Theories

Stuart Hall - Preferred reading

Hall is a theorist who argues that although the media appears to reflect real life, it actually constructs it. He devised his theory of preferred reading after becoming interested in politics and studying the work of Karl Marx.

He was interested in the power of the media and how the mass media create and define issues that are of public concern through audience positioning.

He stated that people read in one of these three ways:

• Dominant (hegemonic) reading - the reader percieves into the text/media product in a positive way and accept the message being put accross in a somewhat natural way.
• Negotiated reading - the reader generally accepts the preferred reading but sometimes modifies it to reflect their own life e.g. interests and experiences.
• Oppositional reading - The reader rejects the reading and percieves it in a negative way. Their social situation could place them in an oppositional position to the dominant ideas being portrayed.

 Hall himself challenged the three components of the mass communications model and argued that a meaning is not always determined by the sender, that the message is never transparent, and finally, that the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. For example, if a documentory about child slave workers was to be created, although it may seem as though the documentory was created to make the audience feel sympathy towards the children, some people may not feel this way therefore the documentory must be created in a way that creates a range of responses and feelings towards the show.

Andrew Goodwin

Goodwin states there are 5 key aspects of a music video that an audience look out for.

•  Synaesthesia - Seeing the sound in your head e.g. the beat, the structure of the song, the mode of address (telling a story? addressing a lover?) and the artists voice

•  Narrative and performance - the way the music video has been constructed, how the story is being told, use of advertising, how realistic it is

• Star image - how the artist/group has been represented throughout the music video

• Relation of visuals to the song - how the lyrics correlate with the lyrics and how the audience can relate to it or make sense of it, use of camera work, movement, angle, mise- en -scene editing, sound and special effects etc.

• Technical aspects of the music video - for example, the special effects or editing that has been used

This is all depending on the aim of the record company as well as the genre of the song, but Goodwin states that music videos are mainly constructed by linking the lyrics with the visuals and showing the artist. He then goes on to say that the relationship between these things are also used in unison with close ups of the artist which respresents them in the way that they wish to be portrayed as this is publicity for them. Voyeurism is used to make the artist and music video more attractive, especially to men and this is often found in hip hop videos.

Levi Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss, a French anthropologist said that we interpret the meaning of words depending on the opposite word, or as he called it binary opposites. He explores these as underlying typical themes rather than events. He, along with another major theorist Roland Barthes, stated that words are simply symbols of societys ideas, therefore they are more about the relationship between words rather than concrete ideas.

Barthes and Levi-Strauss noticed another important feature of these 'binary opposites': that one side of the binary pair is always seen by a particular society or culture as more valued over the other.This theory helps us to understand how ideas and meanings can be shaped, created or reinforced in a text or music video for example.

Some examples of Binary opposites are:

Christian vs. Pagan
Weak vs. Strong
Garden vs. Wilderness
Wilderness vs. Outside Society
Civilised vs. Barbaric
Masculine vs. Feminine

Laura Mulvey

'The Gaze' deals with how an audience views the people being represented. For feminists it can be thought of in 3 ways:  how men look at women,  how women look at themselves, and how women look at other women.  

Mulvey is a best described as a feminist who coined the term ‘Male Gaze’ in 1975. She believes audiences view characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male.

One feature of the Male Gaze is when the camera focuses on the curves of a woman, and the narrative of films/music videos often show a positive reaction from males when this happens. This represents women as something to be looked at and be seen as an object to fulfil a mans basic desire to find attractive women to look at.

In addition to this, Mulvey argues that sexism can also occur in the way the text is presented and that the audience are encouraged to gaze at women. For example, in advertising, women are represented in a way that sexualizes a woman's body even when the woman's body not related to the product being advertised.

Some theorists criticise Mulvey's male gaze theory and argue that some women actually enjoy being looked at in situations such as beauty pageants. Not everything is sexualised, and the gaze may be directed towards women so that they compare themselves to them in body shape or dress sense.

Hypodermic needle

Dating from the 1920s, this theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data.
Basically, the Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciouness of the audience unmediated, ie the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text. This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers. It assumes that the audience are passive and heterogenous. This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents, politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media texts (comics in the 1950s, rap music in the 2000s), for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent behaviour and will then act them out themselves.



Uses & Gratifications

During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:

• surveillance
• correlation
• entertainment
• cultural transmission

Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications):

• Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.
• Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life
• Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts
• Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, particularly as new media forms have come along (eg video games, the internet)