The Media Student's Book

Gill Branston, Roy Stafford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136963797
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Media Student's Book is a comprehensive introduction for students of media studies. It covers all the key topics and provides a detailed, lively and accessible guide to concepts and debates.

Now in its fifth edition, this bestselling textbook has been thoroughly revised, re-ordered and updated, with many very recent examples and expanded coverage of the most important issues currently facing media studies. It is structured in three main parts, addressing key concepts, debates, and research skills, methods and resources. Individual chapters include:

• approaching media texts
• narrative
• genres and other classifications
• representations
• globalisation
• ideologies and discourses
• the business of media
• new media in a new world?
• the future of television
• regulation now
• debating advertising, branding and celebrity
• news and its futures
• documentary and 'reality' debates
• from 'audience' to 'users'
• research: skills and methods.

Each chapter includes a range of examples to work with, sometimes as short case studies. They are also supported by separate, longer case studies which include:

• Slumdog Millionaire
• online access for film and music
• CSI and detective fictions
• Let the Right One In and The Orphanage
• PBS, BBC and HBO
• images of migration
• The Age of Stupid and climate change politics.

The authors are experienced in writing, researching and teaching across different levels of undergraduate study, with an awareness of the needs of students. The book is specially designed to be easy and stimulating to use, with:

• aCompanion Website with popular chapters from previous editions, extra case studies and further resources for teaching and learning, at: www.mediastudentsbook.com
• margin terms, definitions, photos, references (and even jokes), allied to a comprehensive glossary
• follow-up activities in 'Explore' boxes
• suggestions for further reading and online research
• references and examples from a rich range of media and media forms, including advertising, cinema, games, the internet, magazines, newspapers, photography, radio, and television.

Part I
Key concepts

1 Approaching media texts 9

Case study: Visual and aural signs 32

2 Narratives 42

Case study: CSI: Miami and crime fiction 66

3 Genres and other classifications 74

Case study: Horror as popular art 98

4 Representations 106

Case study: Images of migration 129

5 Globalisation 138

Case study: Slumdog Millionaire: global film? 163

6 Ideologies and discourses 172

Case study: The Age of Stupid and climate change politics 194

7 Media as business 204

Case study: Music and movies – digital and available 228

Media scrum at Barcelona Football Club © Jordi Cotrina/El Periodico

1
Approaching media texts

• Semiotic approaches

• Structuralism, difference(s) and oppositions

• Denotation and connotation

• The social nature of signs

• Debates

• Content analysis

• Conclusion

• References and further reading

The media are not so much ‘things’ as places which most of us inhabit, which weave in and out of our lives. Their constant messages and pleasures seem to flow around and through us, and they immerse most of our waking lives. So there’s usually little problem with immediate understanding or enjoyment of them. Yet precisely because of their taken-for-grantedness, many people have seen it as important, and enjoyable, to try to analyse the roles and consequences of this part of everyday lives. And because most of us have learnt their ‘codes’ so thoroughly, they can be hard to stand back from, to try to ‘unpick’.

In this chapter we focus broadly on two examples of the two main approaches to media ‘texts’: qualitative and quantitative, looking at semiotic and content analysis methods. As their names suggest, these are broadly interested, respectively, in:

• exploring the qualities of individual texts, and

• registering what can be discovered by counting repeated patterns or elements across groups or quantities of texts.

Some perceive an opposition between these approaches, and they are indeed different. But they can fruitfully be used together, and each of them is best used with an awareness of the other one as supplementing some of its own weaknesses.

Note: You will probably need to spend some time on all this. The terms you’ll be trying out are now part of the bloodstream of much media study, and thus not explicitly used all the time, though they often structure many media scholars’ work. Semiotic approaches (part of qualitative methods) have been hugely qualified and debated in recent years. Yet broadly semiotic approaches, with an awareness of how

Figure 1.1 A famous image from the Second World War, urging the British to convert their gardens, flowerbeds, parks, etc. to vegetable growing resource (see The Age of Stupid case study). The interesting thing for this chapter is how few viewers perceive that there is only one leg shown – it is an ‘impossible’ image. But culturally formed habits of perception ignore this, perhaps because of the focus on the verbal message, the clouded skies, and the powerful combination of all three.

Part of the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of broadly semiotic or constructionist approaches is media discussions of spin, or PR (public relations). News media often make minute interpretation of signs, debating what a celebrity’s facial expression or a politician’s choice of phrasing ‘really’ signifies. See Chapter 11.

meanings, images, etc. are ‘constructed’, are part not only of this subject area, but also of mainstream media. This is especially true in comment on fashion and politics. You may find you already know more about semiotic approaches than you at first imagine.

EXPLORE 1.1

• When you have read this chapter, look through a few magazines and newspapers for discussion of fashions, politicians’ or celebrities’ dress, gestures and even speeches.

• How do such discussions relate to semiotic theories of ‘signifying practices’?

Roland Barthes (1915–80) French literary theorist, critic and philosopher who applied semiotic analysis to cultural and media forms, famously in Mythologies (1972, originally published 1957), a collection of essays wittily working with ads, wrestling, Greta Garbo’s face and so on.

Yellow Box

A note on the terms ‘text’ and ‘readers’

The word ‘text’ originally referred to sacred writings, such as the Bible, and a written passage from them on which a sermon might be based. Then it came to specify the ‘words on the page’ as in ‘the actual text’ of a speech – or, more recently, of a ‘text message’. But for semiotic and structuralist approaches, used in the study of media and culture, a text can be anything which is to be investigated – a haircut, hip-hop lyrics, a dance, a film.

The term comes from the Latin word meaning ‘tissue’. Barthes emphasised that narrative texts were not one thing, but a weaving together of different strands and processes. Some of these are ‘internal’ to the story; others make connections to its ‘outside’ or the rest of the real; some refer to other texts in the process called ‘intertextuality’. This ‘weave’ approach can be usefully applied to all texts. It is the very opposite of the original sense of something with a single, sacred meaning which is to be carefully discovered.

Within semiotic analysis we, the audience, are called ‘readers’, partly as a way of emphasising that we are dealing with something learnt rather than ‘natural’ and partly to indicate the degree of activity needed to make sense of signs.

Intertextuality: the variety of ways in which media and other texts interact with each other, rather than being unique or distinct.

A major example of qualitative approaches seeking to relate texts to their surrounding social orders has been semiotics (now less often called ‘semiology’, Saussure’s term). Content analysis, on the other hand, tries to explore what seem to be patterns or omissions across many of these ‘texts’, and is a prime quantitative method.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) French linguist who pioneered the semiotic study of language as a system of signs, organised in ‘codes’ and ‘structures’. The Russian theorist Volosinov, however, suggested the term ‘decoding’ tends to treat language as a dead thing, rather than a living and changing activity.

Semiotic approaches

Media, especially news and factual media, have often been thought of as kinds of conveyor belts of meaning between ‘the world’ and audiences, producing images ‘about’ or ‘from’ this or that debate, event or place.

The word ‘media’ comes from the Latin word ‘medium’ meaning ‘middle’. ‘Media’ is the plural of this term.

Sometimes this involves news, or the hidden secrets of celebrities. But it has often been assumed that the task of such communication is simply to tell ‘the truth’ about what it reports. Semiotics, however, does not assume that the media work as simple channels of communication, as ‘windows on the world’. Instead they are seen as actually structuring the very realities which they seem to ‘describe’ or ‘stand in for’. This disturbs powerful notions of ‘a truth’ to the complex worlds we inhabit which can be straightforwardly accessed and ‘brought back’.

Semiotics is a theory of signs, and how they work to produce meanings, or the study of how things come to have significance. This includes signs devised to convey meanings (language, badges) as well as ‘symptoms’ (as in ‘that’s the sign of swine flu’).

When the media were first seriously studied, in the late 1950s, existing methods from literary, social science and art criticism were routinely applied to them. Value was set on ‘good dialogue’, ‘convincing characters’, ‘truthfulness’ and ‘beautiful compositions’. As well as comfortable assumptions about ‘truth’, high value was set on ‘individuality’ (usually of a very limited group of writers, artists). But it soon became clear that simply to discuss a film or television programme by such methods was...

Table of contents

• Praise for this new edition
• Praise for previous editions
• Guided tour
• More praise for this new edition
• Student feedback
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Key concepts
• Part II Debates
• Part III Research methods and references
• Glossary of key terms
• Index