- Laura Mulvey: The Male Gaze - Film represents women as passive objects of male desire. Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male even if they are indeed; heterosexual women or homosexual men.
- John Berger: “Men look, women appear” - Women are there solely for the objectification of women within all platforms of the media. (Think of examples of different magazines, films, TV shows or websites where this is evident, how are women represented in your production?)
- Bell hooks: The colour codes: Lighter skinned women are considered more desirable and fit better into the western ideology of beauty. Black women are objectified and sexualised in hip-hop reflecting the colonialist view of black women (sexually disposable). Commodified blackness, a mediated view of black culture that is considered the norm.
- Jacques Lacan: The Mirror Stage: Where infants see their reflections in the mirror and see it as a superior reflection of themselves that they must aspire to. Seeing iconic rappers who are successful ‘young black males’ may see them as a superior reflection of themselves they could aspire to. Particularly those iconic figures whom have struggled through a deprived childhood e.g. 50 Cent and Biggie Smalls (Notorious BIG).
- Michel Foucault: 'Archaeology' is the term Foucault used during the 1960s to describe his approach to writing history. Archaeology is about examining the discursive traces and orders left by the past in order to write a 'history of the present'. Archaeology is about looking at history as a way of understanding the processes that have led to what we are today. Therefore when analyzing your contemporary case studies you need to take into account those past representations and how they have contributed to what we have today e.g. Birth of a Nation 1913, Blaxploitation films (70s), The slave trade (colonialism) etc.
- Audience Reception Theory: A preferred reading (or dominant system of response) is a way of understanding the text that is consistent with the ideas and intentions of the producer or creator of the product. This may lead to an acceptance of the dominant values within the text. With a negotiated reading (or subordinate response) the individual has a choice as to whether or not they accept the preferred reading as their own. Audience members may read the text though the filter of their own personal agenda. Although there may be an acceptance of the dominant values and existing social structure, the individual may be prepared to argue that a particular social group may be unfairly represented. In an oppositional reading (or radical response) individual members of an audience may completely reject the preferred reading of the dominant code and the social values that produced it. An aberrant reading is where an entirely different meaning from that intended by the maker will be taken form the text. This could be when individual members of the audience do not share, in any way, the values of the maker of the text.
- Hypodermic Theory: The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by ‘shooting’ or ‘injecting’ them with messages designed to trigger a response.
- Moral Panic: A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order.
- Narrative Theory: Todorov: Equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium. Levi Strauss: Binary Oppositions. Roland Barthes: Enigma Codes. Propp: Characters/roles often found in narrative
- Todorov’s Narrative Theory 1. Equilibrium 2. Disruption of equilibrium 3. Recognition of this disruption 4. An attempt to repair the equilibrium is made 5. Equilibrium is restored OR a new equilibrium is established
- Propp’s Narrative Theory: Hero: Individual(s) who's quest is to restore the equilibrium. Villain: Individual(s) who's task is to disrupt the equilibrium. Donor: Individual(s) who gives the hero(s) something, advice, information or an object. Helper: Individual(s) who aids the hero(s) with their set task. Princess (Prince): Individual(s) which need help, protecting and saving. The King: Who rewards the hero. Dispatcher: Individual(s) who send the hero(s) on their quest. False Hero: Individual(s) who set out to undermine the hero's quest by pretending to aid them. Often unmasked at the end of the film.
- Levi-Strauss: Binary Oppositions Argued that meaning in narrative is based upon binary oppositions. He observed that all narratives are organised around the conflict between such binary opposites. Good Vs Evil, Human Vs Nature, Black Vs White, Protagonist Vs Antagonist, Humanity Vs Technology, Man Vs Woman, Human Vs Alien
- Roland Barthes: Enigma Code Refers to any element of the story that is not fully explained and hence becomes a mystery to the reader. The purpose of the author in this is typically to keep the audience guessing, arresting the enigma, until the final scenes when all is revealed and all loose ends are tied off and closure is achieved.
Semiotics
Semiotics
Semiology is an attempt to crate a science of the study of sign systems and their role in the construction and reconstruction of meaning in the media texts.
Semiology is philosophical theory of the studies and symbols. The analysis of anything that stands for something else. Semiotics is divided into three sections.
Semantics.
Syntactics.
Pragmatics.
Key theorists:
Roland Barthes
Ferdinand de Saussure
Charles Peirce.
- Roland was influenced by the structuralist work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand, who first promoted the idea of semiology in his book.
- Charles Peirce took Saussure's ideas and expanded them to include not just language but other 'social constructs'.
Sign
A sign is anything that makes meaning.
- Sign is divided into two aspects -> Signifier and Signified.
The signified is the concept that a signifier refers to.
Signifier -> Denotation
Signified -> Connotation
Charles Peirce:
Logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) began writing on semeiotic, semiotics, or the theory of sign relations in the 1860s. He eventually defined semiosis as an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs".
Charles Peirce took Ferdinand de Sausse idea and expanded on it, he defined that a sign being composed of:
Signifier – the form which the sign takes.
Signified – the concept which it represents.
Peirce said that there are three basic elements in sign action which is semiotics:
A sign - represents something as saying something about something.
An object – this is a subject matter which can be anything thinkable , a quality or an occurrence.
An interpretant – a sign of an object.
Semiology is an attempt to crate a science of the study of sign systems and their role in the construction and reconstruction of meaning in the media texts.
Semiology is philosophical theory of the studies and symbols. The analysis of anything that stands for something else. Semiotics is divided into three sections.
Semantics.
Syntactics.
Pragmatics.
Key theorists:
Roland Barthes
Ferdinand de Saussure
Charles Peirce.
- Roland was influenced by the structuralist work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand, who first promoted the idea of semiology in his book.
- Charles Peirce took Saussure's ideas and expanded them to include not just language but other 'social constructs'.
Sign
A sign is anything that makes meaning.
- Sign is divided into two aspects -> Signifier and Signified.
The signified is the concept that a signifier refers to.
Signifier -> Denotation
Signified -> Connotation
Charles Peirce:
- Born on September 10th 1839
- Died April 19th 1914
Logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) began writing on semeiotic, semiotics, or the theory of sign relations in the 1860s. He eventually defined semiosis as an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs".
Charles Peirce took Ferdinand de Sausse idea and expanded on it, he defined that a sign being composed of:
Signifier – the form which the sign takes.
Signified – the concept which it represents.
Peirce said that there are three basic elements in sign action which is semiotics:
A sign - represents something as saying something about something.
An object – this is a subject matter which can be anything thinkable , a quality or an occurrence.
An interpretant – a sign of an object.