Broadcasting: Concepts and Contexts Ideology, Discourse, Hegemony and Representation

Key Elements of Lecture Content Analysis Ideology Hegemony Feminism

Content Analysis Usual relationship with any media texts is as a passive consumer. We accept or partially accept the position the text offers us or we reject it. Its important to move to an active analytical position to produce an effective analysis. Consider each element of the text and deconstruct how the message works. Its important to ask why a lot!

Content Analysis Central to content analysis: Denotation and Connotation – cultural background and influences Encoding and Decoding – encoded by the maker and decoded by the receiver. (preferred meaning) (Exercise on Hall’s model later)

Content Analysis Cultural Codes - iconography. An icon can be an image of a person or an object which comes to represent a particular meaning for a social group. Current examples?

Context Analysis 4 key elements in the analysis of a media text: 1 Construction: Mise En Scene and technical codes 2 Audience 3 Narrative 4 Medium

Analysis of Gavin and Stacey Watch this scene from a popular British Sit Com - focus on the key ideas/themes in the scenes and list as many as you can.

Ideology Ideology refers to knowledge and ideas characteristic of or in the interests of a particular, usually dominant, class. Ideology is a important tool because it insists that there is no ‘natural’ meaning inherent in an event or object Also they are always socially oriented – aligned with class, gender, race or other interests.

Altusser (1918 – 1990) Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. His was widely known as a theorist of ideology. He believed ideology is the mechanism which turns individuals into subjects of a society. Social and cultural values, notions of morality, ideas of decency, taste, acceptable behaviour etc

Ideology Media texts are the principal arena where ideologies are circulated, established or suppressed. Altusser believed that Ideologies play the role of organisers and producers of individual and social consciousness.

Example Part of the ideology of news bulletins is that the status quo is the preferred model for our society. Take September 11th: The dominant discourse was that the war was justified because of the need to restore some sense of equilibrium, bring those who committed the crimes to justice and destroy dangerous Muslim Fundamentalism. (Allen, 2002, News Culture, Open University Press)

Hegemony This concept was developed by Antonio Gramsci (Marxist) working in the 1930’s. The crucial aspect of hegemony is that it operates by not forcing people against their will (totalitarian) or against their better judgement to concede power to the already powerful but that it works by winning consent to ways of making sense of the world.

Hegemony Central is the concepts of ‘consensus’ and ‘common sense’. However all signs and texts are capable of many potential meanings and readings and they can be decoded in a variety of ways according to many factors – ‘polysemic’. Worksheet - Hall’s model of encoding/decoding example.

Ideology/Feminism Focus on the example of an ideology: feminism (marginalised). (But also important to compare it to patriarchy (legitimated, naturalised)

Feminism An advertising image of an attractive young woman in a bikini sprawled across a car is accepted as ‘normal’. What if the young woman is substituted with an old woman, a fat woman or a man? Feminists would argue that this ideology of the objectification of women is made to seem normal or natural.

Feminism Feminist theorists of the 1970’s were concerned with the narrow range of representations of women offered in the media and argued that these were often ‘negative’ stereotypes. Aligned with political feminist activists concerned with issues like equal rights as men, equal pay etc.

Feminism From the 1970’s to the 1980’s feminist theory was influenced by a range of approaches such as structuralism, semiology and psychoanalysis. (Mulvey) In the 1990s feminist theorists investigated the ways in which women gain pleasure from conventional, popular television texts, especially those that were supposed to exploit them.

Feminism An important offshoot of these debates is the concern around representations of masculinity and of masculine sexuality. In TV there has been a growing tendency to re-evaluate traditional ways of signifying masculinity, for example, through showing male characters as exhibiting softer, more ‘caring’ and/or vulnerable characteristics.

Feminism From the 2000’s until now feminist debate has shifted to focus on the concept of ‘experience’ rather than patriarchy. These theorists discuss how women can and do differ in their experiences. Ethnicity, class, sexuality etc. Feminism has achieved much for women but as women continue to judge themselves and other women in terms of appearance, weight and beauty then does this contradictory idea signal an end to feminism? or an urgent need for its revitalisation?