Media and collective identityjulian mcdougall

• AS Radio and TV Drama as formative • Hip Hop generations – warm up for everything• District 9 and representation – ‘warm up’ micro focus• Mill, Plato, Althusser, Barthes, Butler – ‘warm up’ macro theory• Life on Mars and “how TV changed Britain’• Representation of working class Britain (film, TV, music)• The Wire, race and ‘the game’ (TV, online) – related to hip hop generations• Fandom as collective identity (online, mixed media)• Representation of skate culture in online video• Identities in social networks and virtual worlds• Sexuality – politics of absence (film, advertising)• Youth, children and moral panics – TV, online, gaming• Gender and celebrity in magazines and ‘talent TV’• Postmodernism and identity in music, games and online• We Media, media power and the public sphere – TV, the press, online• Representations of education – The Class, We are the People (film, the press).• Media 2.0, mash-ups and reception theory proved right?• Women and Film

Recommended

Men’s magazine covers = womenWomen’s magazine covers = women

Why?

Mulvey and the Male Gaze

• 1975 – Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

• Male characters are ‘bearers of the look’

• Schopophilia (Freud) - pleasure in looking

• ‘The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure’. (1989: 19)

• Cinema screen acts as distorting mirror (Lacan) for spectators who then (mis)recognise themselves

Butler: Gender Trouble

Complicity

• Althusser: interpellation misrecognition)

• Winship: complicity and (false) belonging

• Gauntlett – irony / play

Media Audiences and The Sociological Imagination

Although we might think of media habits as mundane and idiosyncratic, the fact that we all have them shows structural forces afoot. (Ruddock: 77)

Cultural ImperialismLocal Resistance

British Film

Film and Representation

Films do not present a neutral, transparent view of reality, but offer instead a mediated re-presentation of it.

Types of RealismDiscourses

Ideology Plural readings

Historical Perspective

TV, Representation, Identity

Social Document?

TV and RepresentationTexts not present a neutral, transparent view of reality,

but offer instead a mediated re-presentation of it.

Types of RealismDiscourses

Ideology Plural readings

Why is Skins controversial?

Celebrity

The Demotic Turn (Turner, 2010)

Moral Panics

ZizekVirtual reality = product deprived

of its substance.“Just as decaffeinated coffee

smells and tastes like real coffee without being real coffee, Virtual reality is experienced as reality without being so. What happens at the end of this process of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience ‘real reality’ itself as a virtual entity”.

(2002:231)

Privacy• Many social networking users often provide highly personal

and sensitive information with little concern for privacy risks

• Terms of use important (Facebook – advertising)

• Most potential employers now 'Google' applicants - making it a reputation manager as well as a search engine

• To what extent can information remain available long after it is relevant or accurate?

• Also possible to create fake identities in online spaces, making it difficult to verify that people are who they claim to be.

Michael Wesch

A belief that students should be taught how to ‘read’ the media in an appropriate’critical’ style

Media Studies 1.0 Media Studies 2.0

The patronizing belief that students should be taught how to ‘read’ the media is replaced by the recognition that media audiences in general are already extremely capable interpreters of media content

Very much a contested idea – Buckingham, Turner, Laughey, Lister et al

Lessons from January

• Theory, reading, references, application.• Historical and contemporary examples (more of

the latter).• ‘Stretch and challenge’ = pre-HE level.• Connections and synthesis.• Engagement with debates.• Reference to own media culture. • Avoid over-reliance on texts.• Adopt Cultural Studies ‘mindset’.