Tackling the exam
This topic is new to OCR AS level Unit 2731: Textual Analysis, as an optional topic on Section B. The first exam session in January 2003 for this year’s AS students.
Exam requirements
• Choose two specific episodes from two different sitcoms on British television (so this includes US sitcoms shown on British TV – you could do one of each)
• Study how gender is represented in the two programmes
• Compare the similarities and differences between the gender representation in two programmes.
• The OCR specification lists the following possible areas for questions:
Representation of the construction of gender in characters; construction of characters by appearance and dialogue; the characters’ function in the themes and narratives of the programmes; stereotypes and archetypes; casting issues; characters’ values and beliefs and how they are positioned by the narrative and preferred reading of the programme.
Top tips for the exam
• You need to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the processes of representation in media texts: do this by comparing the messages, values and social signification, in respect of gender, in two texts (you can choose US or British programmes, or a combination of the two).
• Be clear about what the concept of representation is, and how you can analyse it in television texts.
• You can study the institutional, social and cultural contexts of the TV sitcom as part of your preparation for this topic, but don’t get too bogged down in this – remember that you need to focus your answers firmly on a comparison of two texts and on demonstrating your conceptual knowledge and understanding.
• Study a variety of programmes at home (on terrestrial TV, or on Paramount Channel and UK Gold – many are on VHS and DVD and available in local libraries) but (if your teacher hasn’t already done this for you) choose two episodes to study in depth for the exam answer. You can briefly mention other programmes – as long as you answer the question.
• Be thoroughly prepared for the demands of timed answers (45 marks in 45 minutes) and on structuring an answer to an exam question. Address the key words in the question straight away in the first paragraph and ‘touch base’ in each paragraph, finishing with a conclusion which refers to the specific wording of the question.
• An answer on the history of the sitcom or a summary of TV gender representation through the decades will not earn you marks, no matter how good it is. Answer the question set and offer lots of examples to back up your points.
• Bear in mind that characters in sitcoms are the result of a variety of processes of construction – ideological, institutional and production processes (such as in the writing, casting, acting, direction, narrative, mise-en-scène, including costume, make-up, audience interpretations etc.) and are not self-determining entities. No matter how strong a star persona might be, they are following a script and are directed by a director – so beware of producing character sketches or descriptions of characters as if they were real people!
• You need to research and provide the following details in your answer, to show attention to detail:
– title of each programme and date or title of episode
– names of writer, director, producer, main actors’ names (previous roles where relevant)
– production company name and other programmes made by them, if relevant to your point
– channel of broadcast and time in schedule (original or subsequent)
– names of any writers whose critical work is quoted and their sources.
• Don’t be deceived by the comic aspect of the topic into using slang or a casual mode of address. Write formally and attend to issues of presentation, spelling, grammar, punctuation and so on.
Vivienne Clark is Principal Examiner for the Textual Analysis paper for OCR Media Studies
Tuesday 7 December 2010
Studying the Simpsons: Gender, sitcom, satire
Whether you’re studying gender and sitcom for OCR, researching your Med5 Independent Study or your WJEC ME4 essay, The Simpsons will tell you everything you need to know. Rob McInnes shows you how to unpick the magic and mechanics of the world’s favourite TV family.
One of the challenges to Media Studies students is to find your way through a warren of indigestible ‘theory’ while being required to produce coherent exam responses. For the Textual Analysis Paper of OCR’s AS Media exam, you will need to demonstrate an understanding of the mechanics of media texts. For example:
– You will have to study two complete episodes of two situation comedies.
– In the exam you do not have to discuss the history of situation comedy, or generalise about the nature of the genre.
– The exam question will ask you to focus only on the ways in which each programme constructs its representations of males and females, although it may ask you to relate this to other elements of the sitcom, such as ideas about comedy or narrative.
A long time ago, on a TV set far away…
Forget M*A*S*H, Frasier and Friends, it is The Simpsons that is well on the way to becoming the longest running sitcom ever. It is already the longest running prime-time animation television series – although it wasn’t the first. That achievement belongs to another half-hour ‘family’ comedy first produced by independent studio, Hanna-Barbera, over forty years ago: The Flintstones, the first animated sitcom to be broadcast in prime-time (between 6.00 and 10pm), the most competitive period of American network scheduling. Back in 1960, the year it was first broadcast, The Flintstones had been seen as a risky venture, having been rejected by every network and many advertising sponsors before eventually finding a home on ABC – one of the USA’s three main television networks. The success of the show for adult audiences is probably down to its use of the already well-established format of the sitcom.
Take a successful formula…
By the end of the 1950s sitcoms such as I Love Lucy in the USA and Life with The Lyons in the UK had helped establish a successful formula based on familiar characters in predictable settings, recorded in confined studio sets, with a small audience providing immediate responses to the gags. The characters of Fred and Wilma Flintstone and Barney and Betty Rubble were based on The Honeymooners, two neighbouring couples featuring in long sketches on The Jackie Gleason Show. A year or so later, Hanna and Barbera used the same technique with Top Cat, modelled on Sgt. Bilko and other characters in The Phil Silvers Show. The ‘limited animation’ technique permitted many more minutes of animation to be produced than before and was essentially what made the Hanna-Barbera shows financially viable for television. By animating as few frames as possible, and by utilising stock expressions, a growing library of familiar sound effects, repetitive musical cues and by imitating conventional studio camera angles (together with the artificial laugh track that came to be known as ‘canned laughter’), television animation could bring something new to the sitcom genre.
Massive marketing to multiple audiences
Years after Hanna-Barbera had proved that prime-time animation could rework the sitcom format as a cartoon, few people could have anticipated the impact, influence and resonance of the series that grew from the crudely-realised quickie sequences created by Matt Groening as ‘bumpers’ (between the ad breaks and the sketches) for The Tracy Ullman Show. The Simpsons was one of the first big successes for the new American Fox network, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation; and the company immediately picked up on the show’s appeal and marketed it aggressively. Similarly in Britain, the programme spearheaded the launch of the new Sky One satellite channel (also a part of the Murdoch media empire) where for some time it was the only place to see it; this helped lend it early cult status. However, both Fox and the show’s writers carefully cultivated a range of target audiences, from the youngest children who were attracted to the bright colour palette, slapstick visuals and prominence of Bart (an anagram of ‘brat’) to the sophisticated media-literate college students who were provided with an apparently endless stream of in-jokes and layered pop culture references to movies, comics and old TV series.
Add everybody’s favourite family guy
The breadth of the show’s appeal has led to some interesting critics and surprising champions. Famously, George Bush Snr. publicly expressed his desire for American families to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. Conversely, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Wales has more recently described the programme as:
one of the most subtle pieces of propaganda around in the cause of sense, humility and virtue.
Like Williams, psychologists and sociologists across the western world have been drawn to the family’s almost mythological ordinariness, frequently focusing on the character of Homer himself. Over the years, the programme’s storylines have featured Homer increasingly heavily, perhaps because he so readily embodies the concept of the ‘everyman’, an ordinary blue-collar (working-class) character whose motives for any action are always self-serving and built upon a sound basis of laziness and stupidity. In an early episode in which he thinks he is dying from poisoned fish, Homer shares the totality of his wisdom with his son:
Bart, I want to share something with you – the three little sentences that will get you through life. Number One, ‘Cover for me’. Number Two, ‘Oh Good idea boss.’ Number Three, ‘It was like that when I got here.’
Yet despite his less-than-conscientious attitude to life and work, Homer also manages to appear a loyal and loving husband and father, whose lack of self-awareness prevents him from ever seeming really dislikeable.
A recipe for trash – or insightful social satire?
The Simpsons might be said to be guided by a ‘trash aesthetic’ that mocks both ‘high art’ and celebrates and revels in popular culture. The caricatured nature of the inhabitants of Springfield provide the programme’s writers with a constant flow of opportunities for satire and parody. Subsidiary characters often provide either joke-driven cameos or the motor for an entire story. Reverend Lovejoy and Ned Flanders together are used to lampoon attitudes to religion, in ways that other USA television series rarely attempt. Comic Book Guy and Professor Frink demonstrate the show’s preoccupation both with obscure movie parody and the obsessive nature of movie, TV and comic fans. But however delightful these incidental pleasures may be, the show’s major satirical concerns are reserved for its primary characters.
The eighth season episode ‘Homer’s Phobia’ is an interesting example of mainstream television’s potential to explore controversial subject matter. The episode has been amongst the most controversial of the show’s run to date (see side-bar on page 24).
Case study: ‘Homer’s phobia’
The family befriend John, the owner of ‘Cockamamie’ a store in the Springfield Mall full of camp and nostalgic merchandise. John is voiced by film director John Waters, famous for both low-budget ‘trash’ movies and mainstream features such as Hairspray. Blissfully ignorant of John’s sexuality (‘Doesn’t he seem a little … um, festive to you?’ Marge quizzes Homer early on), Homer enjoys his company without realising that John is attracted to the family’s ‘camp’ virtues; their kitchen décor, their record collection, etc. Homer’s usual simpleton persona is morphed into bigot for the purposes of the episode’s satirical tone. On learning from Marge that John’s ‘family won’t be coming over’ he retreats into an absurd caricature of homophobic extremism and refuses to join Bart, Lisa and Marge on their trips out to visit the dark, sordid underbelly of Springfield’s society. However, worse is to come – Homer imagines that Bart is displaying signs of gayness and in keeping with many bigoted perceptions of homosexuality as a pathological problem or disease, becomes totally pre-occupied with ‘curing’ him.
Homer then attempts to ensure Bart does not ‘turn’ by sitting him in front of an roadside billboard depicting scantily clad women advertising Laramie cigarettes for two hours; he then takes him to a steel mill, only to discover that the entire workforce are gay and spend their rest breaks platform dancing (‘We work hard – we play hard!’). Drowning his sorrows at Moe’s, Homer is reassured by Moe and Barney that today’s society has a ‘swishifying effect’ on the young and that the only way to ‘cure’ him of queer tendencies is to take him hunting (‘Shooting a deer will make him a man.’). In locating this scene in the bar, ‘Homer’s Phobia’ takes the series’ traditional settings (the Simpsons’ kitchen and the bar) and reminds us how conventionally they represent male and female environments. The audience has to confront and question its own assumptions about gendered behaviour, and indeed about representation itself. Homer’s hunting trip almost ends in disaster as, failing to find a deer in the wild, Bart is taken to a reindeer enclosure and expected to shoot a captive animal. When the animals stampede, they all end up having to be rescued by John with the aid of a miniature robot Father Christmas – ‘the reindeer’s cruel master’. John adds:
Well, Homer, I won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life. Now if every gay man could just do the same, you’d be set.
The episode hints at the difficulties of confronting deep-rooted prejudices, but offers the hope that exposing those prejudices may eventually break them down. In America, homophobia still remains an ‘acceptable’ prejudice among many sectors of society, not least fundamentalist religious groups. This contrasts interestingly with racism which, after decades of civil rights lobbying and consciousness-raising, is now unacceptable and condemned. Try comparing homophobic and racist issues in your own school or college environment. How much more common is homophobic bullying than its racist counterpart? Gay issues have recently taken centre stage in the States with a legal battle raging in California where San Francisco judges granted marriage licences to gay and lesbian couples. Earlier this year, President George Bush stepped in, threatening a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages.
And satire is …?
‘Homer’s Phobia’ raises the issue of homophobia in a satirical way; that is, it holds a mirror up to human behaviour in order to illustrate our weakness and contradictions. The best satire can sometimes be so subtle it’s barely noticeable. For example, in 1729, in his short publication A Modest Proposal author Jonathan Swift argued that eating children would solve most of the problems of poverty in Ireland. He subtitled the piece:
A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public.
A self-contained essay, it contains few hints that the idea might not be serious, or that his ‘proposal’ was asking its readers to question the notion that logic and reason should entirely govern human behaviour. Reading it now, you might be forgiven for thinking it a product of some deranged eighteenth-century proto-fascist; its internal logic is so well-structured and its arguments made to sound so reasonable.
Swift demonstrated that for satire to be effective it has to risk both offending and outraging people and being misunderstood. Above all it has to encourage the reader/viewer/audience to think for themselves, rather than accept its apparent, superficial principles.
However, satire on television is trickier, due to the weight of audience numbers, the large sums of money involved and the vested interests and political agendas of media owners. Mike Scully, executive producer of The Simpsons for many years, notes how the programme makes regular jokes at the expense of the Fox network that produces and distributes the show:
We have a tendency to bite the hand that feeds us. But they understand that it’s part of the fun of the show.
Scully says The Simpsons is unique for an American network programme in that it is rarely interfered with:
… on most shows you have to accept the input of the network and the studio, their notes on the things they want to be changed. Normally there would be around 12 people going over your script, telling you what’s wrong with it and how to fix it, and we don’t have that. We’re completely autonomous.
However, the ‘Homer’s Phobia’ episode had:
probably the most censor notes of any show we’ve had – two solid pages of single spaced notes. But most of the edge of the show was still there.
Is satire dangerous? Till Death Us Do Part
A satire invariably requires key characters to behave in necessarily negative ways. This often provokes conflicting audience reactions, particularly towards a popular character. This problem is exaggerated when a character is perceived as a role model. Debates about how far The Simpsons provide negative role models will draw upon viewers’ responses to the programme’s representations and values. They certainly echo earlier debates around programmes such as Till Death Us Do Part which featured an irascible bigot, Alf Garnett who, in 1960s’ Britain, prompted serious controversy about his depiction of bigotry and intolerance on-screen. In that programme his character was frequently shown to be the ‘loser’ in most arguments and his views were counter-balanced by the remainder of the regular characters, particularly his daughter and her fiancé. The problem was that Garnett (played by Warren Mitchell, who periodically revives the character) simply had all the funniest lines. The humour could therefore easily be seen as celebrating the very thing that it condemned. The BBC and writer Johnny Speight defended the programme but when a more conservative Director General arrived at the BBC, the series was taken off-air for some years.
As with Till Death Us Do Part, ‘Homer’s Phobia’ deliberately accentuates its central character’s ignorance and prejudice at the risk of alienating some of its Homer fans and of confirming the prejudices already held by some viewers. Certainly, websites such as ‘The Simpsons Archive’ reveal some dramatically differing readings of the episode. Some posts praise the episode for the very reasons others condemn it.
‘Homer’s Phobia’ demonstrates both how effective television comedy can be at revealing social attitudes towards gender and sexuality and how intricate are the processes of constructing representations in a medium that is too often considered throwaway and superficial. Time for homework, anyone?
Rob McInnes if Head of Media Studies at Forest Hill School, South London.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 10, December 2004
One of the challenges to Media Studies students is to find your way through a warren of indigestible ‘theory’ while being required to produce coherent exam responses. For the Textual Analysis Paper of OCR’s AS Media exam, you will need to demonstrate an understanding of the mechanics of media texts. For example:
– You will have to study two complete episodes of two situation comedies.
– In the exam you do not have to discuss the history of situation comedy, or generalise about the nature of the genre.
– The exam question will ask you to focus only on the ways in which each programme constructs its representations of males and females, although it may ask you to relate this to other elements of the sitcom, such as ideas about comedy or narrative.
A long time ago, on a TV set far away…
Forget M*A*S*H, Frasier and Friends, it is The Simpsons that is well on the way to becoming the longest running sitcom ever. It is already the longest running prime-time animation television series – although it wasn’t the first. That achievement belongs to another half-hour ‘family’ comedy first produced by independent studio, Hanna-Barbera, over forty years ago: The Flintstones, the first animated sitcom to be broadcast in prime-time (between 6.00 and 10pm), the most competitive period of American network scheduling. Back in 1960, the year it was first broadcast, The Flintstones had been seen as a risky venture, having been rejected by every network and many advertising sponsors before eventually finding a home on ABC – one of the USA’s three main television networks. The success of the show for adult audiences is probably down to its use of the already well-established format of the sitcom.
Take a successful formula…
By the end of the 1950s sitcoms such as I Love Lucy in the USA and Life with The Lyons in the UK had helped establish a successful formula based on familiar characters in predictable settings, recorded in confined studio sets, with a small audience providing immediate responses to the gags. The characters of Fred and Wilma Flintstone and Barney and Betty Rubble were based on The Honeymooners, two neighbouring couples featuring in long sketches on The Jackie Gleason Show. A year or so later, Hanna and Barbera used the same technique with Top Cat, modelled on Sgt. Bilko and other characters in The Phil Silvers Show. The ‘limited animation’ technique permitted many more minutes of animation to be produced than before and was essentially what made the Hanna-Barbera shows financially viable for television. By animating as few frames as possible, and by utilising stock expressions, a growing library of familiar sound effects, repetitive musical cues and by imitating conventional studio camera angles (together with the artificial laugh track that came to be known as ‘canned laughter’), television animation could bring something new to the sitcom genre.
Massive marketing to multiple audiences
Years after Hanna-Barbera had proved that prime-time animation could rework the sitcom format as a cartoon, few people could have anticipated the impact, influence and resonance of the series that grew from the crudely-realised quickie sequences created by Matt Groening as ‘bumpers’ (between the ad breaks and the sketches) for The Tracy Ullman Show. The Simpsons was one of the first big successes for the new American Fox network, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation; and the company immediately picked up on the show’s appeal and marketed it aggressively. Similarly in Britain, the programme spearheaded the launch of the new Sky One satellite channel (also a part of the Murdoch media empire) where for some time it was the only place to see it; this helped lend it early cult status. However, both Fox and the show’s writers carefully cultivated a range of target audiences, from the youngest children who were attracted to the bright colour palette, slapstick visuals and prominence of Bart (an anagram of ‘brat’) to the sophisticated media-literate college students who were provided with an apparently endless stream of in-jokes and layered pop culture references to movies, comics and old TV series.
Add everybody’s favourite family guy
The breadth of the show’s appeal has led to some interesting critics and surprising champions. Famously, George Bush Snr. publicly expressed his desire for American families to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. Conversely, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Wales has more recently described the programme as:
one of the most subtle pieces of propaganda around in the cause of sense, humility and virtue.
Like Williams, psychologists and sociologists across the western world have been drawn to the family’s almost mythological ordinariness, frequently focusing on the character of Homer himself. Over the years, the programme’s storylines have featured Homer increasingly heavily, perhaps because he so readily embodies the concept of the ‘everyman’, an ordinary blue-collar (working-class) character whose motives for any action are always self-serving and built upon a sound basis of laziness and stupidity. In an early episode in which he thinks he is dying from poisoned fish, Homer shares the totality of his wisdom with his son:
Bart, I want to share something with you – the three little sentences that will get you through life. Number One, ‘Cover for me’. Number Two, ‘Oh Good idea boss.’ Number Three, ‘It was like that when I got here.’
Yet despite his less-than-conscientious attitude to life and work, Homer also manages to appear a loyal and loving husband and father, whose lack of self-awareness prevents him from ever seeming really dislikeable.
A recipe for trash – or insightful social satire?
The Simpsons might be said to be guided by a ‘trash aesthetic’ that mocks both ‘high art’ and celebrates and revels in popular culture. The caricatured nature of the inhabitants of Springfield provide the programme’s writers with a constant flow of opportunities for satire and parody. Subsidiary characters often provide either joke-driven cameos or the motor for an entire story. Reverend Lovejoy and Ned Flanders together are used to lampoon attitudes to religion, in ways that other USA television series rarely attempt. Comic Book Guy and Professor Frink demonstrate the show’s preoccupation both with obscure movie parody and the obsessive nature of movie, TV and comic fans. But however delightful these incidental pleasures may be, the show’s major satirical concerns are reserved for its primary characters.
The eighth season episode ‘Homer’s Phobia’ is an interesting example of mainstream television’s potential to explore controversial subject matter. The episode has been amongst the most controversial of the show’s run to date (see side-bar on page 24).
Case study: ‘Homer’s phobia’
The family befriend John, the owner of ‘Cockamamie’ a store in the Springfield Mall full of camp and nostalgic merchandise. John is voiced by film director John Waters, famous for both low-budget ‘trash’ movies and mainstream features such as Hairspray. Blissfully ignorant of John’s sexuality (‘Doesn’t he seem a little … um, festive to you?’ Marge quizzes Homer early on), Homer enjoys his company without realising that John is attracted to the family’s ‘camp’ virtues; their kitchen décor, their record collection, etc. Homer’s usual simpleton persona is morphed into bigot for the purposes of the episode’s satirical tone. On learning from Marge that John’s ‘family won’t be coming over’ he retreats into an absurd caricature of homophobic extremism and refuses to join Bart, Lisa and Marge on their trips out to visit the dark, sordid underbelly of Springfield’s society. However, worse is to come – Homer imagines that Bart is displaying signs of gayness and in keeping with many bigoted perceptions of homosexuality as a pathological problem or disease, becomes totally pre-occupied with ‘curing’ him.
Homer then attempts to ensure Bart does not ‘turn’ by sitting him in front of an roadside billboard depicting scantily clad women advertising Laramie cigarettes for two hours; he then takes him to a steel mill, only to discover that the entire workforce are gay and spend their rest breaks platform dancing (‘We work hard – we play hard!’). Drowning his sorrows at Moe’s, Homer is reassured by Moe and Barney that today’s society has a ‘swishifying effect’ on the young and that the only way to ‘cure’ him of queer tendencies is to take him hunting (‘Shooting a deer will make him a man.’). In locating this scene in the bar, ‘Homer’s Phobia’ takes the series’ traditional settings (the Simpsons’ kitchen and the bar) and reminds us how conventionally they represent male and female environments. The audience has to confront and question its own assumptions about gendered behaviour, and indeed about representation itself. Homer’s hunting trip almost ends in disaster as, failing to find a deer in the wild, Bart is taken to a reindeer enclosure and expected to shoot a captive animal. When the animals stampede, they all end up having to be rescued by John with the aid of a miniature robot Father Christmas – ‘the reindeer’s cruel master’. John adds:
Well, Homer, I won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life. Now if every gay man could just do the same, you’d be set.
The episode hints at the difficulties of confronting deep-rooted prejudices, but offers the hope that exposing those prejudices may eventually break them down. In America, homophobia still remains an ‘acceptable’ prejudice among many sectors of society, not least fundamentalist religious groups. This contrasts interestingly with racism which, after decades of civil rights lobbying and consciousness-raising, is now unacceptable and condemned. Try comparing homophobic and racist issues in your own school or college environment. How much more common is homophobic bullying than its racist counterpart? Gay issues have recently taken centre stage in the States with a legal battle raging in California where San Francisco judges granted marriage licences to gay and lesbian couples. Earlier this year, President George Bush stepped in, threatening a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages.
And satire is …?
‘Homer’s Phobia’ raises the issue of homophobia in a satirical way; that is, it holds a mirror up to human behaviour in order to illustrate our weakness and contradictions. The best satire can sometimes be so subtle it’s barely noticeable. For example, in 1729, in his short publication A Modest Proposal author Jonathan Swift argued that eating children would solve most of the problems of poverty in Ireland. He subtitled the piece:
A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public.
A self-contained essay, it contains few hints that the idea might not be serious, or that his ‘proposal’ was asking its readers to question the notion that logic and reason should entirely govern human behaviour. Reading it now, you might be forgiven for thinking it a product of some deranged eighteenth-century proto-fascist; its internal logic is so well-structured and its arguments made to sound so reasonable.
Swift demonstrated that for satire to be effective it has to risk both offending and outraging people and being misunderstood. Above all it has to encourage the reader/viewer/audience to think for themselves, rather than accept its apparent, superficial principles.
However, satire on television is trickier, due to the weight of audience numbers, the large sums of money involved and the vested interests and political agendas of media owners. Mike Scully, executive producer of The Simpsons for many years, notes how the programme makes regular jokes at the expense of the Fox network that produces and distributes the show:
We have a tendency to bite the hand that feeds us. But they understand that it’s part of the fun of the show.
Scully says The Simpsons is unique for an American network programme in that it is rarely interfered with:
… on most shows you have to accept the input of the network and the studio, their notes on the things they want to be changed. Normally there would be around 12 people going over your script, telling you what’s wrong with it and how to fix it, and we don’t have that. We’re completely autonomous.
However, the ‘Homer’s Phobia’ episode had:
probably the most censor notes of any show we’ve had – two solid pages of single spaced notes. But most of the edge of the show was still there.
Is satire dangerous? Till Death Us Do Part
A satire invariably requires key characters to behave in necessarily negative ways. This often provokes conflicting audience reactions, particularly towards a popular character. This problem is exaggerated when a character is perceived as a role model. Debates about how far The Simpsons provide negative role models will draw upon viewers’ responses to the programme’s representations and values. They certainly echo earlier debates around programmes such as Till Death Us Do Part which featured an irascible bigot, Alf Garnett who, in 1960s’ Britain, prompted serious controversy about his depiction of bigotry and intolerance on-screen. In that programme his character was frequently shown to be the ‘loser’ in most arguments and his views were counter-balanced by the remainder of the regular characters, particularly his daughter and her fiancé. The problem was that Garnett (played by Warren Mitchell, who periodically revives the character) simply had all the funniest lines. The humour could therefore easily be seen as celebrating the very thing that it condemned. The BBC and writer Johnny Speight defended the programme but when a more conservative Director General arrived at the BBC, the series was taken off-air for some years.
As with Till Death Us Do Part, ‘Homer’s Phobia’ deliberately accentuates its central character’s ignorance and prejudice at the risk of alienating some of its Homer fans and of confirming the prejudices already held by some viewers. Certainly, websites such as ‘The Simpsons Archive’ reveal some dramatically differing readings of the episode. Some posts praise the episode for the very reasons others condemn it.
‘Homer’s Phobia’ demonstrates both how effective television comedy can be at revealing social attitudes towards gender and sexuality and how intricate are the processes of constructing representations in a medium that is too often considered throwaway and superficial. Time for homework, anyone?
Rob McInnes if Head of Media Studies at Forest Hill School, South London.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 10, December 2004
Monday 6 December 2010
Is reality becoming more real? The rise and rise of UGC: Notes and questions
Notes
Examples:
- The 4 police caught on camera beating up a man
- The tsunami had accidental journalism- people's holiday videos became accounts and news footage providing information for the event.
- Seung-Hui Cho and Jamal- filmed the event rather than saved his life to get good footage of the event
- Mumbai bombings were covered by Flickr and Twitter- the live element of twitter made the information current and up to date-accessed by the world
- Hudson river plane crash- Janis Krun tweeted how she was to help the suvivors
Insitution benefit:
- As there are many money making sites, institutions just have to buy sites rather than launching new ones
Audience benefit:
- The help of social networking sites allowed people's UGC help survivors find their families.
- Niche topic on the e-media platform become acessible to a wide audience
- Subordinated groups now have a voice in the media today
Issues and debates:
- The impact of reality TV on the real world- people would rather film events to be famous than save their own lives.
- Mediation- does seing unmediated content still convey meaning. Does this mean we lose trust in mediated and therefore professional content?
- Media and ownership- could this freedom of UGC mean certain groups will try and take over- e.g. discriminative groups
SHEP
Social: anyone can be a producer- doesn't matter about your background
Historical: news use to come from journalists and professionals, but now ordinary people can produce content for news
Economical: It is clearly cost free for ordinary people to produce their own content. This means that some people will lose jobs due to the fewer needed journalists.
Political: The governement will have less control over the media as individuals create their own. This means content will have different ideologies and conflicts- some content could also be offencive causig political problems
Questions
1. "Citizen journalist", "grassroots journalists", or "accidental journalists" is when news or media content is created by normal people.
2. The first example of UGC:
Four police were caught attacking a man
Someone recorded the event on their mobile
It became the first piece of UCG- aired on the news
A form of information for masses
3. Organisations have provided forms of participation such as: message boards, chat rooms, Q&A, polls, have your says, and blogs with comments enabled.
4. The main difference between professional footage and UCG is the quality- it is poor which makes it more realistic and therefore more emotive.
5. A gate keeper controls what is news worthy and worth broadcasting.
6. Gate keepers now need to focus on the content thats is on the web (e-media).
7. More people producing their own content means there is less need for the professional journalists- they have to get paid while UCG producers don't- however they can make money if they want to.
Is reality becoming more real? The rise and rise of UGC
Sara Mills explores the rise of the citizen journalist and considers the impact of user-generated content on news stories, the news agenda, and the role of the professionals.
Once, it was all quite simple…the big institutions created the news and broadcast it to a variously passive and receptive audience. Now new technologies mean that the audience are no longer passive receivers of news. The audience have become ‘users’ and the users have become publishers. Audiences now create their own content. We are in the era of user generated content (UGC) where the old divide between institution and audience is being eroded.
Key to this change has been the development of new technologies such as video phones and the growth of the internet and user-dominated sites. Both who makes the news and what makes the news have been radically altered by this growth of media technologies and the rise of the ‘citizen journalist’.
We first felt the effects of the new technologies way back in 1991. Video cameras had become more common and more people could afford them…unfortunately for four Los Angeles police officers! Having caught Rodney King, an African-American, after a high speed chase, the officers surrounded him, tasered him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by an onlooker from his apartment window. The home-video footage made prime-time news and became an international media sensation, and a focus for complaints about police racism towards African-Americans. Four officers were charged with assault and use of excessive force, but in 1992 they were acquitted of the charges. This acquittal, in the face of the video footage which clearly showed the beatings, sparked huge civil unrest. There were six days of riots, 53 people died, and around 4000 people were injured. The costs of the damage, looting and clear-up came in at up to a billion dollars. If George Holliday hadn’t been looking out of his apartment window and made a grab for his video camera at the time Rodney King was apprehended, none of this would have happened. King’s beating would be just another hidden incident with no consequences. The film footage can be still be viewed. Try looking on YouTube under ‘What started the LA riots.’ But be warned – it makes for very uncomfortable viewing, and even today, it is easy to see why this minute and half of blurry, poor-quality film had such a huge impact.
This was one of the first examples of the news being generated by ‘ordinary people,’ now commonly known as ‘citizen journalists’, ‘grassroots journalists’, or even ‘accidental journalists’. As technology improved over the years, incidents of this kind have become more and more common. Millions of people have constant access to filming capability through their mobiles, and footage can be uploaded and rapidly distributed on the internet. The power to make and break news has moved beyond the traditional news institutions.
It is not only in providing footage for the news that citizen journalists have come to the forefront. UGC now plays a huge role in many aspects of the media. Most news organisations include formats for participation: message boards, chat rooms, Q&A, polls, have your says, and blogs with comments enabled. Social media sites are also built around UGC as seen in the four biggest social networking sites: Bebo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. People also turn to UGC sites to access news: Wikipedia news, Google news and YouTube score highly in terms of where people go to get their news.
The natural disaster of the Asian Tsunami on December 26th 2004 was another turning point for UGC. Much of the early footage of events was provided from citizen journalists, or ‘accidental journalists,’ providing on-the-spot witness accounts of events as they unfolded. Tourists who would otherwise have been happily filming holiday moments were suddenly recording one of the worst natural disasters in recent times. In addition, in the days after the disaster, social networking sites provided witness accounts for a world-wide audience, helped survivors and family members get in touch and acted as a forum all those involved to share their experiences.
A second terrible event, the London bombings on July 5th 2005, provided another opportunity for citizen journalists to influence the mainstream news agenda. No one was closer to events than those caught up in the bombings, and the footage they provided from their mobile phones was raw and uncompromising. This first-hand view, rather than professionally shot footage from behind police lines, is often more hard-hitting and emotive. An audience used to relatively unmediated reality through the prevalence of reality TV can now see similarly unmediated footage on the news.
The desire for everyone to tell their own story and have their own moment of fame may explain the huge popularity of Facebook, MySpace and other such sites. It also had a more negative outcome in the package of writings, photos and video footage that 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, mailed into NBC News. Between his first attack, when he shot two people, he sent the package from a local post office, before going on to kill a further 30 people. In his so-called ‘manifesto’ Cho showed his paranoia and obsession, likening himself to Jesus Christ. The reporting of the terrible events at Virginia Tech that day was also affected by citizen journalism, and the footage that student Jamal Albarghouti shot on his mobile phone video camera. Rather than concentrate on saving his own life, he recorded events from his position lying on the ground near the firing. The footage, available on YouTube and CNN brought events home to a worldwide audience. We now expect passers by, witnesses, or even victims, to whip out their camera phones and record events, an instinct almost as powerful as that to save their own or others’ lives. Perhaps the news now seems old-fashioned and somehow staged if it lacks the raw, grainy low-quality footage provided by citizen journalists.
Twitter and flickr came to the forefront during the Mumbai bombings in India in late November 2008. As bombs exploded across the city, the world’s media got up-to date with events through reports on Twitter and Flickr. There were questions raised, however, that by broadcasting their tweets, people may have been putting their own and others’ lives at risk.
It was on Twitter again that the story of the Hudson River plane crash on January 15th 2009 was broken to the world. With a dramatic picture of a plane half sinking in the river, and passengers crowded on the wing awaiting rescue Janis Krun tweeted:
There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.
The picture is still available on Twitpic, under ‘Janis Krun’s tweet.’ While national news organisations quickly swung into action, it was the citizen journalist, empowered by social networking sites, that first broke the story.
So who’s keeping the gate?
Are the gatekeepers still fulfilling their old function of deciding what is and isn’t news, and what will and won’t be broadcast? In some ways, yes. You can send in as much UGC to the major news organisations as you want, with no guarantee that any of it will ever be aired. In fact, last year a BBC spokesperson reported that a large proportion of photos sent in to the news unit were of kittens. While this may represent the interest of the audience, or users, it still doesn’t turn the fact that your kitten is really cute into ‘news.’
The way around the gatekeepers is with the independent media on the web. The blogosphere, for example, provides an opportunity for independent, often minority and niche views and news to reach a wide audience. In fact uniting disparate people in ‘micro-communities’ is one of the web’s greatest abilities. How else would all those ice fans communicate without the ‘Ice Chewers Bulletin Board?’ And the only place for those who like to see pictures of dogs in bee costumes is, of course, ‘Beedogs.com: the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes.’
On a more serious note, the change in the landscape of the news means that groups who had little access to self-representation before, such as youth groups, low income groups, and various minority groups may, through citizen journalism, begin to find that they too have a voice.
What about the professionals?
Do journalists fear for their jobs now everyone is producing content? It is likely that in future there will be fewer and fewer permanent trained staff at news organisations, leaving a smaller core staff who will manage and process UGC from citizen journalists, sometimes known as ‘crowd sourcing.’ Some believe that the mediators and moderators might eventually disappear too, leaving a world where the media is, finally, unmediated. This does raise concerns however. Without moderation sites could be overrun by bigots or fools, by those who shout loudest, and those who have little else to do but make posts The risk of being dominated by defamatory or racist or other hate-fuelled content raises questions about unmoderated content: ‘free speech’ is great as long as you agree with what everybody is saying!
If there will be fewer jobs for trained journalists, will there also be less profit for the big institutions? This seems unlikely. Although how to ‘monetarise’ UGC – how to make money for both the generator and the host of the content – is still being debated, bigger institutions have been buying up social networking sites for the last few years. Rather than launch their own challenge, they simply buy the site. Flickr is now owned by Yahoo!, YouTube was bought by Google, Microsoft invested in Facebook, and News Corp., owned by Murdoch, bought MySpace.
There is a whole new world out there. With it comes new responsibility. There is enormous potential to expand our view of the world and our understanding of what is happening. Our collective knowledge, and wisdom, should grow. On the other hand, in twenty years time, the news could be overrun by pictures of people’s kittens and a few bigots shouting across message boards at each other.
Sara Mills teaches Media Studies at Helston Community College, Cornwall, and is an AQA examiner.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 30, December 2009.
top
Once, it was all quite simple…the big institutions created the news and broadcast it to a variously passive and receptive audience. Now new technologies mean that the audience are no longer passive receivers of news. The audience have become ‘users’ and the users have become publishers. Audiences now create their own content. We are in the era of user generated content (UGC) where the old divide between institution and audience is being eroded.
Key to this change has been the development of new technologies such as video phones and the growth of the internet and user-dominated sites. Both who makes the news and what makes the news have been radically altered by this growth of media technologies and the rise of the ‘citizen journalist’.
We first felt the effects of the new technologies way back in 1991. Video cameras had become more common and more people could afford them…unfortunately for four Los Angeles police officers! Having caught Rodney King, an African-American, after a high speed chase, the officers surrounded him, tasered him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by an onlooker from his apartment window. The home-video footage made prime-time news and became an international media sensation, and a focus for complaints about police racism towards African-Americans. Four officers were charged with assault and use of excessive force, but in 1992 they were acquitted of the charges. This acquittal, in the face of the video footage which clearly showed the beatings, sparked huge civil unrest. There were six days of riots, 53 people died, and around 4000 people were injured. The costs of the damage, looting and clear-up came in at up to a billion dollars. If George Holliday hadn’t been looking out of his apartment window and made a grab for his video camera at the time Rodney King was apprehended, none of this would have happened. King’s beating would be just another hidden incident with no consequences. The film footage can be still be viewed. Try looking on YouTube under ‘What started the LA riots.’ But be warned – it makes for very uncomfortable viewing, and even today, it is easy to see why this minute and half of blurry, poor-quality film had such a huge impact.
This was one of the first examples of the news being generated by ‘ordinary people,’ now commonly known as ‘citizen journalists’, ‘grassroots journalists’, or even ‘accidental journalists’. As technology improved over the years, incidents of this kind have become more and more common. Millions of people have constant access to filming capability through their mobiles, and footage can be uploaded and rapidly distributed on the internet. The power to make and break news has moved beyond the traditional news institutions.
It is not only in providing footage for the news that citizen journalists have come to the forefront. UGC now plays a huge role in many aspects of the media. Most news organisations include formats for participation: message boards, chat rooms, Q&A, polls, have your says, and blogs with comments enabled. Social media sites are also built around UGC as seen in the four biggest social networking sites: Bebo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. People also turn to UGC sites to access news: Wikipedia news, Google news and YouTube score highly in terms of where people go to get their news.
The natural disaster of the Asian Tsunami on December 26th 2004 was another turning point for UGC. Much of the early footage of events was provided from citizen journalists, or ‘accidental journalists,’ providing on-the-spot witness accounts of events as they unfolded. Tourists who would otherwise have been happily filming holiday moments were suddenly recording one of the worst natural disasters in recent times. In addition, in the days after the disaster, social networking sites provided witness accounts for a world-wide audience, helped survivors and family members get in touch and acted as a forum all those involved to share their experiences.
A second terrible event, the London bombings on July 5th 2005, provided another opportunity for citizen journalists to influence the mainstream news agenda. No one was closer to events than those caught up in the bombings, and the footage they provided from their mobile phones was raw and uncompromising. This first-hand view, rather than professionally shot footage from behind police lines, is often more hard-hitting and emotive. An audience used to relatively unmediated reality through the prevalence of reality TV can now see similarly unmediated footage on the news.
The desire for everyone to tell their own story and have their own moment of fame may explain the huge popularity of Facebook, MySpace and other such sites. It also had a more negative outcome in the package of writings, photos and video footage that 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, mailed into NBC News. Between his first attack, when he shot two people, he sent the package from a local post office, before going on to kill a further 30 people. In his so-called ‘manifesto’ Cho showed his paranoia and obsession, likening himself to Jesus Christ. The reporting of the terrible events at Virginia Tech that day was also affected by citizen journalism, and the footage that student Jamal Albarghouti shot on his mobile phone video camera. Rather than concentrate on saving his own life, he recorded events from his position lying on the ground near the firing. The footage, available on YouTube and CNN brought events home to a worldwide audience. We now expect passers by, witnesses, or even victims, to whip out their camera phones and record events, an instinct almost as powerful as that to save their own or others’ lives. Perhaps the news now seems old-fashioned and somehow staged if it lacks the raw, grainy low-quality footage provided by citizen journalists.
Twitter and flickr came to the forefront during the Mumbai bombings in India in late November 2008. As bombs exploded across the city, the world’s media got up-to date with events through reports on Twitter and Flickr. There were questions raised, however, that by broadcasting their tweets, people may have been putting their own and others’ lives at risk.
It was on Twitter again that the story of the Hudson River plane crash on January 15th 2009 was broken to the world. With a dramatic picture of a plane half sinking in the river, and passengers crowded on the wing awaiting rescue Janis Krun tweeted:
There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.
The picture is still available on Twitpic, under ‘Janis Krun’s tweet.’ While national news organisations quickly swung into action, it was the citizen journalist, empowered by social networking sites, that first broke the story.
So who’s keeping the gate?
Are the gatekeepers still fulfilling their old function of deciding what is and isn’t news, and what will and won’t be broadcast? In some ways, yes. You can send in as much UGC to the major news organisations as you want, with no guarantee that any of it will ever be aired. In fact, last year a BBC spokesperson reported that a large proportion of photos sent in to the news unit were of kittens. While this may represent the interest of the audience, or users, it still doesn’t turn the fact that your kitten is really cute into ‘news.’
The way around the gatekeepers is with the independent media on the web. The blogosphere, for example, provides an opportunity for independent, often minority and niche views and news to reach a wide audience. In fact uniting disparate people in ‘micro-communities’ is one of the web’s greatest abilities. How else would all those ice fans communicate without the ‘Ice Chewers Bulletin Board?’ And the only place for those who like to see pictures of dogs in bee costumes is, of course, ‘Beedogs.com: the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes.’
On a more serious note, the change in the landscape of the news means that groups who had little access to self-representation before, such as youth groups, low income groups, and various minority groups may, through citizen journalism, begin to find that they too have a voice.
What about the professionals?
Do journalists fear for their jobs now everyone is producing content? It is likely that in future there will be fewer and fewer permanent trained staff at news organisations, leaving a smaller core staff who will manage and process UGC from citizen journalists, sometimes known as ‘crowd sourcing.’ Some believe that the mediators and moderators might eventually disappear too, leaving a world where the media is, finally, unmediated. This does raise concerns however. Without moderation sites could be overrun by bigots or fools, by those who shout loudest, and those who have little else to do but make posts The risk of being dominated by defamatory or racist or other hate-fuelled content raises questions about unmoderated content: ‘free speech’ is great as long as you agree with what everybody is saying!
If there will be fewer jobs for trained journalists, will there also be less profit for the big institutions? This seems unlikely. Although how to ‘monetarise’ UGC – how to make money for both the generator and the host of the content – is still being debated, bigger institutions have been buying up social networking sites for the last few years. Rather than launch their own challenge, they simply buy the site. Flickr is now owned by Yahoo!, YouTube was bought by Google, Microsoft invested in Facebook, and News Corp., owned by Murdoch, bought MySpace.
There is a whole new world out there. With it comes new responsibility. There is enormous potential to expand our view of the world and our understanding of what is happening. Our collective knowledge, and wisdom, should grow. On the other hand, in twenty years time, the news could be overrun by pictures of people’s kittens and a few bigots shouting across message boards at each other.
Sara Mills teaches Media Studies at Helston Community College, Cornwall, and is an AQA examiner.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 30, December 2009.
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