Media representations very much reflect social and political concern, current affairs and cultural traditions. They are often created to subordinate or maintain a stereotyped group such as women, reinforcing the idea of hegemony. On the other hand, some institutions use representations to challenge existing ideas and stereotypes to make changes or reflect our diverse society. There are a range of representations of women since the 1940, as in society, they’ve constantly battled with men for equality or power. To keep them subordinated, the media- usually male- use their representations to “symbolically annihilate” (Tuchman, G.) them. These representations of women are also seen in American family sitcoms from Father Knows Best to recent shows like “Everybody Hates Chris” where family roles and ultimately women’s roles in the home are constantly changing.
The 1940’s representations of women were created by the elite to subordinate them, as their rising power was a concern in society. During the war, all the men were fighting so women left their housewife role to do jobs to keep society running for when the men came back. When they did come back, the women had higher expectation and wanted more control and power over what they wanted. This led to the know representation of women “femme fatale”. This representation was first seen in film noirs and now known as one of its conventions. The word translates to “deadly woman” as she was manipulative, seductive and money or power driven. An example of this is Phyllis from “Double Indemnity” (1944). To the male protagonist, she is beautiful and innocent, which leads him to help her achieve what she wants, which involves killing another man. But to the audience, it is clear her intentions are sinister through how effectively she is manipulating the protagonist. Especially to a male audience, this would make them not trust women and ultimately subordinate them. A Marxist and a Feminist would argue that this also shows that hegemony – the “idea of domination of one group over another" (Gramsci, A.) - does exist in society as in fear, the men dominated and ultimately subordinated the women. Therefore, it can be said representations reflect the social and political concerns of society, as the 1904’s poorly represented women, as they were feared of taking control.
The 1950’s had a representation of women as house wives, but also a complete family that only functioned in one way, which could suggest this representation, was model a “perfect family”.The 1950’s sitcom “Father Knows best” showed how a perfect family should be; the mother was the housewife, the doting daughter that aspired to be like her, signified by the fact they were dressed similar. The father is the breadwinner, who comes home from work to see a loving family, and the son, who again is dressed the same, aspires to be like him. A Marxist would argue that these representations would have been constructed in order to maintain order in society where the men were in control of the family, and the women would adhere to his rules. Even the title has hegemonic vales as “Father Knows Best” almost dictates power to the male figure.
More recent representations of women have reflected their aspirations of equality within society. For example “Doghouse” (2009) follows a group of guys, who badly treat their women, to a remote area where female zombies attack. This film uses the horror form to create a powerful message, as these zombie women are out to get these men for treating women badly. One of the first zombies seen is a corpse bride attempting to attack with a knife. The corpse bride instantly signifies a spinster, who possibly didn’t get married or was left at the altar by a man, highlighting her reasons for revenge. This dominant representation of bitter but sad and lonely women has been subverted and challenged as she is now actively trying to gain equality. It could be said by killing these men they are removing men who subordinate and therefore restoring gender equality. This corpse bride has a knife and stabs Danny Dyer’s character, who out of all the men is the most misogynistic. This phallic symbol could foreshadow women’s aspirations of equality and acts as a painful warning to men - as he screams when his hand gets stabbed. There are plural readings in this text as some may argue it’s a feminist text, as like the theory, these women are attempting to gain gender equality. Some might argue it’s a post feminist text, as where these men are misogynistic, the women attempt to destroy these men in order to regain equality. However, As the genre is a satirical horror, some may argue it’s another way of subordinating women, as they are “zombies”, feared monsters who are mindlessly attacking men with little purpose or result. Therefore, this does suggest representations are constructed to reflect social issues as the text is focused on gender equality for women.
Like Doghouse, The Simpson's takes its family stereotypes and adds a contemporary twist, which aims to break these traditions and reflect our diverse society. The set up of the family is simple and similar to Father Knows Best from the 1950's; the father is the breadwinner, the mother is a housewife, and they have three children, 2 girls and a boy. However, some of these representations are subverted, such as the father is lazy, as we often see him sleeping over a box of doughnuts at work in a dangerous power plant. Maggie is the baby who can't talk or walk, but often is seen doing things like fighting other babies with a broken baby bottle. Though these representations are exaggerated and clearly constructed, they do have a purpose. They aim to breakdown any sort of historical stereotype to release groups from expectations. However, some may argue that as the show has be running for so long in many countries, these representations are becoming fixed and are creating newer dominant representations of gender, especially towards men.
Though The Simpson is a sitcom and full of comedy, it sometimes uses characters to reflect contemporary issues and concerns. For example, in the episode 'Homer’ phobia, Homer is forced to deal with homosexuality, and his responses or lack of them at first, reflect peoples attitudes to it in society. At first homer is unaware of the new shop owner John's sexuality. He suggests inviting him and his wife to their home, but Marge says "I don't think John has a wife". This lack of understanding or awareness of John's sexuality could be a metaphor for how society ignores or rejects that people are gay. When Marge tells Homer John is gay, his first response is to scream and say "Oh my god! Oh my god". The institution cleverly reflects some people's negative attitudes towards it. In society "it seems that gender is determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation" (Butler, J.), or gender is “a costume, a mask, a straight jacket” (Lerner, G.) that the media create and society adhere to. However, this episode attempts to challenge this dominant reading about gender and sex.
Though many of these shows appear to reflect the current issues within society, it could be argued that they are only there for entertainment. In particular, Doghouse and The Simpsons latch onto what’s current in society and rather than take a viewpoint, they mock the weaker or subordinated group. For example, Doghouse could be seen as mocking women who are the subordinated group within the film, pushing them down further. Similarly in The Simpsons, it could be argued that the show has strong American comedic values that involve explicitly targeting groups and mocking them through the ignorant and sometimes shocking represented characters like Homer and d Bart.
To conclude, I think that media representations do reflect social and political concerns. In the past, they were unfortunately used to subordinate or create fixed ideologies about how groups should be. This reflects the ridge structure of society in the past, where men were in control and in terms of the hypodermic needle theory; they injected their ideologies and passed it onto everyone else. Now due to the democracy of the internet and other aspects of society, the media uses representations to reflect the diverse nature of society. They are sometimes used to highlight current issues and make us open our eyes to our own ignorance and taboo subjects. Other times they are used just to create humour, to make us understand each other in a relaxed and informal way.
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
“Digital media have in many ways changed how we consume media products”. Who do you think benefits the most- audiences or producers?
New and digital media has had a major impact in various different areas in our society. Institutions with old media products such as print news and TV broadcasting, have had to adapt to the new platform; e-media, in order to obtain and increase the amount of consumers. Not only are consumers consuming media, but the existence of e-media and web 2.0 has allowed them to become producers, creating user generated content, or UGC. Common critical issues and debates concerning new and digital media, is whether institutions of old media can survive on the e media platform when it’s being bombarded with thousands of pages from normal people; so who can really benefit most from the changes?
The impact of digital media on TV broadcasting has lead to the availability of TV content on the internet, which makes consuming TV products much easier for audiences. Audiences no longer need to stick to the rigidness of scheduling and therefore do not have to be overpowered with control from the institution. Much of the TV content is now available on the internet, either from the broadcasting institution’s own website or other hosting sites. For example, Channel 4’s TV shows are available on channel4.co.uk/shows or even hosted by YouTube, PlayStation 3, Virgin Media and more recently BBC iPlayer. This content is available to audiences all the time and due to the convergence of technology, they can now consume with their portable product such as a mobile or tablet almost anywhere in the world. As a result this widely and easily accessible content means viewing TV content can happen where and whenever audiences choose to consume.
As TV content is free online, many assume audiences always expect free content and will do things like opt out of the license fee so institutions like the BBC will lose out, but that isn’t always the case and there are possible opportunities for the institution to benefit from it. Micropayment is a small business for paying small fees for TV content, which has often been criticised as audiences are too comfortable with watching free content. However, according to the entertainment company, Freemantle Media, their research says audience are “willing to pay small amounts for on-demand TV programmes from 5p up to as high as £2”. This infers that pay-walls and micropayments could have a successful place online because the institutions will benefit from the audience who are willing to pay for an online service. This has been a similar idea of Rupert Murdoch who has added a pay-wall for his successful and well regarded online version of the news newspaper, The Times (thetimes.co.uk/tto/news). The success of the pay-wall hasn’t been fully analysed but the institution expected a loss of 90% of consumers, but so far has only lost a third. Therefore, if institutions decide to put up a pay-wall for TV it would be beneficial as it is clear that audiences are happy to pay for TV if they choose not to stick to scheduling.
Due to the introduction of web 2.0, audiences are able to be more involved with creating and sharing information which has had an impact on news. Consumers are becoming more active and want to have an input in what they and others consume. As a result, the Guardian newspaper online (theguardian.co.uk) has a section called “comment is free” where audiences can comment on articles and create their own discussions. This shows how the institutions are willing to adapt to audience’s needs and therefore benefit both consumers and themselves.
Some argue that institutions are losing out due to citizen journalism, but it can benefit both the consumer and the producer. When audiences share on the internet, it seems news is beginning to lose its place in terms of its importance. Audiences trust citizen journalism as much as news institutions as they provide different accounts and angles of an event. That’s why the journalist researching the Ian Tomlinson case was successful because he embraced the “mutualisation of news. The guardian journalist, Paul Lewis, came across someone who had filmed Tomlinson getting beaten up by the police and later that day Tomlinson died of a heart attack. Without the user generated content from the citizen journalist, the police wouldn’t have discovered what had happened to Tomlinson, which shows that new and digital media can be benefit both producers and consumers.
The impact of digital media on TV broadcasting has lead to the availability of TV content on the internet, which makes consuming TV products much easier for audiences. Audiences no longer need to stick to the rigidness of scheduling and therefore do not have to be overpowered with control from the institution. Much of the TV content is now available on the internet, either from the broadcasting institution’s own website or other hosting sites. For example, Channel 4’s TV shows are available on channel4.co.uk/shows or even hosted by YouTube, PlayStation 3, Virgin Media and more recently BBC iPlayer. This content is available to audiences all the time and due to the convergence of technology, they can now consume with their portable product such as a mobile or tablet almost anywhere in the world. As a result this widely and easily accessible content means viewing TV content can happen where and whenever audiences choose to consume.
As TV content is free online, many assume audiences always expect free content and will do things like opt out of the license fee so institutions like the BBC will lose out, but that isn’t always the case and there are possible opportunities for the institution to benefit from it. Micropayment is a small business for paying small fees for TV content, which has often been criticised as audiences are too comfortable with watching free content. However, according to the entertainment company, Freemantle Media, their research says audience are “willing to pay small amounts for on-demand TV programmes from 5p up to as high as £2”. This infers that pay-walls and micropayments could have a successful place online because the institutions will benefit from the audience who are willing to pay for an online service. This has been a similar idea of Rupert Murdoch who has added a pay-wall for his successful and well regarded online version of the news newspaper, The Times (thetimes.co.uk/tto/news). The success of the pay-wall hasn’t been fully analysed but the institution expected a loss of 90% of consumers, but so far has only lost a third. Therefore, if institutions decide to put up a pay-wall for TV it would be beneficial as it is clear that audiences are happy to pay for TV if they choose not to stick to scheduling.
Due to the introduction of web 2.0, audiences are able to be more involved with creating and sharing information which has had an impact on news. Consumers are becoming more active and want to have an input in what they and others consume. As a result, the Guardian newspaper online (theguardian.co.uk) has a section called “comment is free” where audiences can comment on articles and create their own discussions. This shows how the institutions are willing to adapt to audience’s needs and therefore benefit both consumers and themselves.
Some argue that institutions are losing out due to citizen journalism, but it can benefit both the consumer and the producer. When audiences share on the internet, it seems news is beginning to lose its place in terms of its importance. Audiences trust citizen journalism as much as news institutions as they provide different accounts and angles of an event. That’s why the journalist researching the Ian Tomlinson case was successful because he embraced the “mutualisation of news. The guardian journalist, Paul Lewis, came across someone who had filmed Tomlinson getting beaten up by the police and later that day Tomlinson died of a heart attack. Without the user generated content from the citizen journalist, the police wouldn’t have discovered what had happened to Tomlinson, which shows that new and digital media can be benefit both producers and consumers.
Monday, 7 March 2011
The Mutualisation of News
Newspapers use to "operate a "tablet of stone" model of journalism". This is where the journalists present their own information and ideologies with very limited input from the reader
Due to the introduction of the internet, "citizen journalism" has allowed equality of production between journalists and readers.
Journalists are said to be struggling with the lack of power they get from shared production, but institutions are now trying to create a community of producers and consumers can work together.
They want to encourage people to consume more as well as produce.
Social networking sites such as twitter enable people to create media outside the organised media such as newspapers.
The Guardian has "682,000 followers on Twitter " which is double the print consumers, showing the importance of citizen journalism and the role of the internet in modern society.
There are some negatives with citizen journalism; there is no way to monitor information produced and published. This means that journalist can only use citizen journalism as a primary source that has to be verified.
An example of citizen journalims benefiting the news is the Ian Tomlinson case. Journalist Paul lewis wasn't convinced by the cause of Ian's death stated by the police, so decided to investigate on his own. After searching, he came across someone who filmed the assult on Ian by the police and was published online.
Due to the introduction of the internet, "citizen journalism" has allowed equality of production between journalists and readers.
Journalists are said to be struggling with the lack of power they get from shared production, but institutions are now trying to create a community of producers and consumers can work together.
They want to encourage people to consume more as well as produce.
Social networking sites such as twitter enable people to create media outside the organised media such as newspapers.
The Guardian has "682,000 followers on Twitter " which is double the print consumers, showing the importance of citizen journalism and the role of the internet in modern society.
There are some negatives with citizen journalism; there is no way to monitor information produced and published. This means that journalist can only use citizen journalism as a primary source that has to be verified.
An example of citizen journalims benefiting the news is the Ian Tomlinson case. Journalist Paul lewis wasn't convinced by the cause of Ian's death stated by the police, so decided to investigate on his own. After searching, he came across someone who filmed the assult on Ian by the police and was published online.
Saturday, 12 February 2011
12. Relevant Theories to TV Broadcasting
Consider the theoretical perspectives in relation to the impact of new and digital media in TV broadcasting.
Marxism
This theory applies because the TV broadcast instituions are trying to obtain their power as media institutions by presenting broastcasted TV shows on E Media as well as Broadast.
Globalisation
Again, these institions are using new technologies to broadcast their shows to make consumption for audiences easier. This seems to be applicable to other countries around the world as other TV broadcast instituions are using the e media platform to broadcast their tv shows. For undeveloped countries, they are unable to use and share this use of technology to enhance audience consumption of TV broadcast.
Pluralism
This idea that institutions create fixed ideas for audiences isnt true and makes the new and digital changes in TV broadcast pluralistic for audiences. Audiences can consume what they want, when they want and take from it what they please: this shows how active audiences are.
Marxism
This theory applies because the TV broadcast instituions are trying to obtain their power as media institutions by presenting broastcasted TV shows on E Media as well as Broadast.
Globalisation
Again, these institions are using new technologies to broadcast their shows to make consumption for audiences easier. This seems to be applicable to other countries around the world as other TV broadcast instituions are using the e media platform to broadcast their tv shows. For undeveloped countries, they are unable to use and share this use of technology to enhance audience consumption of TV broadcast.
Pluralism
This idea that institutions create fixed ideas for audiences isnt true and makes the new and digital changes in TV broadcast pluralistic for audiences. Audiences can consume what they want, when they want and take from it what they please: this shows how active audiences are.
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
10. Media Effects, Regulation and Censorship
What issues may there be regarding media effects, regulation or censorship as a result of changes due to new a digital media?
Regulation and censorship
They need to verify the audience's age for particular shows
e.g. BBC iPlayer- when playing a programme with adult content it asks for age to be 16+ and audiences have to agree their age is suitable.
There is also the oppotunity for parent lock, where a password is needed to watch adult content shows. This however only relies on audiences to sign up to it.
Regulation and censorship
They need to verify the audience's age for particular shows
e.g. BBC iPlayer- when playing a programme with adult content it asks for age to be 16+ and audiences have to agree their age is suitable.
There is also the oppotunity for parent lock, where a password is needed to watch adult content shows. This however only relies on audiences to sign up to it.
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
8. Political and Social Implications
What are the political and social implications of the new technologies and the methods of their consumption?
To regulate the sutability of shows for audiences, they verify the audience's age
e.g. BBC iPlayer- when playing a programme with adult content it asks for age to be 16+ and audiences have to agree their age is suitable.
There is also the oppotunity for parent lock, where a password is needed to watch adult content shows. This however only relies on audiences to sign up to it.
To regulate the sutability of shows for audiences, they verify the audience's age
e.g. BBC iPlayer- when playing a programme with adult content it asks for age to be 16+ and audiences have to agree their age is suitable.
There is also the oppotunity for parent lock, where a password is needed to watch adult content shows. This however only relies on audiences to sign up to it.
7. Concerns and considerations
What concerns/considerations are there (if any) for the media institutions involved in your case study as a result of the impact of new and digital media?
Losing TV audiences to Online TV- This could result in people not paying for TV licence. The BBC would lose out on funding!
TV broadcasters have to consider the needs of target audience, in order to appeal to them.
E.g. Audiences are expecting the things they consume to be more interactive
BBC's solution: Add a chat service to BBC iPlayer to make viewing programmes more of a social experience.
E.g. Audiences want to consume texts easily, whenever they choose
Institutions solutions: Their shows are available on the offical websites and other websites
Losing TV audiences to Online TV- This could result in people not paying for TV licence. The BBC would lose out on funding!
TV broadcasters have to consider the needs of target audience, in order to appeal to them.
E.g. Audiences are expecting the things they consume to be more interactive
BBC's solution: Add a chat service to BBC iPlayer to make viewing programmes more of a social experience.
E.g. Audiences want to consume texts easily, whenever they choose
Institutions solutions: Their shows are available on the offical websites and other websites
Monday, 7 February 2011
6. Audience Response
How have the audience responded to changes? Is there more customer choice? Is there evidence of a more pluralistic model? What evidence do you have to support this?
All three insitutions provide more viewing choices for audiences. After the deregulation of TV, more channels have become more available and the BBC, ITV and C4 have taken advantage of the available channels. This provides more choice for audiences as they can view an excessive range of broadcasted shows when they choose to.
ITV
ITV1
ITV1 HD
ITV1 +1
ITV2
ITV2 +1
ITV3
ITV3 +1
ITV4
ITV4 +1
BBC
BBC One
BBC Two
BBC Three
BBC Four
BBC One HD
BBC HD
Channel 4
Channel 4
4 HD
Channel 4 +1
E4
E4 HD
E4 +1
More 4
4Music
Film 4
Film 4 HD
Film 4 +1
There is more of a pluralistic model because audiences consume media texts as they choose as audiences are becoming more active. They also choose what gratifications they take from the text too. As audiences are more demanding, in terms of what they consume, this oppotunity to consume what they want means there is a positive response to changes.
All three insitutions provide more viewing choices for audiences. After the deregulation of TV, more channels have become more available and the BBC, ITV and C4 have taken advantage of the available channels. This provides more choice for audiences as they can view an excessive range of broadcasted shows when they choose to.
ITV
ITV1
ITV1 HD
ITV1 +1
ITV2
ITV2 +1
ITV3
ITV3 +1
ITV4
ITV4 +1
BBC
BBC One
BBC Two
BBC Three
BBC Four
BBC One HD
BBC HD
Channel 4
Channel 4
4 HD
Channel 4 +1
E4
E4 HD
E4 +1
More 4
4Music
Film 4
Film 4 HD
Film 4 +1
There is more of a pluralistic model because audiences consume media texts as they choose as audiences are becoming more active. They also choose what gratifications they take from the text too. As audiences are more demanding, in terms of what they consume, this oppotunity to consume what they want means there is a positive response to changes.
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
4. Audience size
Is the size of the audience any different now than before the impact of new and digital media in TV broadcasting?
Due to the fact that audiences have a lot more control over what they consume and when they consume it, it has arguably widened the audiences, as scheduling limited audience viewing times.
3. Distribution and exhibition
What impact has there been on how TV broadcaster have to produce, distribute and exhibit texts? Refer to case study example.
Production:
Distribution and exhibition: Shows are being distributed to more institutions and exhibited by them. This allows the tv broadcaster to keep in contact with their audiences, fulfilling their needs on the platfom they desire, such as broadcast or E media.
Case Study: Channel 4
Channel 4 distribute and exhibit their shows to other institutions such as YouTube, tvcatchup.com etc
Production:
Distribution and exhibition: Shows are being distributed to more institutions and exhibited by them. This allows the tv broadcaster to keep in contact with their audiences, fulfilling their needs on the platfom they desire, such as broadcast or E media.
Case Study: Channel 4
Channel 4 distribute and exhibit their shows to other institutions such as YouTube, tvcatchup.com etc
2. Audience consumption
What impact has there been on the way in which the audience now consume TV broadcasted shows? How does it differ from the past?
Social: Societies needs to consume things when ever they please comes from the interative nature of the internet e.g. Web 2.0. Audiences are becoming more active in what they consume and now produce.
Historical: Audiences use to stick to the scheduling set by the institution, but now catch up services allow audiences to consume TV texts whenever they please- usually within 30 days of it broadcasting on TV.
There is even more flexibility with PRVs as audiences can now consume what they what, when they want and can access them for as long as they want e.g. recording a film on TV means audiences dont have to buy it but can view and record it onto a disc if they choose to.
Economical: The internet allows things to be accessed for free. Audiences are becoming use to it and expect things for free. This is having a negative impact on TV broadcasting and more and more people are relying on broadband to give them free content rather than digitial TV.
Social: Societies needs to consume things when ever they please comes from the interative nature of the internet e.g. Web 2.0. Audiences are becoming more active in what they consume and now produce.
Historical: Audiences use to stick to the scheduling set by the institution, but now catch up services allow audiences to consume TV texts whenever they please- usually within 30 days of it broadcasting on TV.
There is even more flexibility with PRVs as audiences can now consume what they what, when they want and can access them for as long as they want e.g. recording a film on TV means audiences dont have to buy it but can view and record it onto a disc if they choose to.
Economical: The internet allows things to be accessed for free. Audiences are becoming use to it and expect things for free. This is having a negative impact on TV broadcasting and more and more people are relying on broadband to give them free content rather than digitial TV.
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
BBC iPlayer
http://www.which.co.uk/technology/tv-and-dvd/guides/online-tv/bbc-iplayer/
You can download and watch shows on iPlayer up to seven days after they air on TV
Using BBC iPlayer. BBC iPlayer is the most well known online TV on-demand service.
You can catch up with BBC programmes from the past week that you've missed or want to watch again. The iPlayer incorporates a media player, and an electronic programme guide (EPG).
It's also available to Virgin Media customers who can access BBC iPlayer on their TV by pressing the red button while watching any BBC channel, and on some Freesat set-top boxes and PVRs in a similar manner.
Ways to watch BBC iPlayer
There's a variety of ways to watch online TV with BBC iPlayer. If you're in the UK with an internet connection you can do the following:
1. Watch shows from the past seven days on the iPlayer website through Click to Play (streaming);
2. Download TV programmes and store them on your computer for up to 30 days;
access BBC iPlayer on certain mobile phones
3. Load downloaded shows onto compatible portable media players;
watch and download HD programmes;
4. Watch all the BBC channels live online.
HD TV using BBC iPlayer
The BBC's iPlayer is the first free online TV service to offer high-definition (HD) TV programmes. Viewers with an HD television or PC monitor can watch streamed HD content online or download HD programmes to watch later.
Virgin Media customers can also view BBC iPlayer HD content through the television if you have a Virgin Media V+ HD box and an HD-ready TV.
HD download dangers
HD files are larger than standard-definition programmes, so experts are warning consumers to be careful that they don't exceed any download limits set by their broadband provider.
Which? has surveyed thousands of broadband customers about their service – find the best packages and compare download limits in our broadband review.
iPlayer users can access a full range of BBC TV channels
What you can watch with BBC iPlayer online TV
The iPlayer shows programmes from each of the BBC's terrestrial and Freeview channels over the internet, including BBC1, BBC2 and CBBC.
Users can download and watch TV shows for up to seven days after they air on TV. Downloaded TV programmes can be stored and watched for up to 30 days if your computer supports the BBC iPlayer desktop.
As with rival broadcasters, some BBC TV content such as films, music and sporting events are not available to watch using the iPlayer because of rights issues. But the majority of BBC-made or commissioned television, such as soaps and drama series, are available.
BBC iPlayer social features
The BBC iPlayer has had of a facelift, with new features added. Two of these encourage connecting with your friends whilst watching BBC shows, making using the player a less insular experience.
Viewers can now recommend shows to their friends via social networks such as Facebook, adding personalised comments.
If you fancy watching shows with your friends, you can use the new messenger widget, which incorporates Windows Live Messenger.
This allows viewers to message their friends in real time as they watch the show, commenting on what's happening on screen. To use this function, it is necessary to have a Windows Live Messenger account.
These new features are currently only available in the beta version of the site, which can be found here on the BBC website.
How to watch BBC iPlayer on the go
iPhone 3G users can watch streamed iPlayer content online
Online TV programmes can also be downloaded from BBC iPlayer to a range of portable media players and mobile phones for viewing on the move. You can play iPlayer downloads on mobile gadgets supporting Windows Media digital rights management (Windows DRM).
Compatible devices for iPlayer downloads include the Nokia N96 mobile phone and Apple's iPhone 3G, Sony Walkman E and S series, and the Archos Internet Media Tablet. You can download TV content directly onto an internet-capable device or onto your PC before side-loading it on to a compatible portable media player.
To find out if your mobile device can play BBC iPlayer TV programmes, check the manufacturer’s manual. You can also find a list of compatible devices here on the BBC website.
Apple iPhone users can watch streamed BBC iPlayer content online when connected via a broadband Wi-Fi connection.
BBC iPlayer on Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3: In November 2009, the BBC iPlayer launched on the Wii in the form of a dedicated Wii channel. Connect your Wii to the internet and you can download the BBC iPlayer from the Wii Shop Channel.
The BBC iPlayer service is also available on Sony's Playstation 3. You can't download programmes, but you can stream them.
Broadband: Online TV, channel 4 on Demand
Channel 4's 4oD service offers a range of free content
Channel 4's 4oD online TV service allows you to watch most Channel 4 shows from the previous 30 days free of charge. There's also a range of older shows available from the Channel 4 archive, such as classic episodes of Brookside.
4oD is also available through some digital TV providers including BT Vision and Virgin Media.
As the shows are streamed directly to your PC as you watch, your broadband connection will have to be fast and reliable.
4oD is now available on YouTube, via their dedicated channel. The shows are sorted into their specific categories, such as comedy, drama and documentaries.
We've surveyed thousands of broadband customers about their service so to find the best package for you check out the Which? broadband review.
4oD on the PlayStation 3
In December 2010, 4oD was launched on the PlayStation 3. Owners can now watch content from the service free of charge on their console.
4oD can be accessed by signing into a Playstation Network Account, and selecting the TV icon on the Xcross Media Bar.
What you'll need to watch Channel 4oD online TV
To stream TV programmes to watch from a PC or laptop, you'll need a broadband internet connection and the following:
The latest version of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X
A recent version of a recommended browser: 4oD recommends Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher, or the latest versions of Firefox or Safari
An up-to-date version of Flash to view the shows: Adobe Flash 9.0.124 or higher. Mac users will need Adobe Flash 10.
Most PC, Mac and Linux users can access streamed online programmes using 4oD Catch-Up.
Channel 4's 4oD online TV service allows you to watch most Channel 4 shows from the previous 30 days free of charge. There's also a range of older shows available from the Channel 4 archive, such as classic episodes of Brookside.
4oD is also available through some digital TV providers including BT Vision and Virgin Media.
As the shows are streamed directly to your PC as you watch, your broadband connection will have to be fast and reliable.
4oD is now available on YouTube, via their dedicated channel. The shows are sorted into their specific categories, such as comedy, drama and documentaries.
We've surveyed thousands of broadband customers about their service so to find the best package for you check out the Which? broadband review.
4oD on the PlayStation 3
In December 2010, 4oD was launched on the PlayStation 3. Owners can now watch content from the service free of charge on their console.
4oD can be accessed by signing into a Playstation Network Account, and selecting the TV icon on the Xcross Media Bar.
What you'll need to watch Channel 4oD online TV
To stream TV programmes to watch from a PC or laptop, you'll need a broadband internet connection and the following:
The latest version of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X
A recent version of a recommended browser: 4oD recommends Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher, or the latest versions of Firefox or Safari
An up-to-date version of Flash to view the shows: Adobe Flash 9.0.124 or higher. Mac users will need Adobe Flash 10.
Most PC, Mac and Linux users can access streamed online programmes using 4oD Catch-Up.
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Demand for 5p online TV shows
UK consumers would be willing to pay up to £2 to watch TV programmes online, according to entertainment company FreemantleMedia.
Consumers would be happy to pay a small fee to watch TV programmes online, according to the entertainment company behind shows such as The X Factor, Britain's Got Talent and The Bill. FreemantleMedia claims its research demonstrates that viewers are willing to pay small amounts for on-demand TV programmes from 5p up to as high as £2. “Micropayments as an online business model have often been attacked as unworkable because internet users are used to free content,” said Tony Cohen, chief executive at Freemantle. “But while online viewers have a huge appetite for programming many would use legal services if they were available.” The recent Digital Britain report said the Technology Strategy Board is to work with industry partners such as Freemantle and ITV to research the feasibility of a low-cost on-demand pay-per-view model. "For micropayments to work, we need to provide a pain-free, one-click service for users," added Cohen. "Freemantle, together with others in the sector, is funding a usability study for such a service and we should have the results in the autumn." How much would you pay for TV programmes online? Have your say in the Web User Forums
Consumers would be happy to pay a small fee to watch TV programmes online, according to the entertainment company behind shows such as The X Factor, Britain's Got Talent and The Bill. FreemantleMedia claims its research demonstrates that viewers are willing to pay small amounts for on-demand TV programmes from 5p up to as high as £2. “Micropayments as an online business model have often been attacked as unworkable because internet users are used to free content,” said Tony Cohen, chief executive at Freemantle. “But while online viewers have a huge appetite for programming many would use legal services if they were available.” The recent Digital Britain report said the Technology Strategy Board is to work with industry partners such as Freemantle and ITV to research the feasibility of a low-cost on-demand pay-per-view model. "For micropayments to work, we need to provide a pain-free, one-click service for users," added Cohen. "Freemantle, together with others in the sector, is funding a usability study for such a service and we should have the results in the autumn." How much would you pay for TV programmes online? Have your say in the Web User Forums
Video-on-demand to be regulated
Ofcom has announced that from December video-on-demand content such as iPlayer and 4oD will be subject to the same regulations as television broadcasts.
Video-on-demand (VoD) services will be subject to the same regulations as regular television broadcasts by 2010, Ofcom has announced.
This means that the BBC's iPlayer, SkyPlayer, ITV Player, MSN Video, Demand Five and the soon-to-be-launched UK version of Hulu will be regulated by 19 December 2009 in order to comply with EU rules.
Industry regulator Ofcom has announced that legislation will require VoD services to ensure that material doesn't break rules about discrimination and advertising, for example.
"Ofcom proposes that VoD services are regulated by the industry body, the Association for Television On Demand (ATVOD), and that advertising included in those services, is regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)," Ofcom said in a statement.
One service that will not come under the remit of the new regulations will be YouTube, which Ofcom defines as a site that hosts "unmoderated user-generated material".
However, several major broadcasters have official channels on YouTube, so the site doesn't purely host unmoderated material.
Ofcom is currently running a consultation on its proposals, which will conclude on 26 October.
Video-on-demand (VoD) services will be subject to the same regulations as regular television broadcasts by 2010, Ofcom has announced.
This means that the BBC's iPlayer, SkyPlayer, ITV Player, MSN Video, Demand Five and the soon-to-be-launched UK version of Hulu will be regulated by 19 December 2009 in order to comply with EU rules.
Industry regulator Ofcom has announced that legislation will require VoD services to ensure that material doesn't break rules about discrimination and advertising, for example.
"Ofcom proposes that VoD services are regulated by the industry body, the Association for Television On Demand (ATVOD), and that advertising included in those services, is regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)," Ofcom said in a statement.
One service that will not come under the remit of the new regulations will be YouTube, which Ofcom defines as a site that hosts "unmoderated user-generated material".
However, several major broadcasters have official channels on YouTube, so the site doesn't purely host unmoderated material.
Ofcom is currently running a consultation on its proposals, which will conclude on 26 October.
BBC bids for online catchup service for UK's radio stations
• 'Radio Plus' could offer pre-record services
• Idea part of BBC's effort to help out struggling rivals
Jane Martinson The Guardian, Monday 23 March 2009 Article historyWant to know whether the love-lorn listener got lucky on Flirty at 8.30 this morning? Or would you like to series link every episode of the Archers from your car? Frustrated radio listeners may soon be able to access nearly every radio station in the country via a single online service under plans being drawn up by the BBC.
After meetings between senior executives at the corporation and in commercial radio, Tim Davie, the BBC's head of audio and music, believes an online radio player open to all broadcast radio providers could be available within the year. So, instead of consumers having to search for commercial stations such as Capital Radio or Heart FM on individual websites, they will be able to find them on something similar to iPlayer, the hugely popular online service which offers a 7-day catch up for all BBC output.
Longer term proposals would see a common standard - dubbed "Radio Plus" - that works across digital devices to offer the sort of pre-booking services found on Sky Plus and other personal video recorders. "Why shouldn't we be able to live pause, put it on hard drive, grab stuff from the past seven days and pre-book on radio as well as TV," says Davie, a former marketing executive who took over BBC Radio's most senior editorial job last September.
The preliminary proposals, which would need approval from the BBC Trust, would align the radio sector with the television industry, which already offers catch-up TV and the ability to pre-record programmes from both commercial and BBC channels.
They are also part of a BBC effort to prove that it can help out its cash-strapped rivals by sharing its technology and software and work on a common standard.
Such proposals - which include plans to work with rival ITV on regional news - are all part of the corporation's policy of promoting partnerships which it hopes will deflect from recent calls for its £3.5bn annual licence fee to be frozen or cut.
Davie says open access will avoid "bespoke solutions" and will help UK plc. His boss, BBC director general Mark Thompson, indicated that the BBC's commercial rivals needed help given the dire economic conditions of much of the ad-supported industry: "Is the BBC going to stand by or take tangible, measurable steps to partner, support and share some of its advantages to other media players?" he said.
The BBC move to partner old rivals is understood to have received tacit backing from the government. Communications minister Stephen Carter is keen to promote digital radio, which has failed to make a viable return for most commercial operators.
Andrew Harrison, the chief executive of Radio Centre, the trade body which acts for more than 90% of all radio stations, has been involved in early meetings with the BBC and welcomes the development. He also downplayed competition concerns, saying that the plan was for a standard that would not be closed to small players, unlike the Kangaroo project recently rejected by competition authorities. "The concept for this is entirely open access and will showcase all UK radio," he said.
• Idea part of BBC's effort to help out struggling rivals
Jane Martinson The Guardian, Monday 23 March 2009 Article historyWant to know whether the love-lorn listener got lucky on Flirty at 8.30 this morning? Or would you like to series link every episode of the Archers from your car? Frustrated radio listeners may soon be able to access nearly every radio station in the country via a single online service under plans being drawn up by the BBC.
After meetings between senior executives at the corporation and in commercial radio, Tim Davie, the BBC's head of audio and music, believes an online radio player open to all broadcast radio providers could be available within the year. So, instead of consumers having to search for commercial stations such as Capital Radio or Heart FM on individual websites, they will be able to find them on something similar to iPlayer, the hugely popular online service which offers a 7-day catch up for all BBC output.
Longer term proposals would see a common standard - dubbed "Radio Plus" - that works across digital devices to offer the sort of pre-booking services found on Sky Plus and other personal video recorders. "Why shouldn't we be able to live pause, put it on hard drive, grab stuff from the past seven days and pre-book on radio as well as TV," says Davie, a former marketing executive who took over BBC Radio's most senior editorial job last September.
The preliminary proposals, which would need approval from the BBC Trust, would align the radio sector with the television industry, which already offers catch-up TV and the ability to pre-record programmes from both commercial and BBC channels.
They are also part of a BBC effort to prove that it can help out its cash-strapped rivals by sharing its technology and software and work on a common standard.
Such proposals - which include plans to work with rival ITV on regional news - are all part of the corporation's policy of promoting partnerships which it hopes will deflect from recent calls for its £3.5bn annual licence fee to be frozen or cut.
Davie says open access will avoid "bespoke solutions" and will help UK plc. His boss, BBC director general Mark Thompson, indicated that the BBC's commercial rivals needed help given the dire economic conditions of much of the ad-supported industry: "Is the BBC going to stand by or take tangible, measurable steps to partner, support and share some of its advantages to other media players?" he said.
The BBC move to partner old rivals is understood to have received tacit backing from the government. Communications minister Stephen Carter is keen to promote digital radio, which has failed to make a viable return for most commercial operators.
Andrew Harrison, the chief executive of Radio Centre, the trade body which acts for more than 90% of all radio stations, has been involved in early meetings with the BBC and welcomes the development. He also downplayed competition concerns, saying that the plan was for a standard that would not be closed to small players, unlike the Kangaroo project recently rejected by competition authorities. "The concept for this is entirely open access and will showcase all UK radio," he said.
Catch-up services account for 78% of online TV viewing
29 January 2009 By Danielle Long
Massive growth in traffic to broadcasters' on-demand sites partly comes from new web users attracted by online catch-up
Some 78% of online TV viewing is by people looking to catch up on missed broadcast TV, according to research by TV body Thinkbox.
The survey for the TV marketing body, conducted by Work Research, found UK broadcasters' online TV services, such as the BBC iPlayer and 4oD, were seeing strong growth in user numbers as people looked to catch up on linear TV programmes.
In total 64% of people had watched TV or video content on a computer and 44% had accessed online TV content recently.
While 58% of those who watched TV online were people who use the internet at least once a day at home, broadcaster services were attracting people new to the internet.
Tess Alps, chief executive of Thinkbox, said,"These services from trusted brands are helping to persuade people who may have been reluctant to go online."
She said that while services such as ITV Player had seen significant growth, non-broadcaster sites such as Joost and Videojug had only received minimal users, with just 2-3% of people using them.
"There has been significant growth across all the online TV sites," said Alps. "The broadcasters are sizeable businesses and can run major marketing campaigns. Other players find it quite hard to get audiences." The research found BBC iPlayer was the most popular of the online TV services attracting 75% of viewers, followed by YouTube and ITV Player. Demand Five saw strong growth, overtaking Sky Player.
It also revealed that online TV viewers expect to receive advertising around content, with sponsorship and pre-roll ad formats gaining the highest recall at 53% and 34% respectively, well ahead of in-skin (14%) and live buys (5%).
The majority of online viewing is in the home, but watching at work and on mobile has doubled in the last six months to 6% and 10% respectively.
Alps said that while audiences welcome the convenience of viewing programmes online, they prefer to watch on TV, which is seen as more comfortable and sociable. She predicted there would be more IPTV services like the iPlayer and ITV Player on Virgin Media.
"While 2008 showed phenomenal growth for web-based TV services, it's still growing and I think it will be interesting to see where on-demand will end up," she said.
The online TV research coincides with further Thinkbox findings that reveal broadcast TV viewing i 2008 increased by nearly an hour a week.
Massive growth in traffic to broadcasters' on-demand sites partly comes from new web users attracted by online catch-up
Some 78% of online TV viewing is by people looking to catch up on missed broadcast TV, according to research by TV body Thinkbox.
The survey for the TV marketing body, conducted by Work Research, found UK broadcasters' online TV services, such as the BBC iPlayer and 4oD, were seeing strong growth in user numbers as people looked to catch up on linear TV programmes.
In total 64% of people had watched TV or video content on a computer and 44% had accessed online TV content recently.
While 58% of those who watched TV online were people who use the internet at least once a day at home, broadcaster services were attracting people new to the internet.
Tess Alps, chief executive of Thinkbox, said,"These services from trusted brands are helping to persuade people who may have been reluctant to go online."
She said that while services such as ITV Player had seen significant growth, non-broadcaster sites such as Joost and Videojug had only received minimal users, with just 2-3% of people using them.
"There has been significant growth across all the online TV sites," said Alps. "The broadcasters are sizeable businesses and can run major marketing campaigns. Other players find it quite hard to get audiences." The research found BBC iPlayer was the most popular of the online TV services attracting 75% of viewers, followed by YouTube and ITV Player. Demand Five saw strong growth, overtaking Sky Player.
It also revealed that online TV viewers expect to receive advertising around content, with sponsorship and pre-roll ad formats gaining the highest recall at 53% and 34% respectively, well ahead of in-skin (14%) and live buys (5%).
The majority of online viewing is in the home, but watching at work and on mobile has doubled in the last six months to 6% and 10% respectively.
Alps said that while audiences welcome the convenience of viewing programmes online, they prefer to watch on TV, which is seen as more comfortable and sociable. She predicted there would be more IPTV services like the iPlayer and ITV Player on Virgin Media.
"While 2008 showed phenomenal growth for web-based TV services, it's still growing and I think it will be interesting to see where on-demand will end up," she said.
The online TV research coincides with further Thinkbox findings that reveal broadcast TV viewing i 2008 increased by nearly an hour a week.
1. Ownership and Control
1. Has new and digital media had an impact upon ownership and control of institutions involved in TV broadcasting?
ITV Digital
A digital terrestrial Tv broadcaster
It was launched by Carlton and Granada, independent TV companies
The ITV Digital failed to launch and in 2002, the two companines were forced to merge
Granda owns 2/3 of the company which became ITV plc
ITV and Social networking
ITV bought Friends Reunited in 2005 for 175m
In 2009 it sold it for 25m- a loss of 150m
Sold to Brightsolid Limited- owned by DC comic publishers
Channel 4 and Music channel
Channel 4 teamed up with EMAP to provide a TV music channel- 4Music
They have a revenue f 28m from the team up
Case Study Choice
The impact of new and digital media on TV broadcasting
Text choices:
ITV- commercial channel
BBC- Public Service broadcaster
Channel 4- Public Service Broadcaster
Text choices:
ITV- commercial channel
BBC- Public Service broadcaster
Channel 4- Public Service Broadcaster
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
The Impact of New and Digital Media Theories
Hegemony
"Gramsci used the term hegemony to denote the predominance of one social class over others"
"This represents not only political and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as 'common sense' and 'natural'"
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html
Hegemony refers to the winning of popular consent by the ruling group largely through media representations of the world and its social institutions, such as education, work and the family.
http://media.edusites.co.uk/index.php/article/understanding-ideology/
Marxism
"Marxist theorists tend to emphasize the role of the mass media in the reproduction of the status quo, in contrast to liberal pluralists who emphasize the role of the media in promoting freedom of speech"
"Marxists view capitalist society as being one of class domination; the media are seen as part of an ideological arena in which various class views are fought out, although within the context of the dominance of certain classes; ultimate control is increasingly concentrated in monopoly capital"
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html
Pluralism
"A pluralistic media -- marked by a variety of outlets with diverse ownership and viewpoints, independence and transparency -- is generally believed to contribute to a press that honors the ideals of democracy and reflects diversity within society."
http://ijnet.org/community/groups/10189/media-pluralism-divisive-or-democratic
Cultural Imperialism "accused western powers (mainly the United States and Britain) of maintaining an imbalance in the flow of information from the First World to the Third World. This western dominance of indigenous cultures was a form of ‘coca-colonialism’ designed to maintain western power, prevent development, exploit resources – generally to ‘McDominate’ "
http://www.britishcouncil.org/history-why-cultural-imperialism.htm
Post-colonialism
"Post-colonialism" loosely designates a set of theoretical approaches which focus on the direct effects and aftermaths of colonization"
"Post-colonialism forms a composite but powerful intellectual and critical movement which renews the perception and understanding of modern history, cultural studies, literary criticism, and political economy."
http://www.semioticon.com/virtuals/postcol.htm
Globalisation
"Technological, political, and economic changes which they believe make the world
function in a different way from the way it did twenty or thirty years ago"
"Computers, cell phones, and internet have brought about major changes in world communication. Not only is it easier to communicate across the globe, but countries and regions without access to this new technology are excluded from world developments"
"Over the last thirty years some countries have not only successfully adapted to globalization but they have become the key drivers of the process. The United States, Western Europe and Japan are today the key beneficiaries and leaders of the globalised world. Their historical status as colonial powers, with industrialized societies gave them a significant edge"
http://www.etu.org.za/toolbox/docs/development/globalisation.html
"Gramsci used the term hegemony to denote the predominance of one social class over others"
"This represents not only political and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as 'common sense' and 'natural'"
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html
Hegemony refers to the winning of popular consent by the ruling group largely through media representations of the world and its social institutions, such as education, work and the family.
http://media.edusites.co.uk/index.php/article/understanding-ideology/
Marxism
"Marxist theorists tend to emphasize the role of the mass media in the reproduction of the status quo, in contrast to liberal pluralists who emphasize the role of the media in promoting freedom of speech"
"Marxists view capitalist society as being one of class domination; the media are seen as part of an ideological arena in which various class views are fought out, although within the context of the dominance of certain classes; ultimate control is increasingly concentrated in monopoly capital"
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html
Pluralism
"A pluralistic media -- marked by a variety of outlets with diverse ownership and viewpoints, independence and transparency -- is generally believed to contribute to a press that honors the ideals of democracy and reflects diversity within society."
http://ijnet.org/community/groups/10189/media-pluralism-divisive-or-democratic
Cultural Imperialism "accused western powers (mainly the United States and Britain) of maintaining an imbalance in the flow of information from the First World to the Third World. This western dominance of indigenous cultures was a form of ‘coca-colonialism’ designed to maintain western power, prevent development, exploit resources – generally to ‘McDominate’ "
http://www.britishcouncil.org/history-why-cultural-imperialism.htm
Post-colonialism
"Post-colonialism" loosely designates a set of theoretical approaches which focus on the direct effects and aftermaths of colonization"
"Post-colonialism forms a composite but powerful intellectual and critical movement which renews the perception and understanding of modern history, cultural studies, literary criticism, and political economy."
http://www.semioticon.com/virtuals/postcol.htm
Globalisation
"Technological, political, and economic changes which they believe make the world
function in a different way from the way it did twenty or thirty years ago"
"Computers, cell phones, and internet have brought about major changes in world communication. Not only is it easier to communicate across the globe, but countries and regions without access to this new technology are excluded from world developments"
"Over the last thirty years some countries have not only successfully adapted to globalization but they have become the key drivers of the process. The United States, Western Europe and Japan are today the key beneficiaries and leaders of the globalised world. Their historical status as colonial powers, with industrialized societies gave them a significant edge"
http://www.etu.org.za/toolbox/docs/development/globalisation.html
Tuesday, 7 December 2010
Studying TV sitcoms
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
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
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.
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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
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Q7. The texts and their readings
The Simpsons
Source: http://www.fiftiesweb.com/tv/father-knows-best.htm
Therefore the dominant reading is to see the family as a perfect one.
If there is an alternative reading, it would be that the family are too ideal and therefore unrealistic.
Audiences might take the dominant reading of the text which is to get humor and entertainment from a dysfunctional family- a modern representation of famlies.
Evidence: "With its subversive humor and delightful wit, the series has made an indelible imprint on American pop culture, and the family members have become television icons"
Source: http://www.thesimpsons.com/about/
Oppositional readings would be that it offends an audience with some of its humor and characters.
Evidence: "Bart's rebellious nature, which frequently resulted in no punishment for his misbehavior, led some parents and conservatives to characterize him as a poor role model for children. In schools, educators claimed that Bart was a "threat to learning" because of his "underachiever and proud of it" attitude and negative attitude regarding his education"
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons#Criticism_and_controversy
Everybody Hates Chris
The dominant reading is to find the family entertaining and a exaggerated representation of a black family.
Evidence: "the show provides a very real look at growing up in America - a challenge that demands a discussion of race and class often absent from television today. EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS provides this forum for all generations and does it with great humor and humanity - both embodied by Tyler James Williams, a young man who stands tall among the talents of television."
An oppositional reading would be that the family are represented negativly as they are aggressive and abusive- a stereotype of black people
Hannah Montana
Dominant reading is to take sides with the protagonist (Miley Stuart), and see the brother and sometimes the father as a antagonist (become obsticles for the protagonist).
The oppositional reading might be that the protagonist can appear selfish and unjust within the family as the text is surrounded by her.
Father knows best
"Father Knows Best was the ideal. That was the family we all wanted and no one got. Role models are a good thing, but sometimes I wonder if all those perfect people don't set the bar too high and ultimately leave people feeling cheated somehow."
Source: http://www.fiftiesweb.com/tv/father-knows-best.htm
Therefore the dominant reading is to see the family as a perfect one.
If there is an alternative reading, it would be that the family are too ideal and therefore unrealistic.
Q6. Primary Target audiences
The Simpsons
Family audience- Texts surrounds a family (audience identification)
More male than female audience- mature cartoon shows
Everybody Hates Chris
Mainly black but other ethic groups- Surrounds a black family (audience identification)
Both male and female audiences- identify with both parents
Hannah Montana
Female teen audience- identify with protagonist
Father knows best
Family audience- mostly females
1950's houswife would be watching while male would be working
Family audience- Texts surrounds a family (audience identification)
More male than female audience- mature cartoon shows
Everybody Hates Chris
Mainly black but other ethic groups- Surrounds a black family (audience identification)
Both male and female audiences- identify with both parents
Hannah Montana
Female teen audience- identify with protagonist
Father knows best
Family audience- mostly females
1950's houswife would be watching while male would be working
Monday, 15 November 2010
Q5. Historical Representations of Families
1950's
Married couples with kids- house wife mum and working dad- this reinforced a patriarchal society that existed at the time.
1960's
2 member families- no kids, working man and housewife woman. A range of families e.g. homosexual families. Th ebegining of the feminist movement
1970's
Fewer people got married and there were many divorces. This is because women had more job oppotunities and more rights, therfore didn't have to rely on a husband to survive- a continuation of the feminst movement.
1990's
Very few traditional nuclear families- many extended families e.g. step family members, grandparents ect.
2000's:
Complex and dysfuctional families
Overall changes
From the 1950s to present, families have gone from a traditional nuclear family, to single families to a more complex structured family.
This reflects changes of the patriarchal society due to feminism. Women broke out of their roles of houswives and began to work, changing the family structure in society.
However many modern texts still have the traditional nuclear family, but they are represented as dysfunctional and non-working. this may be because it aims to target a wider audience- people can relate to inditicual characters or the family as a whole.
Married couples with kids- house wife mum and working dad- this reinforced a patriarchal society that existed at the time.
1960's
2 member families- no kids, working man and housewife woman. A range of families e.g. homosexual families. Th ebegining of the feminist movement
1970's
Fewer people got married and there were many divorces. This is because women had more job oppotunities and more rights, therfore didn't have to rely on a husband to survive- a continuation of the feminst movement.
1990's
Very few traditional nuclear families- many extended families e.g. step family members, grandparents ect.
2000's:
Complex and dysfuctional families
Overall changes
From the 1950s to present, families have gone from a traditional nuclear family, to single families to a more complex structured family.
This reflects changes of the patriarchal society due to feminism. Women broke out of their roles of houswives and began to work, changing the family structure in society.
However many modern texts still have the traditional nuclear family, but they are represented as dysfunctional and non-working. this may be because it aims to target a wider audience- people can relate to inditicual characters or the family as a whole.
Q4. Alternative Representations
There is no mother figure in Hannah Montana which subverts stereotypes of a traditional "nuclear family".
In contrast, Everybody Hates Chris challenges the stereotypes of a black family structure. Though the mother and father sometimes fight, the father still lives with the family which subverts black stereotypes. The mother is also a dominant character in the family rather than being subordinated again subverting stereotypes.
These alternative representations aim to reflect modern society realistically: not every family is a traditional one.
In contrast, Everybody Hates Chris challenges the stereotypes of a black family structure. Though the mother and father sometimes fight, the father still lives with the family which subverts black stereotypes. The mother is also a dominant character in the family rather than being subordinated again subverting stereotypes.
These alternative representations aim to reflect modern society realistically: not every family is a traditional one.
Father knows best
1. How are the famlies in these texts represented typically? How is this representation constructed?
The text presents this family through a patriarchal society. The father is the breadwinner who goes to to work, the daughter is mature and caring like the mother, the older son wants to be like the dad (they both dress the same). They have a little girl who
2. What insitutions are involved in these texts and do they affect the representations of these families?
The text presents this family through a patriarchal society. The father is the breadwinner who goes to to work, the daughter is mature and caring like the mother, the older son wants to be like the dad (they both dress the same). They have a little girl who
2. What insitutions are involved in these texts and do they affect the representations of these families?
NBC (now ABC) aired the show, they are a large American network owned by Viacom. As they are a large institution they would have represented the family in a dominat way- a patrarchal society.
3. The role of politics and the media
Again as the institution is large they would have been owned by an elite group who would have enforced a dominate ideology- hegemony.
Hannah Montana (The Stuwarts)
1. How are the famlies in these texts represented typically? How is this representation constructed?
This text shows the family from the teenagers POV rather than a traditional parent POV. Miley always gets what she wants in the family possibly because she is the protagonist and the text is surrounded by her.
Miley: Smart, cheeky, always gets into fights with her brother- a dominat representation of a sister (but usually wins)
Always gets what she wants from her dad by sweet talking- typical stereotype of teen daughters
Jackson: Annoying brother, immature older brohter- typical stereotype of teen boys
Robbie: Easily persuaded by children, lonely, mother and father like qualitues
2. What insitutions are involved in these texts and do they affect the representations of these families?
Hannah Montana is aired on Disney Channel: This is an independant broadcasting company and therefore has its own ideologies presented in its texts. Though the family unconventionally has no mother figure (as she died), it doesn't make it the focus of the text- suggesting that life's difficulties don't always have to be the main focus (postive and optimistic ideologies for young audiences.)
3. The role of politics and the media
Hannah Montana: The father figure plays both parental role e.g. at times he is immature, childish and lazy like stereotypical representations but at times he plays a sensible caring parent (mother like qualities- therefore an androgenous character).
This text shows the family from the teenagers POV rather than a traditional parent POV. Miley always gets what she wants in the family possibly because she is the protagonist and the text is surrounded by her.
Miley: Smart, cheeky, always gets into fights with her brother- a dominat representation of a sister (but usually wins)
Always gets what she wants from her dad by sweet talking- typical stereotype of teen daughters
Jackson: Annoying brother, immature older brohter- typical stereotype of teen boys
Robbie: Easily persuaded by children, lonely, mother and father like qualitues
2. What insitutions are involved in these texts and do they affect the representations of these families?
Hannah Montana is aired on Disney Channel: This is an independant broadcasting company and therefore has its own ideologies presented in its texts. Though the family unconventionally has no mother figure (as she died), it doesn't make it the focus of the text- suggesting that life's difficulties don't always have to be the main focus (postive and optimistic ideologies for young audiences.)
3. The role of politics and the media
Hannah Montana: The father figure plays both parental role e.g. at times he is immature, childish and lazy like stereotypical representations but at times he plays a sensible caring parent (mother like qualities- therefore an androgenous character).
Everybody Hates Chris (The Rocks)
1. How are the famlies in these texts represented typically? How is this representation constructed?
2. What insitutions are involved in these texts and do they affect the representations of these families?
Everybody Hates Chris was broadcasted in Channel 5, MTV Base, MTV UK and Comedy Central: MTV Base has a black ethinic audience, and therefore the text attempts to reflect a steeotypical black family, though exaggerated. All these channels are commercial channels and are able to produce "risky" niche programmes due to the large profits.
3. The role of politics and the media
2. What insitutions are involved in these texts and do they affect the representations of these families?
Everybody Hates Chris was broadcasted in Channel 5, MTV Base, MTV UK and Comedy Central: MTV Base has a black ethinic audience, and therefore the text attempts to reflect a steeotypical black family, though exaggerated. All these channels are commercial channels and are able to produce "risky" niche programmes due to the large profits.
3. The role of politics and the media
This texts appeals to a niche audience due to its representation of ethinc minorities and subordinated groups. However, as the producer of this text is Chris Rock- a well know black comedian, the text was much more recognised for this and therefore became popular.
The Simpsons
1. How are the famlies in these texts represented typically? How is this representation constructed?
The characters are a dominant representation of a family, and the text reinforces this patriarchal society by exaggeraing the stereotypes...
Marge: Very motherly and caring/ stereotypical housewife role/looks after the children
Homer: Immature, irresponsible father/ breadwinner/ yet lazy and simplistic charater
Bart: Mischevious young boy/ childish/ naughty
Lisa: Smart daughter/ sensible/ cares about her education
Maggie: Innocent baby/doesn't do much/ now and then surprises the audience with maturity
2. What insitutions are involved in these texts and do they affect the representations of these families?
The Simpsons is currently broadcast on Channel 4: A terrestrial channel which is accessible to anyone with a TV- this reflects it use of traditional and paticharchal representations of a channel, but are sometimes challenged for humor.
3. The role of politics and the media
The Simpsons: The family representations reflect dominant representations in historical examples e.g. patriarchal society (females are motherly housewives and males are the family money makers). However, these ideologies are challenged e.g. at times the female characters control the father figures/ the fathers are lazy and immature.
The characters are a dominant representation of a family, and the text reinforces this patriarchal society by exaggeraing the stereotypes...
Marge: Very motherly and caring/ stereotypical housewife role/looks after the children
Homer: Immature, irresponsible father/ breadwinner/ yet lazy and simplistic charater
Bart: Mischevious young boy/ childish/ naughty
Lisa: Smart daughter/ sensible/ cares about her education
Maggie: Innocent baby/doesn't do much/ now and then surprises the audience with maturity
2. What insitutions are involved in these texts and do they affect the representations of these families?
The Simpsons is currently broadcast on Channel 4: A terrestrial channel which is accessible to anyone with a TV- this reflects it use of traditional and paticharchal representations of a channel, but are sometimes challenged for humor.
3. The role of politics and the media
The Simpsons: The family representations reflect dominant representations in historical examples e.g. patriarchal society (females are motherly housewives and males are the family money makers). However, these ideologies are challenged e.g. at times the female characters control the father figures/ the fathers are lazy and immature.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
The representation of families in American TV sitcoms
I have chosen to study this topic, because sitcoms are very popular and well known amongst a wide range of audiences. The families in these texts are "traditional" with both mother and father with children and family pets however they are dysfunctinal with exaggerated stereotypes that are well known in society.
All three texts are the broadcast platform:
The Simpsons (1989-present)
Everybody Hates Chris (2005-2009)
Hannah Montanna (2006-present)
Father knows best (1954-1960)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1__b6uyxg
All three texts are the broadcast platform:
The Simpsons (1989-present)
Everybody Hates Chris (2005-2009)
Hannah Montanna (2006-present)
Father knows best (1954-1960)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1__b6uyxg
Theorists
Gaye Tuchman: Symbolic annihilation of women
"largely ignoring women or portraying them in stereotypical roles of victims and/or consumer, the mass media symolically annihilate women"
Source: Book Lane Crothers, Charles Lockheart, "Culture ans Politics: A Reader"
David Gauntlett: Gender representations in the media
Laura Mulvey: Male Gaze
"Mainstream film satisfies especially the male spectator by projecting his desires on the screen. Women are regarded as objects of fetishistic display for male viewer's pleasure"
Source: Book, Carolina Hein, "Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Judith Butler: Gender and Sex
"When the relevant "culture" that "constructs" gender is understod in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation"
Source: Book, Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble: Feminism and subversion of identity"
Stuart Hall: Marxist theorist/Cultural Representations
"the media appear to reflect reality whilst in fact they construct it."
"In a key paper, 'Encoding/Decoding', Stuart Hall (1980), argued that the dominant ideology is typically inscribed as the 'preferred reading' in a media text, but that this is not automatically adopted by readers"
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism11.html
Antonio Gramsci: Hegemony
"The term hergemony has come to be synonimous with the idea of domination of one group over another"
Gramsci at the margins: subjectvitity and subalternity in a theory of hergemony by Kyle Smith, 2010, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/research/gramsci-journal/articles/6-Smith-Eng.pdf
"Hergemony is a more sensitive and therefore a more useful critical term that "domination" which fails to acknowledge the active role of subordinate people in the operation of power"
Antonio Gramsci By Steve Jones, 2006, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PULFz85FDMYC&dq=antonio+gramsci+hegemony&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Anthony Giddens: Structuration
"Structuration theory: the concepts of "structure", "system" and "duality of sturcture"".
"the basic domain of...social sciences...is neither the experience of the actor nor the existance of any form of societial totality"
"Human actitvities are recursive...They are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by themselves as actors."
The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration By Anthony Giddens, http://www.s-as-p.org/files_workshop/lausanne_whittington.pdf
"largely ignoring women or portraying them in stereotypical roles of victims and/or consumer, the mass media symolically annihilate women"
Source: Book Lane Crothers, Charles Lockheart, "Culture ans Politics: A Reader"
David Gauntlett: Gender representations in the media
Laura Mulvey: Male Gaze
"Mainstream film satisfies especially the male spectator by projecting his desires on the screen. Women are regarded as objects of fetishistic display for male viewer's pleasure"
Source: Book, Carolina Hein, "Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Judith Butler: Gender and Sex
"When the relevant "culture" that "constructs" gender is understod in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation"
Source: Book, Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble: Feminism and subversion of identity"
Stuart Hall: Marxist theorist/Cultural Representations
"the media appear to reflect reality whilst in fact they construct it."
"In a key paper, 'Encoding/Decoding', Stuart Hall (1980), argued that the dominant ideology is typically inscribed as the 'preferred reading' in a media text, but that this is not automatically adopted by readers"
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism11.html
Antonio Gramsci: Hegemony
"The term hergemony has come to be synonimous with the idea of domination of one group over another"
Gramsci at the margins: subjectvitity and subalternity in a theory of hergemony by Kyle Smith, 2010, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/research/gramsci-journal/articles/6-Smith-Eng.pdf
"Hergemony is a more sensitive and therefore a more useful critical term that "domination" which fails to acknowledge the active role of subordinate people in the operation of power"
Antonio Gramsci By Steve Jones, 2006, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PULFz85FDMYC&dq=antonio+gramsci+hegemony&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Anthony Giddens: Structuration
"Structuration theory: the concepts of "structure", "system" and "duality of sturcture"".
"the basic domain of...social sciences...is neither the experience of the actor nor the existance of any form of societial totality"
"Human actitvities are recursive...They are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by themselves as actors."
The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration By Anthony Giddens, http://www.s-as-p.org/files_workshop/lausanne_whittington.pdf
Manuel Alvarado
"Television is... the most rewarding medium to use when teaching representations of class because of the contradictions which involve a mass medium attempting to reach all the parts of its class-differentiated audience simultaneously... Its representations of class can perhaps best be approached by teaching how class relations are represented and mediated within different TV genres and forms" (Alvarado et al. 1987: 153)
"Four Key Themes in Racial Representations: exotic, dangerous, humorous, pitied" (Alvarado et al. 1987: 153)
Source: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MC30820/represent.html
Nick Lacey: Media Concepts and semiotics
"At the heart of semiotics is the study of language and how it is the dominant influence shaping human beings' perception of and thoughts about the world."
Image and representation: key concepts in media studies By Nick Lacey
Richard Dyer: Representations of gay people in our culture
Marshall McLuhan: "The Medium is the message" and "globall village"
"If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?"
"To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points, which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip . . . she knows that a "long-legged girl can go places." As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grille on a car. They are date-bated power levers for the management of the male audience"
Todd Kappelman, "Marshall McLuhan: "The Medium is the Message"", http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html#text7
Theodor Adorno
"NEGATIVE DIALECTICS: Adorno believes that the standard mode of human understanding is identity thinking, which means that a particular object is understood in terms of a universal concept. The meaning of an object is grasped when it has been categorized, subsumed under a general concept heading. In opposition to identity thinking, Adorno posits negative dialectics, or non-identity thinking. He seeks to reveal the falseness of claims of identity thinking by enacting a critical consciousness which perceives that a concept cannot identify its true object."
"CRITICAL THEORY: Critical theory is based on the understanding of society as a dialectical entity, and the conviction that "teaching about society can only be developed in the most tightly integrated connection of disciplines; above all, economics, psychology, history and philosophy" (O'Connor 7)."
"AESTHETIC THEORY: Adorno asserts the "priority of the object in art," or what is called a materialist aesthetic, in contrast to the idealist aesthetic of Kant which privileges the subject over the object (Jarvis 99)."
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
How are dominant ideologies of Hip Hop Music videos challeneged in alternative texts?
Firstly, black males in hip hop music videos represented as violence and gang relation. However in this video challenges this ideology and this is signified by the lyrics of the song that oppose these things. The music is an alternative representation as it lacks hip hop music video iconographies such as guns and weapons that would signify violence and gang culture. On the other hand, it could be argued that the text almost parodies the gang crime with the artists: a group of people enforcing their beliefs to wider audiences, however their message is positive instead of a dominant message enforcing capitalism for example.
Secondly, the idea of money and getting “rich quick” is another ideology represented in the hip hop genre as a positive. In contrast, this text doesn’t even bring up the subject of money which instantly signifies it is an alternative representation of the hip hop culture.
Texts from the hip hop genre rely heavily on black stereotypes which are usually negative. Similarly, this text reinforces black stereotypes such as clothing- hoodies, caps and big glasses- and crime which is signified by one of the members of the group getting chased and caught by the police. However, it could be argued that the clothing is used as a way of engaging a hip hop audience, as it is associated with the genre, but then uses this stereotype to challenge other links and associations that come with it, such as violence and sexism. Therefore they represent black people and the genre as having a good side signified by them helping the community in the text.
Male characters in the hip hop genre are presented in negative ways such has: sexist, misogynistic, promiscuous, authoritative, arrogant and narcissistic. In contrast none of these stereotypes are shown, but challenged in the text through the use of the song. This is signified through the equal treatment of the male and female gender in particular the group itself that has a female artist in it. On the other hand, it could be argued that the group represent themselves as authoritative as they have control as an inspirational group with a positive- they could be regarded as leaders in this text instead of followers.
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