The question may be about collective identity or mediation - be ready to explain both of these.
Collective identity - individuals sense of belonging to a group, which forms part of that persons personal identity through participating in social activities.
Mediation - the process where you take something that is real, record it in some way and represent it back to an audience. Mediation is always present and cannot be any other way.
It has three main effects..
- Select/reject things from events and accounts, to leaving out of shots, to deleting viewpoint and lighting in the case of photography.
- Organise things in to a logical order, reality tends to be a bit all over the place.
- Focuses attention, it pretty much tells us what is important in a story about a person, by what it focuses on.
REMEMBER TO USE HISTORICAL TEXTS..
This is England, Quadrophenia, Grange Hill, Harry Brown, Fish Tank.
AND CONTEMPORARY TEXTS IN AT LEAST TWO TYPES OF MEDIA..
Film and TV. Sket, Ill Manors, U Want Me To Kill Him, Attack the Block, The Young Apprentice, Sky Coverage of the London Riots, BBC News about the London Riots, Unsafe Sex In The City, Sia Chandelier Video, Blurred Lines Video.
THEORISTS
GIROUX 1997 - Argues that representations of youth becomes an ,empty category' because the representations are created by adults and not the youths themselves.
DYER 1979 - 'Stereotypes are always about power. Those who have power stereotype those who don't.
MULVEY 1975 - Women are represented as passive objects for the male gaze.
BUCKINGHAM - 'A focus on identity requires us to pay close attention to the ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequence for social groups'
GRAMSCI - His idea of hegemony that much of the media is controlled by the dominant group in society and the viewpoints associated with this group become embedded in the media products.
ACLAND 1995 - claims that representations of delinquent youth reinforces hegemony and because it establishes a 'normality' and this is shown as unacceptable. Also creates an ideology of protection.
COHEN 1972 - Who studied Mods and Rockers, argued that folk devils emerge in society which reflect the anxieties in the society. A 'moral panic; is created when folk devils become sensationalised so that politicians and the police become involved.
GERBNER 1986 - Says people that watch a lot of television over estimate the amount of crime in the real world, he called that 'mean world syndrome'. Because the news and TV drama and film contain a lot of representations of crime peoples perceptions are effected. This is 'CULTIVATION THEORY' which if applied to representations of youth as delinquents could, over time, influence how they are perceived.
JENKINS 1992 - We belong to a participatory culture rather than a spectatorial one.
GIDDENS 1991 - Claimed that mediated experiences makes people reflect and rethink their own self-narrative in relation to others. That although we are free we are also constrained on these activities. He stated that the self is not something we are born with, but rather it is constructed by the individual and is not fixed.
GAUNTLETT 2002 - 'Ideas about lifestyle and identity that appear in the media are resources which individuals think through their sense of self and modes if expression.
Exam Plan
Introduction - Explain what mediation or collective identity is. -
