Theory Overview

Basic application of theorists

Theorist	Theory	Application
MEDIA LANGUAGE
Roland Barthes	Semiotics	All logos are symbolic codes. Colours often have strong symbolism.  Look out for stereotypical use eg: Red for love, danger, black for evil, blue for trust or male, pink for girls.
Baudrillard	Blurring of reality (postmodern)	All media can be considered a hyper reality – it is not real.  It is a construction.  The lines between reality and the construction are easily blurred.
Todorov	Narrative structure	Does the story start with any sense of equilibrium?  A music video may not.  The narrative moves into disequilibrium and concludes with a new equilibrium.
Steven Neale	Repetition and difference	Genre is created by conventions but the audience needs differences to get any pleasure from it.
Claude Levi-Strauss	Binary Opposites	Do you have opposites where one is more dominant than the other?  Good and evil.  Male and female. Black and white.  These are binary opposites.
AUDIENCE
Stuart Hall	Audience reception	Producers encode a media product in the hope the audience will decode it how they intend.  If the producer has positioned his audience correctly, they will agree to a preferred reading.
Albert Bandura	Social learning and behaviours	We learn social behaviours from watching and copying others.
Gerbner	Cultivation (audience effects)
Jenkins	Fandom	‘fascination and frustration’
Shirky	End of audience	In the digital age the audience has become the producer.  (Think Youtube)
REPRESENTATION
David Gaunlett	Gender & Identity	We, as an active audience model our identity on the media.
Van Zoonen	Feminism restricts female independence.	Our ideas of femininity and masculinity are constructed in our performances of these roles. Gender is ‘what we do’ rather than ‘what we are’. Moreover, Gender is contextual: its meaning changes with cultural and historical contexts.
Hall	Power in representation	The politics of representation.
Judith Butler	Binary view of gender relations	The existence of feminism, intended to liberate women, actually limits them, making a definite male/female spit.
bell hooks	Problematic racial representations.	Representation is a major realm of power for any system of domination.  Identity is always about representation.
Gilroy	Ethnicity & Post-colonialism
INDUSTRIES
Hesmondhalgh	Cultural and creative industries
Curran & Seaton	Concerns of the reader	The industry addresses the concerns of the reader.  Does it?  This is a great point to argue.  Power without responsibility. The owners can push their own views on the audience without any retaliation. (Newspapers especially)
Livingstone & Lunt	Regulation	Regulation is viewed as both good and bad depending on many factors.  This is another good point for argument
CONTEXTS
Cultural		How distinctive is the culture?  How does the media relate to the culture?
Social
Historical		Is the media set in a specific time?  How do value of that time impact on the media?
Economic		Consider class and status or events such as WWII that would affect all the economy.
Political		Does the government have any control?  War, terrorism, Law, police etc.  Newspapers have a political bias.