Inbetweeners

Ben palmer 2011

Media Effects:

do media representations of young people effect how they are percieved? if so how does this effect occur?

Hypodermic model:
passive consumers, respond and believe every single thing we hear or read.

Cultivation theory:
The more you see enough violence in the media amongst british youth , the more realistic it becomes

Copy Cat theory:
Influenced by what you see, so you copy what you see.

Moral Panic:
creates a panic within society, youths becoming antagonist and police turn into protagonist.

whose perspective is dominant in each of the texts?
what do representations have in each common?
How are representations different?
how are parental figures represented?

Contemporary British social realism:

• Attempt to portray issues facing ordinary people in their social situations
• Try to show that society and the capitalist system leads to the exploition of the poor or dispossessed
• These groups are shown as victims of the system rather than being totally responsible for their own bad behaviour
• low budget

Audience:

social realist films which address social problems in this country offer a very different version of 'collective identity' than british films which are also aimed at an american audience. Films like Notting Hill and Love actually reach a much bigger audience than the lower budget social realist films.

• Social realist films are aimed at a predominantly british audience
• If many more people see the commercial films, consider which version of our colloective identity is the more powerful.

When comparing how britishness and our collective identtiy is represented in films consider:

who is being represented?

who is representing them?

how are they represented?

what seems to be the intentions of the representations?

what is the dominant discourse? ( Communication, World view offered by the film, the way we are spoken through)

What range of readings are there?

look for alternative discourses.

Collective Identity

• the media contributes to our sense of collective identity but there are many different versions that change over time
• representations can cause problems for the groups being represented because marginalized groups have little control over thier representation/ sterotyping.
• The social context which the film is made influences the message/ values/ dominant discourse

Stuart Hall, 1980

Active Audience theory

• Encoding- Decoding is an active audience theory developed by Stuart Hall which examines the relationship between a text and its audience
• Encoding is the process by which a text is constructed by its producers
• Decoding is the process by which the audience reads, understands and interprets a text.
• Hall states that texts are polysemic, meaning they may be read differently by different people, depending on their identity, cultural knowledge and opinions.

(the difference in interpretations because of different backgrounds)

READING/ DOMINANT HEGEMONIC

we understand the media text exaclty how it is said giving an established mindset of framing

NEGOTIATED READING

a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements around the reading to make it fit to you. It makes its own ground rules- it operates with exceptions to the rule.

will acknowledge the reading but conflict with it.

OPPOSITIONAL READING/ 'COUNTER-HEGEMONIC'

you disagree with the text entirely  

any representation is a mixture of:

1. the thing itself
2. the opinions of the people doing the representation
3. the reaction of the individual to the representation
4. the context of the society in which the representation is taking place

Stereotyping

Why do we stereotype?

so we can recognise people easily

we naturally see the world in this kind of shorthand way, with connections between character traits

Implicit personality theory:

implicit: embedded

when we first meet somoene, you have already made a judjment on them

what we experienced on the past we tend to rely on that

we give a system of rules to tell us which charateristics

we categorise people into types to simplify the persons perception

a prototype is then formed

if we encounter somoene in reality or in the media who seems to fit neatly into a prototype, we feel reassured

make assumptions about people

identity

it is almost as if we conspire with the media to misunderstand the world