AS/A2 Media theories to research

Overview

Narrative

• Levi-Strauss: binary oppositions
• Todorov – four act structure
• Roland Barthes – cultural, semantic, symbolic, hermeneutic, proairetic
• Goodwin – useful for analysing music videos – 6 key features
• Propp – 8 character roles
• Lyotard – post modern theory against meta narratives, pro micro narratives and fragmentation
• Joseph Campbell – monomyths and journeys

Genre

• John Fiske – genre as ‘convenience’ for producers and audiences
• Henry Jenkins – genre constantly ‘breaks rules’ e.g. evolving hybridization
• John Hartley – genre is interpreted culturally
• Daniel Chandler – genre is too restricting
• Steve Neale – genre as repetition and difference
• David Buckingham – genre in constant process of negotiation and change
• Jason Mittell – industry uses genre commercially
• Barry Keith Grant - on sub genres
• Rick Altman – genre offers audiences a ‘set of pleasures’

Audience

• Jeremy Tunstall – primary, secondary, tertiary audience engagement
• Blumler and Katz – uses and gratifications theory
• Katz and Lazarsfeld – two step flow theory
• Adorno – passive consumption, hypodermic model (frankfurt school)
• David Gauntlett – producer as consumer (prosumer)
• Stuart Hall – audience positioning and dominant, negotiated, oppositional readings
• Stanley Cohen – moral panics
• Martin Barker – challenging moral panics
• George Gerbner – cultivation theory

Representation

• Angela McRobbie – post feminist icon theory
• Laura Mulvey – male gaze/female gaze
• Carol Clover – last girl theory (horror)
• Stuart Hall – dominant, oppositional and negotiated readings of representation
• Richard Dyer – stereotypes legitimize inequality
• Levi-Strauss – binary oppositions and subordinate groups (see dyer)
• David Buckingham – representation and fragmented identity
• David Gauntlett – “identity is complicated, everyone’s got one” (pluralism but within a hegemonic framework)
• Baudrillard – hyper realism
• Tajfel and Turner – intergroup discrimination and stereotyping (also useful for youth and collective identity)
• Andy Medhurst – stereotyping is shorthand for identification
• Tessa Perkins – stereotyping has elements of truth
• Judith Butler – queer theory

G325 Section B: Contemporary Media Issues

Collective Media Identity

• David Gauntlett – in depth work on this topic including ‘making is connecting’ and lego project
• David Buckingham – identity as a unique marker of a person
• Zygmunt Bauman – identity as a reflection of society is problematic
• Erving Goffman – the nature of social interaction
• Anthony Giddens – self reflexivity and developing own biographical narratives
• Antonio Gramsci – shifting nature of dominant ideology
• Tajfel and Turner – intergroup discrimination and stereotyping
• Dick Hebdige – youth sub culture maintains divisions in society
• Jacques Lacan – the mirror stage (must be fully understood before applying)
• Michel Maffesoli – ‘the time of tribes’
• Laura Mulvey – male gaze mapped onto the female gaze
• Judith Butler – gender is what you do, not who you are
• Janice Winship – on magazines
• Marjorie Ferguson – on magazines

Global Media

• Nick Lacey – on synergy, ownership and institution
• Zygmunt Bauman – globalization contributes to a sense of ‘fragmentation’
• Michael Salwen – on cultural imperialism
• Oliver Boyd-Barrett – on media imperialism
• Stuart Price – global media and ownership
• Terhi Rantanen – consequences of globalization is homogenization andheterogenization
• David Hesmondhalgh – understanding global, cultural industries
• Pradip Thomas and Zaharom Nain – ownership of the media
• Noam Chomsky – Marxist readings on media ownership

We Media and Democracy

• Dan Gillmor – ‘we the media’ author
• Charles Leadbetter - see youtube ‘we think’
• Clay Shirky – collaboration and communal values
• Mapping Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – we media, status and self respect
• Usha Hidi – democratizing information/software, crowdsourcing, political activism
• Henry Jenkins – fan writers and textual poaching
• Jacques Derrida – death of the author
• Simon Reynolds – rave music and dance culture as democratizing
• Graham Roberts – ‘movie making in the new media age’

Contemporary Media Regulation

• Dan Gillmor – citizen journalism
• David Gauntlett – opposes the vulnerability stereotype, youth as active and literate (see ‘moving experiences’)
• Mary Whitehouse – against liberalism
• Henry Jenkins – video game effects research
• Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams – 5 points on media and the internet
• Professor Julian Petley – censorship is a class based issue
• Richard Berger – ofcom will subsume the bbfc, future regulation = video games
• Stephen Abell (ex pcc chairman) – online proliferation against statutory regulation
• Collins – against statutory press regulation
• Stokes and Reading – newspapers use freedom of the press to legitimize intrusion
• Solevay and Reed – self regulation means no regulation
• Robertson and Nicol – the pcc is an ineffective regulator
• Stuart Hall – newspapers as the fourth estate, marxist readings

Media in the Online Age

• David Gauntlett – the prosumer
• Andrew Keen – the prosumer creates a world of ‘amateurs’
• Daniel Chandler – online genre proliferation
• Henry Jenkins – blurred global boundaries, users of digital technology now participating in multiple communications
• Michael Wesch – YouTube as cultural phenomenon
• Chris Anderson – the internet and the distribution possibilities of capitalism. The long tail.

Post-modern Media

• Charlie Brooker – blurred boundaries, representation of ‘the real’
• Jean Baudrillard – hyper-reality and simulacra
• Christopher Butler – postmodernism: ‘a very short introduction’
• Francis Lyotard – micro narratives replacing macro narratives
• Noam Chomsky – against postmodernism, marxist readings
• Ferdinand de Saussure: signifier and signified are often arbitrary
• Mikhail Bakhtin – the ‘carnivalesque’
• Pierre Bourdieu – social class is constructed by cultural taste (and in turn by education)
• Dick Hebdige – subculture and the meaning of style
• Jacques Derrida – death of the author (audiences produce meaning)
• Fredric Jameson – on parody and pastiche
• Edward Said – on orientalism
• Stuart Ewan – style is political
• Daniel Strinati – we understand the world through the media
• Anthony Giddens – modernity, not post modernity