The aim of this activity is to think about how stories are being told and how stereotypes and attached prejudices are shaped by media and how these impact in our understanding of society.
Group is broken into smaller groups of 4-5 each. Each group selects an example of audio or visual representation from a pre-selected mix.
EXAMPLES
Questioning representation
To be more critically aware of a representation, the following questions need to be asked during this exercise:
- Who made it?
- When was it made?
- What are its purposes?
- Who benefits from the representation or whose point of view does it support?
- Who does not benefit or whose point of view is not considered?
- Who or what is not shown?
Using the material provided as a starting point Learners view/listen and try to answer as many as possible of the following questions:
1. Select a certain group, topic, issue, or phenomenon, and then find different representations of this in magazines, TV, newspapers, radio, literature, Web sites.
- Note patterns in these representations in terms of similarities in portrayals
- Images instances of stereotyping or essentialising categories. (see notes below.)
- Identify value assumptions in terms of who has power, who solves problems, how problems are solved.
2. Define the intended audiences for these representations:
- What appeals are made to what audiences?
- Whose beliefs or values are being reinforced or validated?
- How are certain products linked to certain representations for certain audiences?
3. Define what’s missing or left out of the representation:
- What complexities or variations are masked over?
- Find alternative or counter-examples.
4. Consider the potential influence of stereotypes or representations of gender, class, race, or age on people.
- List descriptions of others or oneself and note instances of stereotyping/essentialising
- Note how consumer practices reflect the need to live up to representations
- Examine stories, TV shows, or mini-dramas in ads.
- What is included and what is excluded?
- The group should discuss and report back in the agreed time frame.
Ask your group to consider stories that might challenge the existing stereotypes or how to write/tell stories without using stereotypes.
1 hour
4-10
Internet connection.
Pre-selected audio/visual material and equipment to play it back (1 per group)
Paper and writing materials
The objective here is to understand representations as a method of easy communication of ideas, story plotlines and news bulletins, which also shape our perceptions of reality.
To analyse the institutional forces or systems that use Representations to construct and maintain their own ideological agendas.
Media Representation has certain characteristics that a workshop needs to understand if we are to respond adequately.
Representations work in the following ways:
- Representations are generalisations about categories, and they identify why events, ideas or people belong in these categories.
- A Representation can be a single image, a sequence of images or a whole program, written words, spoken words or song lyrics.
- Representations invite audiences to understand them and agree with them in certain preferred ways.
- A representation consists of repeated elements that become familiar. The more we see these elements repeated, the more the representation will appear to be natural or normal.
- The categories dealt with in this familiar fashion then become part of our thinking processes.
- It is a method of easy communication of ideas, story plotlines and news bulletins.
However, representation is more significant than just being a handy tool
for communication: Representations contain a point of view. The meaning in a representation will be selected and constructed, already containing built-in value judgement.
All representations contain the point of view of the people who made them, so...
- “reality” against which a media text can be compared as either “true” or “fixed” to that “reality.”
- A clear understanding of the magic spell of Representation is to realise that the meaning of that external “reality” itself, is a construction of media.
- Using constructed media texts, Representations create, not the world, but a world!
- This approach moves us away from analysis of bias — that presupposes some fixed, objective meaning that media has misunderstood, to an analysis of the institutional forces, mindset and systems that use Representations to construct and maintain their own ideological agendas.
» Handout Representations.pdf
http://www.tinyurl.ie/1ly (10th. October.2010)
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