Driving Test

Driving Test...

Representation

Audience

Industry

Language

Representation:

This is how the media portray events, issues, individuals and social groups. This can be used for good and bad. They are useful as the help industries create products suited to certain groups of people to gain maximum profit. They are dangerous as they can be generalised, creating dominant groups in society. Look at this VW Golf advert.

The UK Advertising Standards Agency has banned this advert from airing in Britain because it depicts potentially harmful gender stereotypes. All the men were shown to be fun, off in space or camping whereas the women were portrayed to only be able to look after children and the household. This is a poor representation of society.

However, stereotypes can be used for good, like target audiences. Target audiences can be defined with CAGED. Class (ABC1, C2DE), age, gender, ethnicity and disability.

Key media theorist: Stuart Hall
Hall looks at how media uses power to construct hegemonic ideologies. He believes that there are 3 types of audiences that react in different ways to how society is represented.

1. Passive. A passive audience accepts the hegemony they are shown.
2. Neutral. A neutral audience can see both sides of the hegemony and can create their own opinion.
3. Opposed. An opposed audience completely contradicts the hegemony and doesn't believe in it.

Key terminology:

• Polysemic = lots of possible meanings
• Hyper-reality = enhanced reality, medias representation of reality
• Simulacrum = representation of reality
• Scopophillia = love of looking (male gaze)
• Masquerade = idea of being the focus of male gaze as empowering for women
• Semiotics = system of meaning
• Denotation = thing itself
• Connotation = implication of thing
• Stereotype = where a social group is represented by a fixed set of characteristics

Audience:

Media producers can define and categorise their audience through demographic profiles. A demographic audience profile defines groups based on things like age, gender, income, education and occupation.

Examples:
 ABC1, 30-40, male, western
ABC1, all ages, all genders, western
ABC1, 15-25, female, western

Audience profiles:

Another way of categorising audiences are psychometric audience profiles. They consist of a small paragraph explaining the type of person and an image of what they may look like. 

Uses & gratifications: Everyone consumes media for a certain thing, either entertainment, escapism, information, education, social interaction or personal identity.

Language: How the media, through their forms, codes, conventions and techniques, communicate meanings.

High angle - makes objects seem small, insignificant, vulnerable.Low angle - makes object seem powerful, threatening, dominant.Birds eye view - unnatural, strong, audience in god-like position.Canted or tilted angle - confusion, disorientation, drunkenness, sleepiness.Eye level - neutral shot, gives the impression we are watching the events occur.Terminology Semiotics = study of signs, signifyer + the signified Denotation = what the thing isConnotation = what the thing impliesMise-en-scene = the things in the shot e.g positioning/body language, lighting, hair/makeup/costume, setting/propsIndustry:Disney -https://charliehmedia.blogspot.com/2019/09/disney.html 
Newspapers -https://charliehmedia.blogspot.com/2019/09/press-tv-series.html