- How the media shows us things about society - but this is through careful mediation.
- For representations to be meaningful to an audience there needs to be a shared recognition of people, situations, ideas, beliefs etc.
- All representations therefore have ideaolgies behind them. Certain paradigms are encoded into texts and others are left out in order to give a preferred representation (Levi-Strauss, 1958).
- Representation is about constructing reality, it is supposed to contain versimilitued and simplify people's understanding of life.
- It refers to construction in any medium (especially those aimed at wider audiences, the mass media).
- Can be to do with construction of any aspects of reality, such as people, places, objects, events, class, age, gender, ethnicity, cultural identities and other abstract concepts.
- The term refers to the processes involved as well as it's products.
- Some peoples identities can be differentially marked in relation to demographic factors. An example could be the issue of 'the gaze'. How men look at women, women at men, men at men, and women at women.
Four questions regarding analysing media representations in general:
- What sense of the world is it making?
- What does it imply? Is it typical of the world or deviant?
- Who is it speaking to? For whom? To whom?
- What does it represent to us and why? How do we respond to the representation?
- Class - Generally higher classes are richer, more respected, snobby - Lower classes are poor, not respected
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