REPRESENTATION IN THE MEDIA

There are different definitions for the word REPRESENTATION :

- 'something was already there and has been re-presented by the media'

-'standing in for us, being somewhere we couldn't be' e.g. society being represented by political figures.

PROFESSOR RICHARD DYER

  Entertainment and representation and the relations between them as well as music and film (including melodrama), Italian cinema (especially in its popular forms) and gay / lesbian / queer cultures.

 Dyer said: 'How we are seen determines how we are treated, how we treat  others is based on how we see them. How we see them comes from representation'.       




 -What this quote is saying and the point Richard Dyer is making is that how social groups are treated in cultural representation is part and parcel of how they are treated in life.

•   EXAMPLE:

- HERE, is the feedback after Google searching 'teenage girl' on Google images. As Dyer explains, the way the media portrays groups of people such as teenagers for example, determines the public's opinion of how they portray them and treat them.

-Due to the media constantly focusing on the exaggerated ASBO behaviour of ALL teenagers in the modern day, teenagers as a whole are now portrayed as the well analysed image above. Factors such as good education, voluntary work and sporting achievements are put to side and forgot about by those who are injected by newspapers, magazines, tv etc.

INJECTION THROUGH THE MEDIA AKA 'THE HYPODERMIC NEEDLE THEORY'

The hypodermic needle theory was a theory that has was devised and has been developed over the years, its main influence was based in the 1930s and the 1940s. The basic idea of the theory is that whatever is put in the media is then automatically believed by its consumers. The needle is a metaphor that is used to suggest that those who create the media 'inject' their ideas into audiences.

EXAMPLE: if a newspaper article claimed that a footballer such as David Beckham was having an affair, the hypodermic needle suggests that this information is automatically believed by those who read it due to it being commercialised.

The hypodermic needle plays a massive part in representation and to a certain extent is true. However people or situations are portrayed in the media depends on a wide range of naive people's views.