An interesting article on how the media demonise youth

this is an interesting article on some research undertaken into how the media demonise teenagers.

Representation

Students of media are taught that media texts do not present a neutral, transparent view of reality, but offer instead a mediated re-presentation of it. The processes by which audience members come to understand media texts in terms of how they seem to relate to people, ideas, events, themes and places. This is a very complex idea, as the reader of a media text will play an active role in constructing these meanings him/herself. At its most simple, it is how media texts are understandable.

Some media theorists that could be incorporated into a discussion of representation:

Stuart Hall


Stuart Hall suggests that there are three different positions that the reader of a text can occupy when trying to interpret a text, they are:

• Preferred Reading


• Negotiated Reading


• Oppositional Reading

Preferred reading is when the reader fully shares the text's codes and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading i.e. the most dominant reading.

Negotiated reading is when the reader partly shares the text's codes and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests - this position involves contradictions.

Oppositional reading is when the reader, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred reading but does not share the text's code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference (radical, feminist etc.).

In this instance a 'code' can be interpreted as what a text says.

Roland Barthes:
Roland Barthes concentrated some of his work on a discussion of how myth operates in society and he discussed this in the context of denotation and connotation.
Connotation and denotation are often described in terms of levels of representation or levels of meaning.
Denotation - the literal, 'obvious' or 'commonsense' meaning of an image.
Connotation - is used to refer to the socio-cultural and 'personal' associations (ideological, emotional etc.) of the image. These are typically related to the interpreter's class, age, gender, ethnicity and so on. Images are more open to interpretation - in their connotations than their denotations.

Ferdinand de Saussure:
Semiotics is the study of the social production of meaning from sign systems. A sign could be made up of something which physically resembles the object in some way (icon), or has a direct link between it and its object, it is somehow connected i.e. smoke indicates fire (index) or it can be something with no resemblance at all and it communicates only because people agree that it shall stand for what it does (symbol).

The reading of a sign is determined by cultural experience of the reader. Semiotics pays great attention to the role of the reader in realising and producing meanings out of texts.

Useful web link:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html

Key Media Concepts: Genre

Genre Definition:
A way of categorising compositions/texts (film/TV/music/literature etc) based on a certain criteria – a check-list of expectations and conventions.


How is genre important?
It is a way of organising the huge of amounts of texts that are available.
It can act as a set of audience of expectations.
It creates a relationship between audiences and producers which minimises the risk of financial failure – consider the money put into production and marketing…
It reinforces our ideas and values
It makes clear what ‘works’ artistically allowing for repetition.
It acts as short-hand communication for audiences.
It creates a structural framework that can be adhered to or played with.


How to identify genre
Film theorist Janet Staiger asserts that genre can be identified using the following methods

Idealist: Judging texts by a predetermined standard.

Empirical: Comparing texts to texts that are already assumed to be part of a certain genre. (This is what you have mainly done during your planning stage - comparing the Codes and Conventions of similar texts).

Social Conventions: Using an accepted cultural consensus. (Perhaps this is relevant if you did audience/market research).

A priori: Using common generic elements that are identified in advance.


Limitations of Genre
Genre is always subjective (one man’s comedy could be another man’s horror.)
Texts are often so sophisticated that it is hard to fit them into one category.
It should only be seen as a tool rather than an absolute.
Categories are constantly evolving and changing so there is no such thing as ‘typical’.


How Genre’s are created
Jane Feuer in her article ‘Genre Study and Television’ states that ‘genres are not organic in their conception - they are synthetic: artificial creations by intellectuals.’

Genre can be seen as a retrospective way of categorising texts by identifying trends and patterns in media. These trends and patterns could be established by creators repeating what works and is successful or by the expression of shared experiences (social factors).

For instance the ‘Saw’ films were successful, films that focused on the gratuitous torturing and suffering of entrapped people. Consequently a series of other films that shared the same delight in displaying human suffering followed such Hostel, Devil’s Rejects, Wolf Creek, Captivity and I Know Who Killed Me.
This type of film became known as ‘Torture Porn’ after film critic David Edelstein first used the term when describing Hostel.
‘Torture Porn is a term often used described these type of films, but they could easily be called ‘Splatter Films’ or ‘Horror’.


How Genres Evolve
Producers of mainstream texts have to ensure that they give the audience ‘what they want’ and so use what has been effective and successful before. However they have to keep things fresh to make sure that audiences are not continually being part of the same experience.
This brings in the idea of ‘repetition and variation’ - repeating what is successful but adding enough variation to prevent it from seeming stale.

Another way is creating hybrid genres – taking several elements from two or more genres to create a new experience. e.g. Westworld (Western/Sci-fi), Blade Runner (Film Noir/Sci-fi), Shaun of the Dead (Rom-Zom-Com).

‘Audiences want to have some idea what they are watching. They want to go into the theatre and know what kind of a film they are about to experience. It influences their expectations. But the dynamic quality of genre is also necessary to keep genres fresh. There are times when audiences’ expectations need to be altered. In short, filmmakers working within a genre need to walk a line: expand, develop, elaborate on the genre, but keep it under the overall structure of the specific genre umbrella.’
Charley McLean paraphrasing Thomas Schatz (Film Genre and Genre Film)