Media Representation

 How the media presents events, individuals, social groups and ideologies. Representation can be classified through different groups of people:

• Class
• Age
• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Disability

Stereotypes

Often these CAGED representations are useful starting points for analyzing media messages. Representations work by enforcing or reinforcing stereotypes. Stereotypes can be positive or negative. They work through symbolic codes and signs and are often generalized and if they are used at a high enough frequency they can become accepted in society. Barnes, the creator of semiotics suggests that stereotypes aren't real and are only myths. Newspapers consider what stories will appeal to their audiences and shape it in a way that will appeal to their audiences. Meaning is constituted by what is present, what is missing, and what is different thus meaning is constructed. If you have power you can create and persist stereotypes. Media will try and create an idea of us vs them where we belong and they don't to try and alienate a minority group.

Stereotypes-an assumption about a group of people that dictates how they're represented.

Binary opposites-two completely different things on the opposite end of a spectrum

Hyper reality-inability to distinguish simulation from reality through your view of media. For example expecting castles to look as grand and lavish as they in Disney

Stuart Hall

An outsider, raised in colonial Jamaica but educated in Oxford and felt out of place in both and decided to study media and how groups are represented in all its forms of media from music videos to soup operas and tabloids and how people react to their meanings. To create deliberate anti-stereotypes is fixing meaning but in a different direction and can be equally as problematic, a more effective strategy is to go inside the stereotype and deconstruct it from within. Trying to skew representation in one direction will turn into tokenism. There is also the concept of the other which is the group that is either represented badly in the media or not represented much at all.

Liesbat Van Zoonan

Feminist theory suggests we live in a patriarchal culture where men are more dominant which therefore affects how women are presented through media. women are presented as accessories to men and are objectified, rather than admired. she also suggested that gender is performative, it is what we do rather than what we are. Women's bodies are seen as their most valuable and only asset.