Digital Media Within Society Week 5

This week's Digital Media Within Society class started off with Representations and Realism.

Representation
This is a concept about how the media construct meanings about the world, how it is represented. This helps the audience understand it better.

Link to more explanation: http://www.slideshare.net/Tomaskas/media-representation-theory

This refers to the construction in mass media of aspects of reality such as people, objects, places, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. These representations can be in speech, writing as well as still or moving imagery.

 

It refers to the process as well as to it's products. It emphasizes that regardless of how realistic or compelling media images become, they never present the world direct. Sometimes the media represents certain images, stories and situations repeatedly.

E.G.. supermodels are usually represented more perfect than they really are in real life. Photoshop artists will remove any blemishs on the skin, make the person even slimmer or perhaps change the skin tone.

If certain groups, ideas, situations are constantly represented in oppressive or limited ways, how does this relate to our understanding of the situation in reality.

There is an increase amount of possibilities for 'self-representations' in digital forms.

Sometimes the media's representations of other countries and it's people can be quite annoying. American media usually portray Ireland as an empty green country where we all speak the same way with  over-the-top Irish accents, shamrocks and drunk people everywhere.






Hegemony
The term Hegemony is used to describe the predominance between the different levels of social classes.

Hegemony refers to the winning of popular consent through everyday cultural life, including media representations of the world as well as education and family.

The mass media regularly shows the dominance that world governments and corporations have over the general public.

 

 

We see imagery of royalty and government dressed in very expensive clothing often visiting poor districts where the general people look very much out-classed by the leaders. The media can also portray celebrities and people with power as 'better' than us when in reality we are just all human. In Northern Ireland there has always been hegemony where the protestants feel far superior to the catholics. This is not as much of a problem as it used to be there, but in the past catholics had less rights and often did not get jobs. We have also seen images of innocent protestors who have been shot/fired upon by the ruling police/governments.



Ideology
Ideology refers to a set of ideas which give account of the social world..

definition link: http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/ideology

It is a system of ideas and beliefs or principles which forms the basis of economic or political system and policy.



Ideology often gives way to widely held beliefs which everyone takes for granted as they are seen as 'common sense' making widely acceptable certain forms of social inequality.

Many of these beliefs are not entirely accurate but some ideas can be seem more 'natural' or 'truthful'.

Through ideology we have seen huge differences in social class as well as gender and racial inequalities.

Our media often circulates and reinforces dominant ideologies. Sometimes the media tries to understand or challenge certain ideologies.



Myth
Ideologies work though symbolic codes which represent and explain cultural phenomena.

This symbolic representation gives a sense of appearing natural or the reality.

This is used extensively in advertising where the product or company will advertise their brand as the perfect solution for our problems but may in reality hide some harmful truths.

E.G Diet Coke or diet drinks in general advertise the fact that their products contain almost no calories but in reality there are chemical agents in those drinks which are more harmful than the normal versions of these drinks.

This weeks lab
In this weeks lab we were asked to show/report our progress on our visual essay. I also showed this to several students for suitable feedback.



It was suggested that:




1 - I should use a few more examples of addiction to gaming in my documentary.
2 - It was suggested that I change the soundtrack used in the second half of the documentary as it was too upbeat and did not reflect a serious situation.
3 - My voice-over was too slow paced, it was suggested that I change the tone of the voice-over with more variations in tone to emphasis situations.