Collective Identity

Prompt Question 3

Social Implications

• In today’s media it often seems as if children but particularly young people or teenagers are represented as the most recent threat to society.

Social Implications

• If we look at the historical representation of young people in the media they hardly feature at all until the 1950s when suddenly it was realised that they had money and were a consumer group just waiting to be sold to and with this sudden power they also became a threat.

• To what extent are audiences active in constructing their own sense of identity?

Copy Cat (Audience effects theory)

• Refers to how the media influence and affects the audience behaviour and how they think.

• It relates to something publicized in the media that creates a lot of attention, causing other people to imitate in order to gain the same level attention.

• The well- known example of this is copycat murders, suicides and other violent acts that come with no other motive other than attention, caused by seeing the same acts in the media.

Encoding – Decoding Theory (Audience reception theory)

• Stuart Hall suggests that the audience does not simply passively accept a text. There are, in his views, three ways in which audiences can read or decode and understand a text:

Preferred Reading

• Preferred Reading/Dominant Hegemonic - when an audience interprets the message as it was meant to be understood, they are operating in the dominant code. The producers and the audience are in harmony

Negotiated Reading -

• Not all audiences may understand what media producers take for granted.

• Audiences will understand the over-riding dominant ideologies within the text but they may not agree with all the views/ideas; audiences will make their own ground rules to get to the agreed dominant ideology (they will take a different path).

Oppositional Reading/'counter-hegemonic' –

• when an audience understands the context of the media text but they will decode the text in a completely different way; opposing the encoded text.

Social Identity Theory

• Social identity theory was developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in 1979.

• Social identity is a person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership(s)

Social Identity Theory

• In order to increase our self-image we enhance the status of the group to which we belong.

• For example, ‘Adults know best’ We can also increase our self-image by discriminating and being prejudice against the out group (the group we don’t belong to).

• For example, youths and the elderly are not capable to make ‘right’ decisions.

• Therefore we divided the world into “them” and “us”

Passive consumption

• Repetitive negative representation of young people in TV and Film could cause the ‘out group’ (those who do not belong to the youth culture) to gain further negative assumptions increasing the gap between collective groups.

Eysenck and Nias (1978)

• Argue that recurrent representations of violence in the media desensitive audiences to violent behavior and actions.