Staus Symbols of Media Culture

Our media culture, the world of media that we engage with and consume, is replete with status symbols that we can either use or have used against us.  The most obvious are costly media texts (Vogue, The FT, DVD Box Sets, etc) but the volume and form of consumption and the types of media read or consumed are also indicative of social status and the great game of status competition.
Status competition is a deadly serious game and one that is impossible to avoid.  You may not seek to participate in the game of status but that does not prevent others situating you in their games and treating you (poorly or well) accordingly.  In fact it is impossible to escape being classified by others and even the act of active rejection of classification on your part in effect classifies (into those who classify and those who do not (you)) and is therefore the ultimate act of status completion; 'I do not participate in status competition' is the claim of those who consider their status in the field in question to be so far beyond the others around them as to be axiomatic.
Media status competition is a question (following Bourdieu) not just of the volume of media consumed but of the composition of that media.  The volume of media consumption will position an individual in the great game of distinction but may not necessarily always afford a high position in the hierarchy of that game.  Indeed massive and conspicuous consumption of media can be stigmatised and stigmatising rather than distinguishing.  On the level of display this conspicuous consumption of media (through really substantial multi-channel TV subscriptions [especially through dedicated film & sport subscriptions], high bandwidth broadband contracts, expensive mobile phones on expensive monthly contract terms, possession of expensive new media equipment [especially the very wide screen TV], etc) is concerned with display of access to resources (economic capital) and not with social/cultural capital.  It can therefore be used to denigrate those who enact this media-potlatch by those with surplus socio-cultural capital.  This is to say that a strategy of distinction can be mobilised by those of high socio-cultural capital against those of equal (or greater) economic capital who have less socio-cultural capital.  The very display that equates to successful distinction in one field of status competition can be a failing strategy in another.  This is very easy to imagine simply by considering the cultural position of Premiership Football.  Football does not hold a position in the high reaches of the cultural life of England but TV access to it requires just the media-potlatch under discussion; dedicated multi-channel TV equipment (not Freeview) and special (and expensive) subscriptions.
It is this antagonism between groups with different amounts of cultural capital (even if the total volume of capital is equal the unequal composition will come into play) that leads to denigration of the media (and thus cultural) choices of those people located in the lower parts of the cultural hierarchy (of the "they live in council houses but can afford satellite television..." type).  As the lower reaches of the cultural capital hierarchy are, typically, also the lower reaches of the economic capital hierarchy this competition leads to the enactment of symbolic violence against that lower capital volume part of society.  The least powerful feel the double effect of the actual violence of low economic capital (the choice of the necessary) and the symbolic violence of low socio-cultural capital; they have less and are made to suffer shame and disgrace for that lack.
As our society utilises a 'capitalist' mode of resource allocation (i.e. rationing by power of resources) it only notices persons with a certain capital volume and is uninterested in the rest of society and so those who lack and are made to suffer for that lack are not represented by our media and so suffer the final annihilation of not existing in our media society.  The absence of the poor from our media landscape is a brutal expression of the brutality of our social formation.

The Missing The Point Society

The Royal Society of Chemistry have generated great deal of 'news' coverage for their Solve The Italian Job Competition without ever noticing what a horrible display of ignorance of socio-cultural matters in general this represents. The end of The Italian Job is left open to afford the slight possibility that the team get away with the loot because such a possibility was a radical departure from the previously strongly imposed conventions on crime not being allowed to pay. The contrast between the conclusion of The Italian Job (1969) and the conclusions of the great English comedy-heists of a slightly earlier generation [e.g. Two Way Stretch (1960), The League of Gentlemen (1960), The Lady Killers (1955)] could not be clearer. Fictional criminals were not allowed to profit from their crimes because the hegemonic-ethic of society was utterly opposed to such an outcome. So what is breathtaking about the literal cliffhanger ending of The Italian Job is the audacious playing with the ethical conventions of the heist movie not the unstable physical mechanics of the bus (which of course do not exist being just a plot device and an effect of the composition of the text of the film). The inability to recognise that there are no physics to discuss but that there are interesting things about society and culture to consider - not least the extremely nationalistic ideology of the text (which is only slightly undercut by the ironic composition of this nationalistic framework) - suggests an absolute (and deliberate) ignorance of literary studies and theory and of socio-cultural studies and theory more generally. As an approach to media culture it is very reminiscent of the poor deluded fools who try to establish scientific rationales for the 'events' 'reported' in the Bible and other holy works (the ten plagues as side-effects of volcanic activity, the deluge as memory of the formation of the Bosphorus, the star of Bethlehem as comet or nova or both) as though there were a necessary reason for those things to actually have happened.
What is particularly galling about this is that the standards they set for other peoples knowledge and understanding of science are reject by them when it comes to their dealings with other fields of knowledge (e.g. their fear of The Flintstones).
The RSocChem are not alone in this as Sense About Science and the rest of the 'science-communication-industry' are equally guilty of this hypocritical hectoring foolishness when it comes to knowledge of fields of enquiry and understanding beyond their own borders. If we consider Sense About Science's annual pop at celebraty ignorance of science we can see this deliberate ignorance of other fields of knowledge quite clearly.
Consider the following two examples.
First, Delia Smith is disturbingly, praised for keeping out of the politics of food (i.e. GM) but castigated for considering over indulgence in sugar to be a problem and suggesting excluding it from ones diet. The SaS response to this is remarkable and worth quoting in full

Lisa Miles, senior nutrition scientist, British Nutrition Foundation

“Delia, you’ll never get rid of sugar from the diet, nor would you want to, as you consume sugars naturally in many foods such as fruit and milk, which provide us with important nutrients. Also, the causes of obesity are much more complex. Although you’re right, in so far as that if you have too many foods/drinks with high levels of added sugar, it can upset the balance of a healthy diet.”

Note the 'ontological gerrymandering' at the begin of the second line in the move from the cooking term 'sugar' to the nutrition science term 'sugars'. The deliberate transition from singular to plural transforms the meaning of the words. Although these words are connected they do not posses the same meaning here and are, indeed, not even members of the same family resemblance. 'Sugar' here has been used to mean sucrose processed from the plant Sugar Cane and used as an ingredient in cooking - as we would expect from a famous cook. Whereas 'Sugars' has been used to indicate water-soluble carbohydrates - as we would expect from a nutrition scientist. There is a fundamental difference between the two uses of these words and there is no sense in which SaS's criticism of Delia is meaningful. It is not the case that this is ignorance of Wittgenstein on the part of SaS rather it is a wilful display of ignorance of cooking on the part of SaS and there is simply no ignorance of science on the part of Delia Smith to be discussed. Consider what a culinary disaster it would be if you asked a member of the SaS team to pass you the salt when cooking as they would have to pass you some salts; the combination of Lead Diacetate and Copper Sulphate sounds particularly yummy!
Second, we have this gem of wilful ignorance;

It’s unusual to hear celebrities talking about maths, but science sells and Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 is so famous that it even makes a cool album title. Mariah Carey explained her choice of an equation as her latest album title by clarifying that it stood for “emancipation equals Mariah Carey times two”. Dr David Leslie, mathematician “Unfortunately, Mariah has misread the algebra. The two in the equation means c squared, not mc multiplied by two. The correct reading of the equation is E=mcc, so perhaps Mariah's re-interpretation should have been “Emancipation equals Mariah Carey Carey”? I would have been very happy to chat with her and check it out before she went to print.”

There is so much that is outrightly silly about this statement and it displays such blindness to other fields of knowledge that at first I assumed this was some kind of ironic piss taking of Sense About Science's communication project. Now I am forced to accept that this was sincerely meant. I look forward to Dr Leslie giving Garrison Keillor a good talking to about the impossibility of all the children of Lake Wobegon being 'above average' and slapping the producers of Lynx deodorant silly for claiming that the mere act of addition makes women undergo forced and immediate chimerism! The sign in question has marketing effectiveness because it is an icon of the modern world and is immediately recognisable to almost everyone. Their is no 'misreading' of this equation because it is not an composite entity in this case but one icon. In mathematics the five individual components are meaningful as an assemblage whereas in marketing or semiotic terms this is but one whole iconic entity.
The problem of this is that all of the fields of knowledge and understanding essential to communication are deliberately ignored by the professional communicators of scientific knowledge and understanding; which is a useful starting point for a discussion of irony.

IDEOLOGY

Ideology is the science of ideas. However, for us it has a technical meaning and we are really concerned with ideological power when we use this term.

N/B – A Value is an opinion or attitude that an individual or group holds because of talking about or discussion of a subject. A Conviction is an opinion or attitude that an individual or group holds due to its understanding of its experiences. Convictions need not be generated by experiences that happened to an individual. They could come to the individual from the understood experiences of the group. Convictions are much firmer and less open to change than opinions.

How do ideas have power?

The main way that ideas are understood to have power is by ‘manufacturing consent’. This is an idea mainly developed by Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky out of the thinking of the early C.20^th Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.

Manufacturing Consent is a process that attempts to align the understood interests of the mass population with the actual interests of the elite or ruling group in society. The process is intended to replicate the values, attitudes and convictions that the elite or ruling group expresses (rather than actually holds) in the mass population at the expense of that population developing values, attitudes or convictions of its own.

This replication of values and convictions means that the elite or ruling group can then take any action or implement any policy knowing that the mass population has already consented to it. That consent having been manufactured in them by the conquest of their values and convictions by the elite.

In their book Manufacturing Consent Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman summarise the process thus:

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.

The means of Manufacturing Consent

There are four main means of manufacturing consent.

• Generative Propaganda – that attempts to create new values and convictions in the audience. This is very difficult and is thus a weak form of manufacturing consent.

• Re-enforcing Propaganda - that attempts to strengthen, highlight, or raise awareness of pre-existing values and convictions in the audience. This is easier and thus a stronger form of manufacturing consent.
  

• Common Sense – This is not ‘good sense’ but rather the set of incompletely thought through values and convictions we all hold that come to us from the attitudes and experiences of those around us. The most powerful form of manufacturing consent because it is not normally possible to work out where an individual part of the ‘common sense’ has come from.

• The colonisation of the imagination – wherein the understanding of that which is possible is limited to only a certain ‘acceptable’ range of discussion. This is most common in discussion of political and business life.
  

Theorists

There are two main theorists that we need to deal with; Antonio Gramsci & Louis Althusser.

The main line of thinking on ideological analysis of the media comes from Marxist thinkers. The first wave of theory on ideology was founded around the Base-Superstructure model. This is a deterministic model that suggests that the Base (the means and type of economic production) determines the Superstructure (all culture and society). For a capitalist society, therefore, the capitalist mode of production would determine the superstructure and all culture and society would be a means of oppression of labour (the proletariat or working classes).

This Base-Superstructure model is simple, static, and implies both direct oppression and the passivity of the oppressed. For these reasons and for its determinism it is not very useful as a means of studying ideology.

The two ideas to deal with in this are; Althusser’s ‘Interpellation’ and Gramsci’s ‘Hegemony’. In each case the analysis grows from the realisation that in every society there is a ruling group (an elite), which seeks to maintain and replicate (that is perpetuate into future generations) itself. This ruling group cannot stably sustain its dominance through force, violence, and the threat of such alone. What this ruling group requires it that the dominated (the ruled) consent to the rule of the elite. What the ruling group need is to manufacture in the dominated consent to their rule and its maintenance and replication. It is in manufacturing this consent that Ideology and Representation come into play.

If we take Althusser’s Interpellation first, we know that interpellation works on the basis of getting the dominated to ‘misrecognise’ themselves as the authors of the ideological content of a media-text rather than the targets of it (which in truth they are). This is crucial because if the elite can bring the dominated to the point where the ideology (worldview) of the elite is also the (mistaken) ideology of the dominated then the elite will have succeeded in manufacturing consent to their rule. Representation comes into play in this area because the elite (i.e. the ruling group in a society) will generate/create representations of themselves in media-texts and ‘interpellate’ the dominated to misrecognise themselves in that image – to see themselves, wrongly, as members of the elite.

We can see Interpellation in action in the USA where a majority of people believe they earn just a bit more than the mean average salary. This is, of course, mathematically impossible but it is ideologically inevitable. That a majority of Americans have come to believe this is the effect of Interpellation. Representations of the elite have been presented to the dominated and they have been ‘interpellated’ to misrecognise themselves in those images.

Louis Althusser tried to deal with the problem of the passivity of the oppressed in ideological analysis. Althusser was convinced that ideology, rather than being a veil draped over the oppressed, structured peoples lived experience; meaning that ideology played a part in every person’s life from the outset.

Interpellation – Althusser developed the idea of Interpellation, meaning ‘hailing’ or ‘calling’, as a way of explaining how ideological power works. Interpellation implies a process in which a media text ‘hails’ the reader and invites the reader to ‘misrecognise’ themselves in the text and positions the reader as a ‘sovereign autonomous individual’ who cannot be the subject of ideology but must be the author of ideology. Thus the reader actively participates in the ideology of the text.

Turning to Hegemony we must remember that the basis on which it works is that the ruling group (re)present themselves to all the other groups in society as the only group in that society capable of/ willing to organise and run that society so that the needs, wants, and desires of the other groups in society are meet – and that no other group is capable of such government. To this end it is crucial that a majority are of the opinion that they earn ‘slightly more than average’ as this means that they, wrongly, believe they are benefiting from the way in which society is organised rather than being exploited by the way in which society is organised - the very purpose of that social organisation. Representations, of the ruling group by the ruling group aimed at the dominated are crucial to the operation of Hegemony.

Antonio Gramsci lived and worked before Althusser and was concerned with the static nature of the base-superstructure model. His ideas on hegemony were intended to deal with this.

Hegemony – The idea behind hegemony is that not only does the elite impose its will through ideology but also through the presentation of itself as the group best placed and suited to provided for and meet the interests and aspirations of all other social groups, the purpose of this presentation being to establish consent to the rule of the elite as natural (as part of the common sense). This presentation is constantly being re-established and, apparently, re-negotiated as social development occurs. The elites hegemonic presentation will grow to include previously excluded social and status groups (or contract to exclude previously powerful groups) as and when useful to the elite.

LINKS

IDEOLOGY

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/ideology.htm

http://www.mediaknowall.com/alevkeyconcepts/ideology.html

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/ideoldet.html

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/marxism.html

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism01.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

ALTHUSSER

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism09.html

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism06.html

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/marxism/modules/althusserideology.html

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/interpellation.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation

http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70NB.html

http://samvak.tripod.com/althusser.html

GRAMSCI

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism11.html

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/hegemony.html

http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/soc/courses/soc2r3/gramsci/gramheg.htm

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/contributions/gramsci.html

DISCOURSE OF REALISM

Realism is a key issue of all textual studies (whether of literature, film, media, the past, etc.) as the more realistic a text is accepted as being the more engagement we make with it. Indeed highly realistic texts will be accepted as 'true' and in that acceptance is the power of realism as an interpellating device; i.e as a mechanism for drawing the audience to the text and getting them to adopt the ideology of the text as their own. The discourse of realism involves the different conditions that each text must meet for its audience to accept it as realistic.

TYPES OF REALISM

There are many different types of realism because each text will need a different approach to the realistic. Plots involving things that do not exist (ghosts, faster-than-light-travel, talking chickens/rats/donkeys) can still be realistic as can texts that deal in non-realistic depictions (cartoons especially) because they utilize approaches to the realistic other than an appeal to contemporary experience and photographic depiction.

1. Surface naturalism - presenting the world of the text as though it were the real world being represented (avoiding anachronisms and ensuring authenticity though appropriate locations, props, costumes, accents, etc).

2. Ecphrasis - Ecphrasis is the luxuriously detailed description of something that evokes the real through the sheer mass of descriptive effort involved. This approach to the establishment of the realistic was proposed by Barthes in his The Effect of Reality. For Barthes ecphrasis was the key to both the realistic novels of the 19th century and the bourgeois ideologies they embodied and to the disciplined realistic history that emerged alongside them.

3. Conformity to experience - if a text limits itself to the representation of that which is within the experience of its audience it will be more easily accepted as real.

4. Photography - since the invention of photography and its incredible offspring moving pictures with sound photo-realism has been the starting point for establishing the realistic.

5. Psychological or emotional realism - in this approach the audience are asked to view the characters in a text and their actions as plausible and potentially real because they seem to us to be in-line with our own emotions and psychology. This form of realism is fundamentally about the believability of character.

6. Narrative realism - form of realism in which the realistic is evoked by the telling of believable stories. If narratives are not plausible, regardless of how outlandish their content, then the text will not be accepted as realistic.

7. Content realism - this form of realism concerns the 'real' record of events and the depiction of 'real' things (such as a London street) and it is this form of realism that is most often used by news and documentary texts.

8. Genre conventions of realism - each genre has its own codes and conventions of realism and audiences will use a modality judgment (i.e. a judgment on the appropriateness of the form of realism used for the genre involved) to decide if any given text is acceptably realistic based on their prior experience of the genre and of other approaches to the realistic (e.g. non-diegetic music is typically not considered anti-realistic).

DISCOURSE OF REALISM

Discourse means both language about and/or of 'x' and communication embodying ideology and so the discourse of realism is not just the negotiation between text and audience about whether or not the text is acceptable as realistic (i.e. the result of the audience's modality judgment regarding the approaches to the realistic used in the text) but also concerns the ideological power considerations regarding realism to be found in the wider society and what interest the elite may have in the realistic. Whether or not a text is considered realistic or not will not just be the result of the creators of the text stacking up enough approaches to establishing the real and then an individual deciding if that makes the text real enough or not but also of the play of social power around the text. Sufficient backing by enough resources of social power will make a text acceptably realistic regardless of its own qualities.

It must never be forgotten that which is considered realistic is the effect of social power and that creators of texts, texts, and their audiences are just a part of the ebb & flow of social power. All representations are hegemonic after all and the 'real' in this case is just a system of representations in texts not something essential and concrete even though great lengths are gone to suggest that very concrete existence.

REPRESENTATION: Realism

The representation of reality is a huge area of representation study and a key aspect of media studies. When we turn to the study of documentary we shall find that realism is a key issue for that genre (it is the most important convention of documentary) and realism plays a central role in some aspects of intertextuality and post-modernism.

Just as everything in the media is a representation (we do not experience the thing itself) everything is also unreal (the process of mediation is artificial and so therefore is everything so mediated); in the media we deal with the representation of reality. Text are therefore always in the situation of

The realism of a media text is a key part of our relationship with it. Some media texts (the news, documentaries, etc) are required to have a very strong sense of realism for us to accept them whereas others (cartoons, comics, computer games, surreal comedy, etc) can be as seemingly unreal as they like and still be accepted by us (most media texts fall some where in between these two poles); it all depends on what the text is doing and claiming. This is the text’s discourse of realism; how realistic it is, why, and how.

The realism of a media text can rest on a variety of different factors and there are many ways of establishing a media text as real (see the appendix below) but what is important is that we, the audience, treat texts as real enough for us. Every text is considered by its audience in terms of should I accept this as realistic and do I accept this as realistic. This is the audience’s modality judgment about the text; is the mode of realism and the type of text appropriate to one another, does the text succeed in seeming real, and ought I accept this?

A final thing to consider is the way in which the process of mediation can lead to hyperreality. Hyperreality, an idea proposed by Jean Baudrillard, is the situation that occurs when the media image of a thing or place replaces the ‘reality’ of that thing or place. Consider the image you posses of the world’s great cities and how that image derives from the media and not from your experience of the city in question and then consider being confronted by the reality of that city. The best example of this process is Las Vegas. Las Vegas is an artificial city in that it was only brought into existence to feed the gambling industry. The media image of this city of vices then became far more powerful than the reality of the city itself and in turn the real city began to make itself into the media image through a process of creative destruction. The Las Vegas of The Rat Pack, Elvis, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, CSI, and Ocean’s Eleven (all four films) is the one that actually exists now. More fearsome still is the hyperreality of Disney (read the entry in links below).

Realism

http://www.litnotes.co.uk/realism.htm

http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/hobbs/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_Reality

Modality

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02a.html

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/realrev.html

Hyperreality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/realityhyperreality.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/

http://www.robertexto.com/archivo9/baudrillard.htm/

http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/index.html

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-disneyworld-company.html

REPRESENTATION : Hegemony

Hegemony is a representational strategy of power; a way of using representations to control other people. In many ways hegemony is the central concept of media studies. This idea is crucial to the key concepts of representation, ideology, narrative, institutions and audience so it is essential that we develop a detailed understanding of the idea.

Let us start with a definition:

Hegemony is a representational strategy of social power that aims to ensure the continued tacit or active support of the majority of the people for the rule of the minority (even though the rule of that minority – the elite – is not in the interests of the majority). This is achieved by representing all groups bar the elite as unfit or unsuitable to hold and wield legitimate power and by representing the elite as the only group capable of ensuring social peace, prosperity, justice, etc.

For example:

The ‘fearful outsider’ is the most commonly encountered representation used by the elite to control the majority and ensure that the majority continue to tacitly support the rule of the elite. Anyone or any group who can be depicted as ‘not one of us’ or ‘outside the boundaries of normal society’ (i.e. as other) is being represented as fearful so that the majority of the population will turn to the elite (who hold and wield all the power in society) for protection. Consider; ‘hoodies’, paedophiles, criminals, ‘chavs’, foreigners, immigrants, every front page of the Daily Mail, indeed any moral panic is a hegemonic success because the elite will be turned to by the people to save them from the source of the panic (see the list above).

More technically we can say that:

Hegemony is the manufacture consent through the manipulation of the common sense.

Terminology

Other – The ‘not us’ from which we derive some sense of who ‘we’ are. This ‘we’ being a common sense notion useful to the manufacture of consent and not the reality of the social group in question; use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ always establishes a ‘them’ who are not us (i.e. it sets out what is normal – us – and what is abnormal – them).

Manufacture Consent – No elite can rule through force alone and forever. A ruling group needs the consent of the majority to maintain and replicate (i.e. hand it on to their children) their rule. The consent, however, is not sought from the majority – they could decide the wrong thing after all – nor left up to them rather it is manufactured by the elite through the processes of hegemony. It is a consent that is not freely given nor is it fully informed (quite the opposite) rather it is carefully built up for us by the elite; it is a consent we give with out knowing and without option.

Common Sense – The realm of uncritical assumptions and acceptance of what is normal and abnormal as defined by the elite or as Gramsci put it:

“Common sense is not something rigid and stationary, but is in continuous transformation, becoming enriched with scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation. 'Common sense' is the folklore of philosophy and always stands midway between folklore proper (folklore as it is normally understood) and the philosophy, science, and economics of the scientists. Common sense creates the folklore of the future, a relatively rigidified phase of popular knowledge in a given time and place.”

Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from cultural writings. London (Lawrence & Wishart) 1985, 421

Moral Panic – A moral panic is a collective outburst against a perceived threat to the ethical underpinning of the community. Often this threat has been outsiders to the community – Jews and Roma have suffered terribly at the hands of moral panics – but anyone or group who can be seen as outsiders (on grounds of their identity or actions) can also be constructed as a threat and thus cause a moral panic.

Links

Hegemony

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/contributions/gramsci.html

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm

http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/soc/courses/soc2r3/gramsci/gramheg.htm

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol6.htm

http://rykalskireadsthemedia.blogspot.com/search/label/Hegemony

http://www.bisa.ac.uk/bisanews/0205/bisa0205_2.htm

Common Sense

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/csme/meas/papers/coben.html

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=308

Moral Panic

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/fdevdet.html

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/mugging.html

http://www.mediaknowall.com/violence/moralpanicnotes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed_20030430.shtml

REPRESENTATION: Stereotypes

All media texts are full of representations of the exterior (you could call it 'the real') world and as whole things are themselves representations. Media texts will represent types and groups of people, places, times, opinions, ideas, concepts, events and actions to us and we have to try and work out where the representations come from and what they are doing. All such representations are mediated and are not the things themselves but media constructions made out of the idea (that is someone's or some group's idea) of the thing.

Type/Stereotype

One of the first issues to get to grips with is that of typing and stereotyping by the media. Typing is the ascription of assumed group characteristics to an individual that is assumed to be a member of the group in question. It is a very common human behaviour and we all of us do it all the time to make sense of people and groups we know little of. Stereotyping is the same activity, lumping someone into a group without knowing if they really are a member of that group, carried out with negative intent or effect. So to make assumptions about a person or group you do not know is typing but to make those assumptions with the intent or effect of denigrating, dismissing, disempowering or harming someone is stereotyping.

Stereotypes can be very hard to erase or change once someone has adopted a particular attitude. The point is that a stereotype is a habit of mind (an idea which is habitually used without critical awareness by a person) and so is a part of the person who uses the stereotype. It is common for strongly established stereotypes to become deeply rooted in the common sense of a culture and these widely held and un-critically accepted habits of mind are the most dangerous stereotypes. They are the ones most likely to be acted on and they are the ones most likely to lead to a moral panic (consider these instances – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Birmingham_riots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till).

Links

Stereotypes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/special_initiatives/toolkit/stereotypes/what_are_stereotypes.cfm

http://www.revision-notes.co.uk/revision/875.html

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/TF33120/gendertv.html

http://www.understandingprejudice.org/apa/english/page11.htm

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/stereotypethreat

http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_112.asp

http://www.tolerance.org/teach/web/index.jsp