ideologies are considered hegemonic; power in society is maintained by constructing ideologies which are usually promoted by mass media. We are shown representations of groups of people and consume them, we are made to believe how society is structured is correct.

Ideas are spread throughout society of a system of values, attitudes and beliefs. Dominant relations of power become seen as common sense so that the philosophy, culture and morality of the ruling elite come to appear as the natural order of things. The values that maintain the power relations infiltrate all levels and aspects of culture. It’s something that we have accepts as part of life. Hegemony is getting us to actively agree to the system of oppression (authority/power). Ideology is not imposed but a system of choices and ideas are. These are grouped together into sets which we choose to adhere.