Key Theories (Updated)
Language:
Semiotics: Roland Barthes:
Signs, signified and signifiers - everything has meaning.
Hermeneutic Codes:
Enigma codes are hermeneutic codes and they refer to something within the product that creates mystery or suspense. Creates questions for the audience.
Proairetic Codes:
These are action codes that refer to something within a media product that suggests something will happen.The suggestion occurs with an action such as a knock on a door.
Symbolic Codes:
They are something within a media product that creates a deeper meaning for the audience.
Narratology: Tzvetan Todorov:
Each narrative should start with initial equilibrium. However, the equilibrium is changed after disruption, resulting in a disequilibrium. The old equilibrium is broken, and therefore a new one must begin.
Genre Theory: Steve Neale:
Genre is constructed by repetition and difference. Texts need to conform with generic paradigms to be identified with a certain genre - must also subvert from these to be individual. Most media products conform to the same formula so people know what they are watching.
Structuralism: Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Binary Oppositions: Two concepts, messages or values are presented in direct opposition to one another. Strauss suggests our perception of the world is based on binary oppositions.
Representation:
Theories of Representation: Stuart Hall:
Re-presentation: Re-presenting something. Representation is the way in which a media product constructs the world and aspects in it: including social groups, individuals, issues and events.
Theories of Identity: David Gauntlet:
Audiences can construct their own identities through what they see on TV. He also states that there are more representations of gender now than the traditional 'gender binary'.
Feminist Theory: Lisbet van Zoonen:
Gender is constructed through codes and conventions of media products and the idea of what is male and female changes over time. Gender is also constructed through cultural and historical context. Additionally, she states that woman's bodies are used in media products as a spectacle for heterosexual male audiences, reinforcing patriarchal hegemony.
Feminist Theory: Bell Hooks:
Feminism is the struggle to end patriarchal hegemony and the domination of women and feminism is not a lifestyle choice, it's a political commitment. She also said that race, class and gender determine the extent to which individuals are exploited and oppressed.
Gender Performativity: Judith Butler:
Madonna/Whore complex: Sigmund Freud:
Freud developed a theory to explain men's anxiety towards women's sexuality, suggesting that men define women into on of two categories: the Madonna (Women he admires and respects) and the whore (women he is attracted to and therefore disrespects).
The Madonna is typically virtuous, nurturing, saintly and sexually repressed.
The whore is sensual, sexualised and desirable without purity.
Paul Gilroy: Postcolonial Theory:
Post-colonialism is the study of the impact of being under direct rule has had on former colonies. For example, despite being a tiny island, Britain colonised and declared ownership of many countries, including India and Australia etc.
These ideas and attitudes continue to shape contemporary attitudes to race and ethnicity in the post colonial era.
These pos colonial attitudes have constructed racial hierarchies in our society, where, for example, white people are by far and large given more positive and important roles than BAME people.
Media producers are also guilty of using binary oppositions to reinforce BAME people and characters as 'others'.
Media Industries:
Power and Media Industries: Curran and Seaton
The media is controlled by a small number of companies primarily driven by profit and power. Media concentration limits variety, creativity and quality. Socially diverse patterns of ownership can create more varied and adventurous media productions.
Regulation: Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt:
The increasing power of global media corporations, together with the rise of convergent media technologies and transformations in the production, distribution and marketing of digital media, have placed traditional approaches to media regulation at risk.
Cultural Industries: David Hesmondhalgh:
Hesmondhalgh came up with the idea of horizontal and vertical integration: Horizontal integration: Where a company buys other companies in the same stage to reduce the competition for audiences. For example, Disney buying other companies like Marvel to reduce competition.
Vertical integration: Owns multiple companies across different stages of production and circulation.
Conglomeration: David Hesmondhalgh:
A conglomerate is a corporation that consists of a group of businesses dealing in different products or services. Conglomeration is the process of a conglomerate being formed. He argues that companies use advertising and marketing techniques to minimise risk and maximise profit.
Cultural industries and online media: David Hesmondhalgh:
He argues that major cultural organisations create products fir different industries in order to maximise chances of commercial success. In relation to online products, he argues that major IT companies now compete with the more traditional media conglomerates within the cultural sector: "Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazonare now as significant as News Corporation, Time Warner and Sony for understanding cultural production and consumption."
Audiences:
Cultivation Theory: George Gerber:
"The idea that prolonged and heavy exposure to [TV]... cultivates" , as in grows or develops in audiences "a view of the world consistent with the dominant or majority view expounded by television."
Outline of Cultivation Theory:
Television (and by extension other tools of mass media distributions) present a mainstream view of culture, ignoring everything else. In doing so, television (etc) distorts reality. Heavy television users are therefore likely to accept this edited and distorted view of reality.
Issues with the Cultivation Theory:
Not everyone watches excessive amounts of television.
While this theory may have been useful in the 1970s, with only three channels, the ridiculous amount of ways that we have of accessing media now challenges the idea that any ideology can be mainstream. The theory is less relevant now.
Reception Theory: Stuart Hall:
Preferred Reading:
The 'right' reading of a text, which can be enforced by positioning.
This concept has to be approached carefully: often texts intentionally have multiple meanings/readings, and of course, as we have discovered, audiences can potentially get whatever they want out of any media text.
Hall categorised audience response into three separate groups.
These groups can help us to understand whether or not an audience sticks to the preferred reading, or if they decide to make their own decisions as to how to decode a text.
Dominant Reading:
The audience agrees with the dominant values in the text, and agrees with the values and ideology it shows.
Negotiated Reading:
The audience generally agrees with what they see, but they may disagree with certain aspects.
Oppositional Reading:
The audience completely disagrees with what they see, and rejects the dominant reading.
Hypodermic Needle Model:
The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by 'shooting' or 'injecting' them with a desired response. They express the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating an idea because the receiver or audience is powerless to resist the impact of the message. People are seen as passive and are seen as having a lot of media material 'shot' at them. People end up thinking what they are told because there is no other source of information.
Postmodernism: Jean Baudrillard:
Hyperreality: In postmodern culture the boundaries between the 'real' world and the world of the media have collapsed and that it is no longer possible to distinguish between what is reality and what is simulation. In fact, it really doesn't matter which is which.
Therefore, in this postmodern age of simulacra, audiences are constantly bombarded with images which no longer refer to anything 'real'.
Because of this, we are now in a situation that media images have come to seem more 'real' than the reality they supposedly represent. This concept is referred to as 'hyperreality'.
Fandom: Henry Jenkins:
Fandom refers to a particularly organised and motivated audience of a certain media producer franchise.
Unlike the generic audience or the classic spectator, fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.
Fans appropriate texts and read them in ways that are not fully intended by the media producers ('textual poaching'). Examples of this may manifest in conventions, fan fiction and so on.
Rather than just play a video game or watch a TV show, fans construct their social and cultural identities through borrowing and utilising mass culture images, and may use this 'subcultural capital' to form social bonds. For example, through online forums like Reddit or 4Chan.
End of Audience: Clay Shirky:
Audiences are no longer passive, they interact with media products in an increasingly complex variety of ways.
We could argue against the theory that audiences were never passive, the internet just advanced it further.
Semiotics: Roland Barthes:
Signs, signified and signifiers - everything has meaning.
Hermeneutic Codes:
Enigma codes are hermeneutic codes and they refer to something within the product that creates mystery or suspense. Creates questions for the audience.
Proairetic Codes:
These are action codes that refer to something within a media product that suggests something will happen.The suggestion occurs with an action such as a knock on a door.
Symbolic Codes:
They are something within a media product that creates a deeper meaning for the audience.
Narratology: Tzvetan Todorov:
Each narrative should start with initial equilibrium. However, the equilibrium is changed after disruption, resulting in a disequilibrium. The old equilibrium is broken, and therefore a new one must begin.
Genre Theory: Steve Neale:
Genre is constructed by repetition and difference. Texts need to conform with generic paradigms to be identified with a certain genre - must also subvert from these to be individual. Most media products conform to the same formula so people know what they are watching.
Structuralism: Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Binary Oppositions: Two concepts, messages or values are presented in direct opposition to one another. Strauss suggests our perception of the world is based on binary oppositions.
Representation:
Theories of Representation: Stuart Hall:
Re-presentation: Re-presenting something. Representation is the way in which a media product constructs the world and aspects in it: including social groups, individuals, issues and events.
Theories of Identity: David Gauntlet:
Audiences can construct their own identities through what they see on TV. He also states that there are more representations of gender now than the traditional 'gender binary'.
Feminist Theory: Lisbet van Zoonen:
Gender is constructed through codes and conventions of media products and the idea of what is male and female changes over time. Gender is also constructed through cultural and historical context. Additionally, she states that woman's bodies are used in media products as a spectacle for heterosexual male audiences, reinforcing patriarchal hegemony.
Feminist Theory: Bell Hooks:
Feminism is the struggle to end patriarchal hegemony and the domination of women and feminism is not a lifestyle choice, it's a political commitment. She also said that race, class and gender determine the extent to which individuals are exploited and oppressed.
Gender Performativity: Judith Butler:
Identity is a performance, and it is constructed through a series of acts and expressions that we perform every day.
While there are biological differences dictated by sex, our gender is defined by this series of acts. These may include the way we walk, talk, dress and so on.
Therefore, there is no gender identity behind these expressions of gender.
Gender performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual. It is outlined and reinforced through dominant and patriarchal ideologies.
Freud developed a theory to explain men's anxiety towards women's sexuality, suggesting that men define women into on of two categories: the Madonna (Women he admires and respects) and the whore (women he is attracted to and therefore disrespects).
The Madonna is typically virtuous, nurturing, saintly and sexually repressed.
The whore is sensual, sexualised and desirable without purity.
Paul Gilroy: Postcolonial Theory:
Post-colonialism is the study of the impact of being under direct rule has had on former colonies. For example, despite being a tiny island, Britain colonised and declared ownership of many countries, including India and Australia etc.
These ideas and attitudes continue to shape contemporary attitudes to race and ethnicity in the post colonial era.
These pos colonial attitudes have constructed racial hierarchies in our society, where, for example, white people are by far and large given more positive and important roles than BAME people.
Media producers are also guilty of using binary oppositions to reinforce BAME people and characters as 'others'.
Media Industries:
Power and Media Industries: Curran and Seaton
The media is controlled by a small number of companies primarily driven by profit and power. Media concentration limits variety, creativity and quality. Socially diverse patterns of ownership can create more varied and adventurous media productions.
Regulation: Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt:
The increasing power of global media corporations, together with the rise of convergent media technologies and transformations in the production, distribution and marketing of digital media, have placed traditional approaches to media regulation at risk.
Cultural Industries: David Hesmondhalgh:
Hesmondhalgh came up with the idea of horizontal and vertical integration: Horizontal integration: Where a company buys other companies in the same stage to reduce the competition for audiences. For example, Disney buying other companies like Marvel to reduce competition.
Vertical integration: Owns multiple companies across different stages of production and circulation.
Conglomeration: David Hesmondhalgh:
A conglomerate is a corporation that consists of a group of businesses dealing in different products or services. Conglomeration is the process of a conglomerate being formed. He argues that companies use advertising and marketing techniques to minimise risk and maximise profit.
Cultural industries and online media: David Hesmondhalgh:
He argues that major cultural organisations create products fir different industries in order to maximise chances of commercial success. In relation to online products, he argues that major IT companies now compete with the more traditional media conglomerates within the cultural sector: "Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazonare now as significant as News Corporation, Time Warner and Sony for understanding cultural production and consumption."
Audiences:
Cultivation Theory: George Gerber:
"The idea that prolonged and heavy exposure to [TV]... cultivates" , as in grows or develops in audiences "a view of the world consistent with the dominant or majority view expounded by television."
Outline of Cultivation Theory:
Television (and by extension other tools of mass media distributions) present a mainstream view of culture, ignoring everything else. In doing so, television (etc) distorts reality. Heavy television users are therefore likely to accept this edited and distorted view of reality.
Issues with the Cultivation Theory:
Not everyone watches excessive amounts of television.
While this theory may have been useful in the 1970s, with only three channels, the ridiculous amount of ways that we have of accessing media now challenges the idea that any ideology can be mainstream. The theory is less relevant now.
Reception Theory: Stuart Hall:
Preferred Reading:
The 'right' reading of a text, which can be enforced by positioning.
This concept has to be approached carefully: often texts intentionally have multiple meanings/readings, and of course, as we have discovered, audiences can potentially get whatever they want out of any media text.
Hall categorised audience response into three separate groups.
These groups can help us to understand whether or not an audience sticks to the preferred reading, or if they decide to make their own decisions as to how to decode a text.
Dominant Reading:
The audience agrees with the dominant values in the text, and agrees with the values and ideology it shows.
Negotiated Reading:
The audience generally agrees with what they see, but they may disagree with certain aspects.
Oppositional Reading:
The audience completely disagrees with what they see, and rejects the dominant reading.
Hypodermic Needle Model:
The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by 'shooting' or 'injecting' them with a desired response. They express the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating an idea because the receiver or audience is powerless to resist the impact of the message. People are seen as passive and are seen as having a lot of media material 'shot' at them. People end up thinking what they are told because there is no other source of information.
Postmodernism: Jean Baudrillard:
Hyperreality: In postmodern culture the boundaries between the 'real' world and the world of the media have collapsed and that it is no longer possible to distinguish between what is reality and what is simulation. In fact, it really doesn't matter which is which.
Therefore, in this postmodern age of simulacra, audiences are constantly bombarded with images which no longer refer to anything 'real'.
Because of this, we are now in a situation that media images have come to seem more 'real' than the reality they supposedly represent. This concept is referred to as 'hyperreality'.
Fandom: Henry Jenkins:
Fandom refers to a particularly organised and motivated audience of a certain media producer franchise.
Unlike the generic audience or the classic spectator, fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.
Fans appropriate texts and read them in ways that are not fully intended by the media producers ('textual poaching'). Examples of this may manifest in conventions, fan fiction and so on.
Rather than just play a video game or watch a TV show, fans construct their social and cultural identities through borrowing and utilising mass culture images, and may use this 'subcultural capital' to form social bonds. For example, through online forums like Reddit or 4Chan.
End of Audience: Clay Shirky:
Audiences are no longer passive, they interact with media products in an increasingly complex variety of ways.
We could argue against the theory that audiences were never passive, the internet just advanced it further.
Audience's can make/produce media and interact/speak back to other producers.
theory may not be correct - audience cant really interact properly (interaction is an illusion).
Shirky suggests the idea that the internet and digital technologies have had a profound effect on the relations between media and individuals.
The idea that the conceptualisation of audience members as passive consumers of mass media content is no longer tenable in the age of the internet, as media consumers have now become producers who speak back to the media in various ways as well as creating and sharing content with one another.
Broadcast media, the media of passive television consumption, Shirky claims, arose as a response to the explosion of leisure time afforded by technological progress in the 20th century. Shirky said media in the 20th century is run by consumption.
Conversly, digital media and technological convergence revolutionised the media landscape by substantially lowering barriers to ordinary users to produce and distribute media and in so doing gave audiences the power to forge their own broadcast networks.
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