Representation

Mediation and Representation

Every time we encounter a media text, we are not seeing reality, but someone's version of it. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is something that is easily forgotten when we get caught up in enjoying a text. The media place us at one remove from reality: they take something that is real, a person or an event and they change its form to produce whatever text we end up with. This is called mediation.

You should be looking for this with any media text. Think about the latest Coldplay album, for example- this is not just the sound of four musicians playing together in a studio. Instead, the reality of the sound that they might make has been mediated before it reaches you. Engineers and producers have re- modelled the sound and artists have packaged the album. Newspapers and magazines have reported the group and created a context for the album so that most people probably had an opinion about it before it came out. Once again, whatever sound the group made in the studio has been highly mediated before it gets to you.

If you ever go to see a comedy show recorded for the television, you will see the process of mediation in action. What might end up as a half hour broadcast, will be recorded over an entire evening - jokes that might seem spontaneous when watched on the TV will have been endlessly repeated until "just right". The studio audience will have been trained into laughing in exactly the right way by warm up men and the text that finally reaches the public will also be given context by use of soundtrack music and computer graphics. The whole experience of hearing a few jokes will have been mediated.

Of course, most of us are aware of this- we know that what we are seeing in a film or Soap isn't real- we just allow ourselves to forget for the time that the programme is on that it is a fiction. At the same time we all have ideas in our heads of some kinds of texts which might be somehow less mediated- it is obvious that a fictional programme isn't real but when we encounter something like the television news, we are more likely to believe in the straightforward nature of the "truth" we are receiving.

In fact, the News is just as sure to be mediated as anything else- someone has decided that these are the few news items that are the most "newsworthy" and has chosen the shots that are used to tell the stories, the graphics that will go with them and the tie that the presenter will be wearing which will distract you so much while you are watching. Whatever version you get of what has gone on will end up being highly mediated- very different from the experience of someone who was at the scene- as you will know if you have ever seen a news event taking place.

Mediation- three things to look for:

1. Selection- Whatever ends up on the screen or in the paper, much more will have been left out- any news story has been selected from hundreds of others which the producers decided for you were less interesting, any picture has been chosen from an enormous number of alternatives.
2. Organisation- The various elements will be organised carefully in ways that real life is not- in visual media this involves mise-en-scene and the organisation of narrative, in the recording of an album the production might involve re-mixing a track. Any medium you can think of will have an equivalent to these. This organisation of the material will result in…….
3. Focusing- mediation always ends up with us, the audience being pushed towards concentrating on one aspect of the text and ignoring others. If you are watching a film the camera will pan towards an important character, in a tabloid the headlines will scream, for your attention. It can be easy to ignore how different from our everyday lives this is. If you are walking through a field, you are unlikely to see a sign saying "look at this amazing tree." You make your own decisions about what is worth our attention. The media text, through mediation, tries to do this for us.

Representation

The result of this process of mediation is that we are given a version of reality which is altered- those are never the real people that we are seeing but representations of them which have somehow been created. It is time now to look at this idea of representation and how it happens.

What is representation?

The Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions of the word:

1. To represent something is to describe or depict it, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal…..; to place a likeness of it before us in our mind.
2. To represent also means to symbolise, stand for, to be a specimen of or to substitute for; as in the sentence, "In Christianity, the cross represents the suffering and crucifixion of Christ."

It is worth thinking about each of these for a moment- the first one is the more straightforward- the media are in the business of describing things to us- they represent people and types of people to us so that we end up feeling that we know what they are like.

In most of these cases it is unlikely that you know these people personally- what impression that you have of them must come from the media. They have given us descriptions that have affected our views of these people.

The second of the two dictionary definitions is slightly more difficult but also useful. A representation is something that symbolises something else. The example the dictionary gives of the cross is an obvious one, but in the media you can find plenty of others. Liam Gallagher, as he is represented in the media is not just the singer in Oasis, but also a symbol of many things which some in the media think is wrong with young people in England today- drug-taking, hooliganism lack of originality etc.

Society, the individual and representation

Of course it is too simple to talk just about the media mediating reality and creating representations- we need a more subtle understanding of the process. To get this we need to look briefly at some different ideas people have had about how representation works.

You could broadly separate these into three:

The Reflective view of representing

According to this view, when we represent something, we are taking its true meaning and trying to create a replica of it in the mind of our audience- like a reflection. This is the view that many people have of how news works- the news producers take the truth of news events and simply present it to us as accurately as possible.

The Intentional view

This is the opposite of the Reflective idea. This time the most important thing in the process of representation is the person doing the representing- they are presenting their view of the thing they are representing and the words or images that they use mean what they intend them to mean. According to this theory, if you see a picture of an attractive person drinking a can of Coke in an advert, it will have the same meaning to you as the advertiser intended- go away and buy some!

The Constructionist view

This is really a response to what have been seen a weakness in the other two theories- constructionists feel that a representation can never just be the truth or the version of the truth that someone wants you to hear since that is ignoring your ability as an individual to make up your own mind and the influences of the society that you live in on the way that you do so. This text will broadly be taking a Constructionist approach to representation so it is worth spelling out this idea again.

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.

Here's an example of how this works:

If you've seen the film Independence Day, you may have been amused or annoyed at the way that British people were represented as upper class idiots. If you consider the different parts of the Constructionist approach to representation, they would work like this:

1. There must be some British people who the producers either encountered in reality or in other media texts.
2. They formed an opinion of them that they were stuck up idiots which they used as the basis of their representation.
3. As an individual watching this, you chose whether to believe the representation was valid or not.
4. In doing this, you were influenced by the fact that you are yourself British- an American watching the film would probably have come to a different conclusion.

In the last two parts of this equation- the individual and society are an enormously difficult area. For now it is worth thinking about the influence of society on what representations we receive. In society there are ardent royalists and republicans, people who hate loud women and those who respect them- a multitude of views- so how can we say that society has an influence on our views of someone or something? The truth is that amid all this confusion of opinions, some kinds of ideas dominate and are shared by a majority of people. We call views about how things should be and how people should behave an ideology and if an ideology is shared by the majority of people in a culture it is called the dominant ideology.

The group of ideas that make up the dominant ideology in Britain are not something that remains static- they change as new ideas enter society, are encountered and people discuss them. For example the dominant ideology in Britain used to be anti-gay and there was legislation that made it illegal but this has changed in recent history and the dominant attitude or ideology of our society today is one which accepts people’s choice of sexual identity. We also have an ideology that outwardly subscribes to equality for women and all ethnic groups, however that does not mean that everyone accepts this; homophobia, sexism and racism still exists and examples can still be found in the media.

Here are some things that are generally agreed to be part of the dominant ideology in Britain:

• People should put their families first.
• People should work for their money and not show off too much about how much they have.
• Women should behave modestly.
• Women should look after their appearance. (Is this equality?)

You may not agree with all of these morals, but they are part of the dominant ideology, the chances are that they are the feelings of most people.

Stereotypes

We've spent quite a long time dealing with society and how it effects the process of representation, it's worth now looking in more detail at what is going on in the other parts of the process- the individuals and the media and their relationship with what is being represented. This brings us on to the question of stereotypes- another word which is maybe worth a dictionary definition:

A standardised, usually oversimplified, mental picture or attitude that is held in common by members of a group.

A stereotype is a simplification that we use to make sense of a real person or group which is much more complicated. In reality there are many different kinds of Germans who are all individuals, but it is much easier to fool ourselves into believing that all Germans cheat with beach towels and eat strange sausages. The example that I have just given may seem harmless, but in fact it is arguable that it is racist. Stereotypes are potentially highly dangerous but stereotyping itself is impossible to avoid- it is a natural function of the human mind- something that we all do in order to survive mentally in the confusing world around us.

Task

You are going to research the following ‘categories’ and record what you think are the prevalent representations of them in our society. You will need to find text and images from the media to support your views.

Gender

 

Age

 

Ethnicity

 

Sexuality

 

Class and status

 

Physical ability/disability

 

Regional identity

1. Is there one dominant representation or did you find a variety of competing representations within each ‘category’? Did you find any evidence of stereotyping being used?
2. Did the group being represented seem to have much or any control over how they were portrayed? Did you find any evidence of subversion or challenging of the prevalent representations from within the group? What, if any, effect does this have on their representation/the way they are viewed in our society?
3. What do the first two answers tell us about those being represented, about how people are represented and about power in our society?

You need to provide thorough and thoughtful responses with evidence from actual media texts used to support your points. These can include pictures and textual evidence or downloads/links to video you have found.