CODES, CONVENTIONS, REPRESENTATIONS

What are Codes?✤ A systems of signs, which create

meaning. - Technical ‣ Camera techniques, framing,

depth of field, lighting, exposure and juxtaposition

- Symbolic - character's actions shows his feeling. ‣ Objects, setting, body

language, clothing and colour - Written Codes ‣ Headlines, captions, speech

bubbles, language style ✤ Music is both technical and symbolic.

What are codes?Codes are systems of signs, which create meaning. Codes can be divided into two categories – technical and symbolic.Technical codes are all the ways in which equipment is used to tell the story in a media text, for example the camera work in a film.Symbolic codes show what is beneath the surface of what we see. For example, a character's actions show you how the character is feeling.Some codes fit both categories – music for example, is both technical and symbolic.What are conventions?Conventions are the generally accepted ways of doing something. There are general conventions in any medium, such as the use of interviewee quotes in a print article, but conventions are also genre specific.How codes and conventions apply in media studiesCodes and conventions are used together in any study of genre – it is not enough to discuss a technical code used such as camera work, without saying how it is conventionally used in a genre.For example, the technical code of lighting is used in some way in all film genres. It is a convention of the horror genre that side and back lighting is used to create mystery and suspense – an integral part of any horror movie.Symbolic CodesObjects: Can be used to assist in the suspension of disbelief and as plot progression devices. For example: The ghost-face mask in Scream (Craven, 1996).Colour

FILM TERMS✤ Frame: a single still picture or image ✤ Shot: the images that are filmed from the time the camera starts

to the time it stops, with no cuts ✤ Sequence: a series of shots on the same subject ✤ Cut: stop one shot / abruptly start second; creates the

impression of different places, same time ✤ Fade out/in: go to black / go from black to picture; suggests

passage of time, change of place ✤ Pan: camera moves from left-to-right or right-to-left across scene

from one subject to another – can be used to create suspense ✤ Zoom: camera moves in (tight) or out (wide) ✤ Tilt: camera moves vertically, up or down

CAMERA SHOTS✤ECU – extreme close up of eyes/face: aggression,

discomfort ✤CU – close up of head/reaction: intimacy ✤CU head and shoulders – 2–3 people ✤MS – medium shot: to waist, 2–3 people ✤MLS – medium-long shot: full-body normal view ✤LS – long shot: room, normal view ✤ELS – extreme long shot: house, establishing the

setting ✤ES – establishing shot: city, establishing the venue

CAMERA ANGLES✤ Low angle: camera looks up

- subject looks large – creates an impression of power ✤ Normal or straight angle: camera looks at the subject

from eye-level 

- subject looks equal to viewer, who feels equal to, and may even identify with, subject

✤ High angle: camera looks down

- subject appears small – creates an impression of weakness

Conventions✤ Meanings derived from codes. Accepted ways of doing

something

- Technical

‣ music videos for e.g. fast cuts, fast pace and movement.

- Genre - associated with a particular genre.

‣ In a horror film the audience expects blood, dark settings, a girl running from a masked killer, point of view shots etc.

Conventions

Conventions are the widely recognised way of doing something which is to do with content, form and style. There are two types of conventions which consists of:

- Technical Conventions - A convention in a technical area. These conventions, apply to the majority of music videos for e.g. the video being the same length as the song and fast cuts

- Genre Conventions - this is where conventions are associated with a particular genre. An example of this would be Pop videos, that ba e dance routines and bands performing songs with instruments.

Conventions of a music video:

-  The video is the same Length as the song (somewhere around 4 minutes)- They present the band/artist, who look as though they are singing- They have lots of fast editing

These conventions dont however, apply to all music videos.

Representation✤ Media representations are the ways in which the media portrays

particular groups, communities, experiences, ideas, or topics from a particular ideological or value perspective.

✤ “re-present”

✤ Shape perceptions of experience about

- gender,

- class, and race,

- assumptions about what is valued in society,

- notions of urban, suburban, and rural life.

Media representations are the ways in which the media portrays particular groups, communities, experiences, ideas, or topics from a particular ideological or value perspective. Rather than examining media representations as simply reflecting or mirroring “reality,” we will be examining how media representations serve to “re-present” or to actually create a new reality.For example, beer ads portray drinking beer as a primary component for having a party. SUV ads create the impression that driving an SUV as an exciting, outdoor adventure. And, perfume/cologne ads imply the using perfume/cologne makes one sexually appealing. These ads all create idealized experiences associated with the uses of these products, experiences that may not jive with alternative perspectives on these experiences:Similarly, the Disney Corporation, one of the major producers of film and television, represents stories and fairy tales for children primarily in terms of White, Western, middle-class values. And, DisneyWorld/Disneyland creates artificial realities that represent different “worlds” — other “lands” in ways that sanitized and idealize any political, cultural, and ideological differences constituting the unique cultures of those worlds. For example, “Safari” boat trips represent Africa as a primitive jungle experience. Click here for a discussion of the role of Disney in constructing their own representations of different realities.Why study media representations? Media representations shape adolescents’ perceptions of experience—their beliefs about gender, class, and race, their assumptions about what is valued in society, and their notions of urban, suburban, and rural life. However, it is important to recognize that adolescents are not simply passive dupes who accept all of these representations without some interrogation. As James Tobin (2001) argues, students are able to resist these representations, resistance that is often specific to adopting stances valued in certain context, particularly is they can parody or adopt creative alternatives to representations.Creating a critical context in the classroom where students practice interrogation of representations helps them acquire a critical stance. In adopting this stance, they learn to examine the underlying value assumptions inherent in a representation and whether they accept or reject those assumptions. For example, studying local television news representations of urban landscapes as rife with crime and danger leads them to challenge these representations as serving to reify suburban viewers’ presuppositions about the city as dangerous and problematic, beliefs held by many suburban adolescents.

Representations and Identities

How does the media contribute to the creation, promotion and maintenance of

social identities?

Media representations and cultural models

✤ Reflects cultural values

✤ Helps to make sense of the world.

✤ Helps to shape discourse with scientific, legal, religious, sociological, economic, political, psychological ideologies.

- For example, students may examine how the beauty industry employs discourses of gender to define the ideal female body weight as slim consistent with the discourses of femininity, popularity, and appearance.

Studying media representations therefore involves interpreting the creation of new forms or ways of understanding reality. As Stuart Hall (1997) argues, this approach differs from more traditional notions of studying media representations as “false” or “misrepresentations” of some reality or experience. This concept of “misrepresentation” assumes that there is a “true” or “fixed” meaning associated with some external “reality” against which a media text can be compared as either “true” or “fixed” to that “reality.” However, the meaning of that external “reality” itself is a construction of media. Media texts are not simply external ways of representing a reality “out there.” They themselves constitute the meaning of reality. The cultural meaning of “party time” is created by beer ads, which portray social practices that are valued by participants who believe that drinking beer constitutes “having a good time.” Click here to hear more on what Stuart Hall has to say about this.Dan Chandler argues that this more constructivist approach moves away from analysis of stereotyping or bias — that presupposes some fixed, objective meaning to an analysis of the institutional forces or systems that use representations to construct and maintain their own ideological agendas. He therefore focuses attention on the “systems of representations” that work to create certain cultural meanings through media texts to demonstrate that certain practices are “natural” or “common sensical.” As he notes: “A key in the study of representation concern is with the way in which representations are made to seem ‘natural’. Systems of representation are the means by which the concerns of ideologies are framed; such systems ‘position’ their subjects.”Museums, particularly anthropological or ethnographic museums that portray past cultural worlds, can construct a version of those worlds that reflect certain cultural attitudes about those worlds (Walsh, 1992). From this constructivist notion of representation, these museum exhibits are neither mirroring or reflecting past cultures; they are actually creating a version of those cultures. It is often the case that these exhibits of Asian, African, South American, and/or Third World countries often reflected a Western, colonialist discourses that positioned. For example, museums, as systems of representations, portray cultures in ways that are assumed to be “scientific.” During the 19th and early 20th century, European and American museums often exhibited “other” cultures in as inferior, primitive, or exotic. These exhibits reflected a Western political and ideological perspective of colonized sections of the world (Lidchi, 1997). For example, an exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair portrayed the Igorots, a Philippine tribe, as purchasing and eating dog meat, a representation that only served to portray them as “primitive” or “savage” (Lidchi, 1997, p. 196).Media representations and cultural models

IDENTITIES

Social Identity Personal Identity

Our membership of social groups influences our

perception of certain roles

How individuals interpret and play their roles according to their

perceptions of what this role means in general

cultural terms

Chandler: representation refers to how the media socially constructs realities in terms of key markers

of identity

Key Markers of Identity

C

A

G

E

D

lass

ge

ender

thnicity

isability

Caution! What is meant by transgressive categories?

SOCIAL CLASS

Upper Class

Social construction of Royal Family – presented as `like us’ and `not like us’

Familiar

•On-going soap

•Working mothers

•Narrativisation of their lives

•Magazine portraylas of the lives

Different

•Royal events – ceremonials

•Representatives of the nation

•Immense wealth

STEREOTYPES

?Involve a one-sided or partial representation of, for example,

a social group

Do they always present groups in a negative way?

These are a simplified representation of a person, groups of people or a place, through basic or obvious characteristics -

which are often exaggerated.

MIDDLE AND WORKING CLASS

• Poor families portrayed as having themselves to blame or as

`welfare scroungers’

•In general middle class over-represented on TV and working class under-

represented

• In TV dramas, apart from soaps, professional families

predominate

• Glamorous lifestyles are focused on rather than

perceived impoverishment of working-class lives

•Non-fictional representations see middle class as sources of authority – experts, scientists, politicians etc – whereas working class more often seen as troublesome especially where

trade unionism is involved

From a Neo-Marxist position, media act against counter-hegemonic groups in order to maintain

ideological dominance of elite groups

REPRESENTATIONS OF AGE

CHILDHOOD

YOUTH

AGEING

REPRESENTATION OF AGE - CHILDHOOD

In past:

Children seen as underdeveloped adults who developed from: • simplicity to complexity

•Irrationality to rationality •Childhood to adulthood

REPRESENTATION OF AGE - CHILDHOOD

Now:

Children use media in identity construction

Move from TV patronising children to reflecting children’s view

Children as potential consumers – targets of advertisers and film merchandising

REPRESENTATION OF AGE - YOUTH

In past:

•Impressionable •Restless •Respectful •Ambitious

•Fears expressed that they would be influenced by cinema in anti-social ways

REPRESENTATION OF AGE - YOUTH

Now:

•Problematic, especially within youth sub-cultures.

•Violent sub cultures: Rockers, punks, skinheads, rave culture

•Focus on use of drugs and alcohol

•Sex, fashion, drinking

•Breaking norms

•Invincible

•Living dangerously

•Media concentration on `Youthism’

REPRESENTATION OF AGE - AGEISM

•Old age seen as undesirable

•Gender differences as women encouraged to remain youthful whilst elderly men still portrayed as sexual partners to younger women.

•Over sixties on TV:

•Men: world leaders, politicians, experts, judges etc.

•Women: Too dominating/ feeble, difficult, forgetful etc.

•Limited ads for older group.

•New move to present more positive images as older groups have disposable incomes.

CRITICAL THINKING

Read the information on representations of gender and representations of ethnicity. You can also refer to the www.sociology.org.uk

website choosing AS Sociology for AQA and then the media section.

?

?You are to create your own publisher flyer to details information regarding representatons

of gender and ethnicity. This is an individual task.

Representations of Social Groups

✤ Femininity

✤ Masculinity

✤ LGBT

✤ Racial and ethnic groups

✤ Class

✤ Different age groups

✤ Disability

✤ Occupations

✤ Families

✤ Urban, suburban, rural communities

✤ Politics

✤ Religion

✤ Conflict

✤ Organisations

▪ Women are most often portrayed in the context of relationships. Men, on the other hand, are most often seen in the context of careers.

▪ More women than men are seen dating across a range of media — on TV 23% of women compared to 17% of men, in movies 27% of women compared to 16% of men, and in commercials 9% of the women compared to 4% of the men.

▪ In contrast, men are seen spending their time “on the job” far more often than women in all media — on TV 41% of men compared to 28% of women, in movies 60% of men and 35% of women, in commercials 17% of men and 9% of women.

▪ Women are also more likely to be motivated by the desire to have a romantic relationship — on TV 32% of women and in the movies 35% of women, compared to 20% of men in each instance.

▪ In contrast, on TV 32% of men are motivated by the desire to get or succeed in a job compared to 24% of women. In movies 53% of men were motivated by their career compared to 31% of women.

▪ Magazine articles reinforce this message by focusing much more on “dating” (35% of their articles) than they do on subjects like “school” or “careers” (12%).

Methods for Analysing Media Representations

✤ Images

✤ Sound/music

✤ Intertextuality

✤ Language

✤ Technique

✤ Content analysis

While students may have an intuitive sense of how the media represents certain phenomena, they need to learn some particular research techniques for how to analyze these representations. It is often useful to model these different techniques, demonstrating how you use them in analysis of a particular example.The following are some steps involved in conducting studies, following by specific aspects associated with analyzing representations: 1 Select a certain groups, worlds, topics, issues, or phenomenon, and then find different representations of this topic/phenomenon in magazines, TV, newspapers, literature, Web sites. 2 Note patterns in these representations in terms of similarities in portrayals/images instances of stereotyping or essentializing categories. 3 Note value assumptions in terms of who has power, who solves problems, how problems are solved. 4 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? 5 6 Define what’s missing or left out of the representation:

▪ What complexities or variations are masked over?

▪ What is included and what is excluded?

Representation in printIn print based media texts representation is constructed using: Layout and Design Language and Mode of Address Camera shots and angles in any photographs Visual codes Anchorage

In this poster for the film Brooklyn, there are representations of gender, place and the past.The style of font used (design) along with the costumes worn by the three characters (visual codes), and the colours used reflect the 1950s when the film is set. Taken together, the colours and images are soft and warm, and represent the past in a nostalgic way; this is a romantic, idealised representation of the past (mode of address).Gender is represented by the positioning of the three characters (layout): the main character Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is in the middle of the poster and shown from a low angle (camera shots), and she looks directly ahead of her, over the heads of anyone looking at the poster.These elements combine to represent her as a strong, confident female who is at the centre of this story.The layout also emphasises that the story has two sides which is represented by the two men pictured and the images behind them.The left hand side of the poster features a picture of Jim (Domnhall Gleeson): he is pictured against the rugged Irish coast and is looking down and to the left (visual codes). In this way, he represents Eilis's past in Ireland.The right hand side features Tony (Emory Cohen), Eilis’ love interest in America, and he is looking up and to the right. He is pictured against the towering Brooklyn Bridge - this represents Eilis' life in Amercia and maybe her future as well.The tag line at the top of the poster - ‘Two countries, two loves, one heart’ - anchors (anchorage) the images and gives the audience an idea of what the film is

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