Culture, power and representation
Focus on a particular media industry and analyse the relation(s) between culture, power and representation, which are played out through your chosen media.In this essay I will be defining the key concepts of 'culture', 'power' and 'representation' and discussing them in relation to my chosen media form of 'women's' magazines. I will show how the theories behind these key concepts are used to analyse the 'women's' magazine I have chosen for this essay, the Australian Women's Weekly. Using two issues, March 1993 and March 2005, this essay will attempt to show what affect, if any, 'culture', 'power' and 'representation' have had on this publication over the last twelve years.According to British cultural analyst Raymond Williams (1983, cited in Payne 1996, p.128) the term 'culture' is one of the most complex words in the English language because of the many ways there are to define the term. John Downing and Alan O'Connor explain 'culture' as being:an ongoing process and an active process of communication and understanding. The study of culture involves the study of activities and interactions...[culture] is an interactive process, saturated in everyday realities (Downing & O'Connor 1995, p. 10).
Ien Ang (1995) believes that the audience is responsible for constructing meaning from what is delivered to them by the media. The meanings and knowledge derived by consumers can be "used to mould oneself into a critical consumer of culture" because "consumers are also producers" (Hermes 1995, p. For this he borrows the term 'hegemony', a concept developed by Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci. The royal family are still prevalent on the cover, as are stories which have a cultural relevance in today's society - those that discuss marriage and family. Just as 'power' and 'culture' are linked, 'representation' too, ties in with these previous concepts. Simultaneously, popular entertainment, information and the proliferation of texts and visual imagery have become the conduit for much of what consumer culture regards as valuable, pleasurable and important (Lewis 2002, p. As Bonner explains:The trajectory through which the magazine-reading woman passes is well mapped out; the ideal ACP consumer moves from Dolly or Girlfriend to Cosmo or Cleo to She or Elle. The argument here is that capitalism has moved away from the notion of goods and services meeting basic needs to them having a 'symbolic' value to the consumer. In the Australian Women's Weekly (2005) 113 full pages out of the magazines 296 are devoted to advertisements compared with the Australian Women's Weekly (1993) where 80 of its 264 pages display advertisements. create the conditions for, and parameters within which, representation takes place (Davis 2004, p. Jean Baudrillard also agrees that "the media are monopolised by the dominant classes" and is used to their advantage as a means of "marketing and merchandising of the dominant ideology" (Baudrillard 1981, pp.
Common topics in this essay:
Women's Weekly,
Ien Ang,
Pierre Bourdieu,
John Fiske,
Jeff Lewis,
Stuart Hall's,
Frances Bonner,
Lochie Daddo's,
Jean Baudrillard,
Joke Hermes',
australian women's,
women's weekly,
australian women's weekly,
women's weekly 1993,
'culture' 'power',
weekly 1993,
chosen media,
key concepts,
media form,
'power' 'representation',
women's weekly 2005,
'culture' 'power' 'representation',
bonner 1997,
weekly 2005,
chosen media form,
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Acceptance Essays
