Social Class: Reinforcing Cultural Hegemony/Dominant Ideologies

Working class British youths are generally represented as being violent, brutal, unapologetic criminals - Harry Brown, Kidulthood, Quadrophenia and Eden Lake.
VS
Middle class British youths are generally represented as being more law abiding, conscience citizens - The Inbetweeners

• Antagonists are always the working class youths and middle class adults are positioned to be the protagonists.

Media Effect Theories

Hypodermic model

The media injecting their ideas into the consumers. Suggests we as consumers have no power in how the media influences us, passive consumers like robots believing everything we hear in the media.

Cultivation Theory

If you see enough violence and criminal behaviour among youth, the more likely you are to believe that it is realistic and occurs in society at that level.

Copy Cat Theory

Influenced by what you see in the media and copy the actions within films, TV etc. Puts an idea into youths causing them to go out and do the same.

Moral Panic

Actions within the media puts fear into society that these events happen in reality. Puts British youths as the antagonists and the public services as the hero.

Contemporary Social Realism

• Social realist films attempt to portray issues facing ordinary people in their social situations.
• try to show that society and the capitalist system leads the exploitation or the poor.
• These groups are shown as victims of the system rather than being totally responsible for their own bad behaviour.

'These places represent everywhere in Britain, where relationships are broken down and where people have isolated and disconnected. Their Britishness is their culturally specific address to audiences at home' (Murray, 2008)

Audience

• Social realist films which address social problems in this country offer a different version of 'collective identity' than British films which are also aimed at American audience. Films like Notting Hill and Love Actually reach a bigger audience than the lower budget social realist films.
• If more people see the more commercial films, consider which version of our collective identity is more powerful or has more impact.

Analysing Representation of Collective Identity

When comparing how British and our collective identity is represented in films consider these:

• Who is being represented?
• Who is representing them?
• How they are represented?
• What seems to be the intentions of these representations?
• What is the dominant discourse?
• What range of readings are there?

The media contributes to our sense of 'collective identity' but there are many different versions that change over time. Representations can cause problems for the groups represented because marginalised groups have little control over their representation/stereotyping. The social context in which the film/TV programme is made, influences the dominant discourse of the film.

Active Audience Theory
Encoding - Decoding (Stuart Hall, 1980) 

• Encoding - Decoding is an active audience theory developed by Stuart Hall which examines the relationship between a text and its audience.
• Encoding is the process by which a text is constructed by its producers.
• Decoding is the process by which the audience reads, understands and interprets a text.
• Hall states that texts are polysemic, meaning they may be read differently by different people depending on their identity, cultural knowledge and opinions.

 Preferred Reading/Dominant Hegemonic

When an audience interprets the message as it was meant to be understood, they are operating in the dominant code. The position of professional broadcasters and media producers is that messages are already signified within the hegemonic manner to which they are accustomed. Professional codes for media organisations serve to contribute to this type of industrial psychology. The producers and the audience are in harmony, understanding, communicating, and sharing mediated signs in the established mindset of framing.

 Negotiated Reading

Not all audiences may understand what media producers take for granted. There may be some acknowledgement of differences in understanding:

• Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules - it operates with exceptions to the rule.
• While the hegemonic view and dominant definitions will tie events to; 'grand totalizations'; as Hall calls them, negotiated positions are the result of the audience struggling to understand the dominant position or experiencing dissonance (conflict) with those views.

Oppositional Reading/ 'counter-hegemonic'

• When media consumers understand the contextual and literary inflections of a text yet decode the message by a completely oppositional means, this is the globally contrary position/oppositional reading.
• The de-totalization of that text enables them to rework it to their preferred meaning. This requires operating with an oppositional code which can understand dominant hegemonic positions while finding frameworks to refute them. Hall feels that this position is necessary to begin a struggle in discourse or the 'politics of signification'. (communication, the way in which meaning is given through signs and signifiers)

Any representation is a mixture of:
1. The thing itself.
2. The opinions of the people doing the representation.
3. The reaction of the individual to the representation.
4. The context of the society in which the representation is taking place.

Stereotyping

The fact that we naturally see the world in this kind of shorthand way, with connections between different character traits, allows the media to create simplistic representations which we find believable. Implicit personality theory explains this process…

• As humans we use our own unique storehouse of knowledge about people when we judge them.
• Our past experience is more important than the true features of the actual personality that we are judging — traits exist more in the eye of the beholder than in reality.
• We have each a system of rules that tells us which characteristics go with other characteristics.
• We categorise people into types (e.g. workaholic, feminist etc.) to simplify the task of person perception.
• Once we have in our minds a set of linked traits which seem to us to go together, they form a pattern of connections that can be called a prototype. In other words the mix of traits that we may consider “typical” of feminists are a prototype of what a feminist is like to us.
• If we encounter someone in reality or in the media who seems to fit neatly into a prototype, we feel reassured. It confirms our stereotyped view — we do not need to think further.
• Also once a few of the traits seem to fit our prototype, we will immediately bundle onto the person the rest of the traits from the prototype even if we do not know if they fit them in reality.
• Research has shown that if we find people who do not fit into our prototypes, we will form very strong often impressions of them — it is surprising to us and disconcerting — it forces us to think more deeply.
• On the other hand, if it is at all possible, we will try to twist the truth to fit in with our prototype, often ignoring traits which do not fit into our neatly imagined pattern of characteristics. This will particularly happen as time passes and we have time to forget things that do not fit in. This can lead to enormous differences between our perceptions of people and the reality.
• All of this distortion happens naturally in our minds before the media have had their chance to simplify and distort. We do a lot of the business of stereotyping ourselves. It is almost as if we conspire with the media to misunderstand the world.

Dominant Ideology of young people

Eastenders: Martin Fowler
First character to be born in the programme. Stereotypical youth from many news stories. Anti-social behaviour with gangs. Teenage, unmarried father. Prison sentence for manslaughter. Continued criminal behaviour upon release.

Moral panic

Stanley Cohen (1972)Studied youth groups in 1960s.A moral panic occurs when society sees itself threatened by the values and activities of a group who are stigmatised as deviant and seen as threatening to mainstream society’s values, ideologies and /or way of life.Mods & Rockers (1960s), football hooligans, muggers, vandals, mobile-phone snatchers...
Working class males: Represented as yobs. Stuart Hall (1978) argues that the negative representation of young people is deliberate as it justifies social control by authority figures such as the police and government. The media has a key role in this ‘social production’ of news.
From media text to legislation: Occurrence of deviant act or social phenomenon. Act or problem widely reported in media: news outlets; internet chat rooms; fictional narratives; video games…Call for government control either from legislation/policy initiatives or the more vigilant operation of already existing social controls.
Jamie Bulger No evidence was presented that either boy had watched ‘Child’s Play 3’. The judge made the connection and this was picked up by the tabloid press. It led to a change in the law so the BBFC now has to take into account ‘the influence’ of videos as well as their content.