Sophie Elliott: An introduction to A2 media studies...Critical Perspectives: Themes

For A2 Media, cover the following questions and tasks...

How important is the media in society?
What different roles do the media play in peoples lives?
Engage with a range of theoretical perspectives on how people use media.
Know about a variety of research that discovered specific audiences practices and habits.
Demonstrate a personal position on the issues.
Take an interest in how people use the media at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
Understand how people make sense of and use media products as part of their lives.
What difference increasingly global dissemination of ideas makes to culture and identity?
Are our identities becoming increasingly shaped by media in the online age?
What kinds of regulation are adequate in this web 2.0 world?

Themes of Critical Perspective:

For each theme, focus on three areas:

Historical...understand how relevant aspect of contemporary can be compared to the past.
Contemporary...demonstrate an up to date, accurate, theoretical and academic analysis of today's media.
Future...have some ideas of where media is going.

POPULAR CULTURE - the media that ordinary people access in large numbers.

CULTURAL STUDIES - not just looking at texts and what they 'mean' or how they are 'consumed', look at people and what they do with media.

Example of Cultural Studies:

The impact of broadband Internet on how people use media
Is there such a thing as 'audience' in this post-modern 'we media' age?
Dan Gilmor argues web 2.0 allows ordinary people to participate in politics and news via 'citizen journalism' in the form of blogs - their own accounts of real events and comments produced immediately on 'official journalism'.
'Long Tail' media production - the proliferation of small chunks of media content at the opposite end of the body to the head.
Implications of 'long tail' media distribution according to John Hartley, web 2.0 has introduced 'mass literacy' and the idea of mass public schooling.
Most of us are using the web 2.0 sites to read, watch, play and listen (not to create or upload), which is how we were using 'old media'.

Definitions of culture:

Made by humans.
Describes all the various forms of belief, communication, ritual, representation and ideas that the human race uses to make sense of it's existence.
Is the things humans produce that animals do not.
The outcome of collective thought.
Jenks' (2005) four definitions of culture...a state of mind; a collective pursuit of civilisation; artistic and intellectual activity; a social category.
Everything we might study in the media and produce for the media is culture.

Social Groups:

To give people a label based on collective characteristics or traits, as opposed to their individual or biological make-up.

Sophie Elliott