...importance of representation in media by examining the effects of it on the world we live in today. It will not only discuss one group of people (such as just people of color but many groups such as women and people of a certain age range. Studies will be shown to convey the possible connection between how long children are involved in some form of media and the way certain demographics are depicted in the media children watch. Considering the fact that children, and people in general, spend a lot of their time involved in some form of media there is some sort of correlation between media and perception. An answer will be given on whether traditions and customs depicted have can have an possible...
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...The group in society I have decided to focus on for this internal are teenage girls/young women and how they are represented as sexualised/beautified to market a product to a viewer. Also how they are shown as promiscuous, beauty driven people who are obsessed with achieving physical “perfection” based on their favourite celebrities throughout the media. The three media texts I have chosen that I think best portray the idea of teenage girls and how they strive to be physically perfect are; the film ‘The House Bunny’ , the television show ‘Gossip Girl’ and the magazine ‘Cosmopolitan’. (Mainly the cover) My first example is the television series ‘Gossip Girl’ The first image is a photo from the March 2011 Cosmopolitan magazine of Blake Lively portraying her character Serena Van Der Woodsen in the T.V series ‘Gossip Girl’. Serena has been styled based on her character, beautiful and desirable (mostly due to her wealth and social status in the show). She has been dressed in entirely white, surrounded in a completely white background, this allows her skin to be the main aspect of focus, and it portrays perfectskin and skinniness. Most girls who see this aspire to imitate these images and may inspire feelings of failure when they do not achieve the exact image. Her lips in the picture are pouting making her look sexy and draws attention to her lips by also making them look glossy and shiny. Her face has been ‘retouched’ (or photoshoped) giving her a look of perfection and...
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...Using your own detailed examples explore representations of ethnicity in the media today. There are many representations of ethnicity is the media however they all seem to be very limited if not overlooked completely. Many of these tend to be as token gestures or stereotypical to fit with the dominant ideology. To explore this further I will be primarily looking at the representation of Gypsies in My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, a TV programme produced by Jenny Popplewell shown on Channel 4. I will also comment on other representations of gypsies in the media such as those in Snatch and The Traveller Times Online. In the media, gypsies are portrayed in a negative light. Every single media product stereotypes them as dirty, tramps and thieves. We see this everywhere, in magazines, films, TV programmes and Documentaries. A good example is the article titled ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves?’ it varies in different words that are linked with negativity throughout the whole article. While including examples from Snatch, the article says ‘Messages of gypsies in Snatch are deeply negative, putting us, the audience in a superior position’. This clearly shows the negativity of them in the media. Only 300,000 gypsies and travellers live in Britain. Only small part of them are in TV programmes and other forms of media therefore the representation is disproportionate to their population. Not all Irish Travellers are dirty or thieves. My Big Fat Gypsy Weddings is clearly produced purely for entertainment...
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... * * * * * Representation Of Race In Media * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Much of our perceptions of the world are based on narratives and the images that we see in film, television, radio, music, and other media. These are some of the outlets that construct how individuals see their social identities, as well as learn and understand about what it is to be black, white, Native American, Asian, South American, etc. (Dow, Wood, 2006, p. 297). You will get a better understanding of this once you understand the concept of ideologies. Ideologies are what create our perception of the world around us, whether it is political, social, economic, etc. Ideologies are not the product of individual intention or conscious, rather we create our intentions within ideology (Marris, Thornham, 2000, p. 267). These ideologies exist before we are even born; they form the social constructions and conditions that we are born into. But, ideologies are just a practice, and it is produced and reproduced in apparatus of ideological production. The media is a great example of an apparatus of ideological production (Marris, Thornham, 2000, p. 273). It produces social meanings and distributes them throughout society. However, as long as ideologies continue so will social struggles such as racism, which we will discuss in this essay. Media elites represent different races through media based on their ideologies. This has...
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...Media Representation of crime William and Dickinson (1971) found British newspapers devote 30% of their space to crime Media gives a distorted image of crime, criminals and policing compared to official statistics. The media: Over representation of violent and sexual crime Ditton and Duffy (1983) found 46% of media reports were about sexual or violent crime, compared to the actual 3% of crime records for this kind of crime. Marsh found violent crimes were 36 times more likely to be recorded in newspapers than property crime- America Media portray criminals and victims as older and more middle class Felson (1998) calls this the ‘age fallacy’ Media exaggerate police success Partly due to media covering violent crime a lot, which has a higher clean up rate than property crime Media exaggerate risk of vctimisation Especially to women, white people and higher status people Crime is reported as a series of separate events Without examining underlying causes or structure The media overplay extraordinary crime Felson- ‘dramatic fallacy’ and ‘ingenuity fallacy’; media portray crime as hard to commit and you need intelligence to commit crime There is evidence to show that media coverage of crime in the media is changing. Schlesinger and Tumber (1994) found that in the 1960s the focus had been on murders and petty crime, but by 1990 murder and petty crime were of less crime to the media. Change had occurred due to the abolition of the death penalty, and rising crime rates...
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...profession, the media has failed us. The most popular medical dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy and House are physician dominated shows, offering viewers little to no truth about nursing profession. However, all the above shows fail to portray nurses with a positive image; most of the time the role of nurses is being undermined, insulting, or misrepresenting the profession. For example, on the show House, nurses are fairly irrelevant. Nurses are barley background noises; rather, it is the doctors providing direct bedside patient care in the hospital. In my 20 years of experience in nursing, I have never seen doctors spend so much time at the bedside with patient and performing tasks. I have worked in different settings, from a large teaching hospital to a small neighborhood hospital, and not even the interns and residents spend that much time giving direct patient care. For the general public and for the new generation who has not decided as what they want to be in life, this show portrays nursing as standing silently in the back ground. On all of the TV shows, the physician performs critical nursing tasks and this makes the doctors look more heroic and nurses look more incompetent and inessential. In these shows, we do not see nurses interacting with patients, but that is a misrepresentation of the profession, because we all know that nurses are the most in contact and interaction with patients and their families. However, there are some positive media representations of nursing....
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...The aim of this essay is to identify how gender is represented within the media, particularly looking at examples from the television show How I Met Your Mother (Fox, 2005-2014). Looking at how both male and females have been stereotyped, how it affects the audiences, using research from scholars Stuart Hall, Gaye Tuchman & George Gerbner to support and extract information to my argument. Representation has been defined by Oxford dictionaries as ‘the act of speaking or acting on behalf of someone’(Oxford dictionaries, Online, 2015). Media representation are the ‘ways in which the media portrays particular groups, communities, experiences, ideas, or topics from a particular ideological or value perspective’ (Twin cities, Online, 2015)...
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...The media is selling the idea that girls’ and woman’s’ value lies in their youth, beauty and sexuality and not in their capacity as leaders. Boys learn that their success is tied to dominance, power, and aggression. Many would agree that some strides have been made in how the media portray women in film, television and magazines, and that the last few decades have also seen a growth in the presence and influence of woman in media behind the scenes. Documentaries such as “Miss Representation” focus on outlining the flaws and misrepresentation media has on woman and girls. Their project aims to challenge and change the way media objectifies woman. Nevertheless, female stereotypes continue to thrive in the media we consume everyday. Gender stereotypes are everywhere. Stereotypes are defined as a “generalized view or...
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...authority, become a successful business woman, getting paid equal to men), is extremely different to how women are portrayed in the media. Todays women in the media are sexualized, they provide unrealistic expectations, and there are undeniable stereotypes. To begin, women are exceedingly sexualized in the media. Pornographic pictures of women are a huge component of media today, which leads to the objectification of women. By having these women viewed as sexual objects, the main reason why marketing companies do this is to attract men, and to have other women looking up to the advertised women as a role model. A good example is the Calvin Klein commercials, where women are seen as sexualized (making other women jealous and wanting to be like them) and sexually attracting men (if they buy this product they will get the girls). Another example is the MTV channel. The women on this channel will arouse sexual fantasies, but the less seductive more modest female singers barely get...
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...The Media’s Representation of Women The greatest problem facing women is the way the media portrays and represents them. America’s population is about 51% female, but the media is mainly focused on men and their actions (The Problem). Many things in the media that are said are sexist and degrading to women. Ads with completely normal meaning such as trying to sell food or other products are oversexualized with women in them, trying to convince people to get the product. This pressure from the media to be perfect and ideal can cause eating disorders, encourage self harm and dangerous behavior, and lead to other mental illnesses. The National Organization for Women created a campaign that promotes women and encourages them to be willing to try new things. The media is unfair to women and there must be a way to help it get better and help women reach equal representation with men in the media. Men are represented in the media much more than women are. In about a 3 to 1 margin, males outnumbered females in front page newspaper headlines in coverage of the 2012 presidential election. On TV talk shows aired on Sundays, of all people interviewed women made up 14% and only...
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...a common wardrobe for women in media. When women constantly broadcast themselves without modesty in media outlets how are they expected to be taken seriously? Today, due to increasing pressures of what it means to be a real woman, women in media outlets are frequently portrayed as sexualized objects. The current representation of women in media outlets must be changed in order to progress as a society and to dismantle the gender disparities between men and women. According to Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s documentary,Missrepresentation, 78 percent of 17 year old girls feel unhappy with their bodies and 65 percent of women and girls have an eating disorder. (Newsom) It is difficult for young women to be themselves because often it is not socially acceptable. The hourglass figure portrayed on women in media has caused women of all ages to compare themselves to media’s socially standardized women. For instance, social comparison theory was first proposed by Leon Festinger during the 1950s. Festinger stated in his theory that people rely on external models on which to form their self-perceptions. These models can come from people known in real life...
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...In the first few shots of this programme, we can establish that it covers the codes and conventions used in documentary style T.V. shows. The producers of the text have reinforced the programme's content and message throughout by using the layout and delivery of the information. During the intro to the programme, we hear upbeat music being played in the background, similar to that found on a news show. Shortly after this we see a clip of a newsbroadcaster talking on the problem at hand, drugs. If up until this point, a viewer did not understand what this text was about, various words and phrases related to drug use move around the screen. We as an audience are made light that this is based on a very serious subject and in addition to the 'Horizons' logo displayed at the top, we have high expectations for the documentary as a whole as 'Horizons' are well-known for their stellar documentaries and controversial content. This contoversy becomes more apparent in the following sequence of clips. We are given information on this particular topic, through the use of first hand accounts e.g people. By using regular people just like ourselves this links with the Bulmer and Katz Uses and Gratifications theory as we feel connected with the people and what they have to say, which is the way the director would have wanted to get his point across. The connection is made through our acceptance and understanding of these first hand accounts as we can relate to the realism of their opinions...
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...Media has changed people’s perception about different kinds of ideologies. One of the most powerful visual media that shapes our society is advertisement. It is almost inevitable to ignore advertisements and attempt to remain unaffected, butadvertisements both reflect and shape society norms. Compare to when society was more restricted by conservative regulations, such as Hayes Law, increasing numbers of advertisements in western culture allow queer people to represent in ways that are inclusive and respectful. Many companies have chosen to target on homosexual people who comprised a large potential market. Companies provide positive queer images in exchange for queer people’s good will and support. An example is Expedia’s Find Your Understanding, an ad released on Oct 2nd, has gained more than 2.2 million views. It is a moving tale told by Artie Goldstein, a retired business owner who described his emotion and reaction while traveling to his daughter’s, Vickie’s marriage with another woman. “That startled me. I told her, this is not the dream I have for my daughter,” said Artie when his daughter first asked his permission for marrying another woman. His arrival at his daughter’s wedding and witnessing how happy his daughter is were the turning points. “ You come to terms with it and say this is the nature order of things in your life, and it is supposed to be this way,” he said. His apprehension turned into true acceptance. I decided to pick this video as my analysis...
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...“With reference to your own detailed examples explore the representation of the gender in the media today” The media influences how certain genders should take certain roles in our society. For example, men are stereotyped to be masculine and heroic whereas in everyday life, that is not the case. Representation is the way in which people are presented and perceived or interpreted in a particular way. Firstly is the New Man ( breaking the stereotype), this example is from the Amazing Spiderman. In the film, Andrew Garfield is presented as being the hero, but he approaches it in a different way. It proves that the hero is not traditionally ‘macho’ or aggressive as he is a geekier/nerdy lead character which goes against the norm. Also he is not afraid to be seen as smart and being clever due to him having a positive attitude. His iconography is that he is dressed as Peter Parker; which reflects his desire to ‘blend in’ with his 2 identities. When is being Spiderman, the colour pallet is always brighter. It also tells us that he is young, which creates audience identification. The mise-en-scene of the settings reflects his surroundings. For instance, in the city, he looks out of place, whereas at home, the lighting and colour pallet reflects his clothing. In The Amazing Spiderman, the lead still follows the stereotype to a certain extent as the lead is still a male, where he is still actively saving the day and the female role. He is not the victim in the film and is defined...
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...Discuss the concepts of 'ideology' and 'discourse' in relation to the ways in which representation functions in media texts. You might like to do this in the context of representations of gender, sexuality, 'race', ethnicity, war, refugees or celebrity, for example. Your essay should include your own analysis of a media text that has not been discussed in detail in the lectures, required or additional readings, or in your other assessments. Representation is both the process and the product of media texts, in terms of sexuality in media these representations are shaped by ideologies; the way people think and interpret the word. In turn, different ideologies promote discourse and the discussion of ideas in relation to sexuality. In relation to specific media texts such as True Blood, there are several ideologies in the program, social, political and cultural which show a non-heteronormative view on sexuality. Ideologies are ways of thinking and how we interpret the world around us. It’s through ideology that representation in media text functions to reinforce the view of that particular school of thought. Representation can be through stereotype, strengthening sometimes negative views or typecasting those who are represented. Looking especially True Blood, vampires are being “re-presented” as the gay community which have to struggle and fight for equal rights(Dhaenens, 2013). The concept of Ideology, a way of thinking which impacts how you view and world and interact with people...
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