Questions of representation However realistic media images seem, they never simply present the world direct. They are always a construction, a re-presentation, rather than a transparent window onto the real. It prompts the question: how do groups, or situations, get routinely represented in the media? This relates to a world of political representatives: people who ‘stand in’ for us – school reps, MPs etc.

Questions of representation It signals the way some media re-present certain images, stories etc. over and over again, making them seem ‘natural’ and familiar, and thereby often marginalising or even excluding others, making them unfamiliar or even threatening.

Questions of representation The media give us ways of imagining particular groups, identities and situations. When these relate to people they are sometimes called stereotypes or types; when they offer images of situations or processes, the term ‘script’ is used, with the implication that we grow familiar with these and often know how to ‘perform’ them in our own lives, to the exclusion of other ways of being. These imaginings can have material effects on how people expect the world to be, and then experience it, and how they in turn get understood, or legislated for, or called names, or not given employment.

Stereotypes are widely circulated ideas or assumptions about particular groups. They are often assumed to be ‘lies’ that need to be ‘done away with’ so we can all ‘get rid of our prejudices’ and meet as equals.

Stereotypes have the following characteristics They involve both a categorising and an evaluation of the group being stereotyped. They usually emphasise some easily grasped feature(s) of the group in question and suggest that these are the ‘cause’ of the group’s position. The evaluation of the group is often, though not always, a negative one. Stereotypes often try to insist on absolute differences and boundaries where the idea of a spectrum of difference is more appropriate.

In groups of no more than 4… Discuss a particular stereotype. List how this ‘group’ is represented in the media. (give examples) Be prepared to discuss how fair you think this representation is.

Stereotypes work by taking some easily grasped features presumed to belong to a group. They put these at the centre of the figure, and then imply that all members of the group always have those features. They then make the final step of suggesting that these characteristics (often the result of historical processes) are themselves the cause of the group’s position. One of the ‘seductions’ of stereotypes is that they can point to features that apparently have ‘a grain of truth’. But they then repeat, across a whole range of media, jokes, etc., that this characteristic is and has always been the central truth about that group.

Scripts Another powerful way of approaching the influence of representations, this time of ‘events’ and ‘situations’ rather than constructed characters, is to think of the media as circulating dominant ‘scripts’.

These shared expectations get ‘performed’ with hugely different degrees of commitment, or subversion, by us. They involve important images of how life may be lived; how to behave with others in particular situations, and so on. The very conventionalised ways in which romantic encounters are often portrayed may make you feel you will know when ‘true love’ hits you because you’ve seen its stages ‘scripted’ so many times. Maybe you have even rehearsed it in private fantasy moments.

You may have tried to copy the ways that ‘being a proper man’ is framed and ‘scripted’ by repeated media imagery, often involving notions of ‘toughness’. These scripts include a sense of when is the appropriate time for violence, how you do or do not express emotion, etc. They do differ depending especially on gender or class.