Media Miss Davies

Discourse, both written or spoken communication or debate - in terms of Forecault, with particular relation to power and control. Forecault believed that audiences don't exist naturally they are 'constructed' by media institutions - 'elusive fields' of reality are transmitted into discrete objects - i.e. are discussed/analysed/created in certain ways by those who who seek to know them in order to have power over them e.g. advertisers 'define' audiences as consumers and gather knowledge about their purchasing habits because they want to sell to them.

In my work:

We 'constructed' an audience in our creativity by doing market research into what our the genre conventions of rock/dance/electro were but also the features of our bands existing art work and music videos was like. We challenged this by enhancing our creativity using a GoPro camera in underwater sequences to be cohesive with the songs title 'The Holy Coast' and then used a more conventional narrative with a couple showing subversion of Laura Mulvey's theory The Male Gaze but also using binary opposition to show the male as the protagonist. This 'constructed' an audience around the features that they are known to like, with a story that is easily relatable to a range of people.

Participatory media include, but are not limited to, blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging, social bookmarking, music, photo-video sharing, podcasts etc. These distinctly different media share three common, interelated characteristics. The asymetry between broadcaster and audience that was dictated by the structure of pre-digital technologies has changed radically.

My work:

Any way we used the internet e.g. for research, YouTube, feedback and the pro's/con's of this. Participatory media in my work could include the way we have represented the characters for example - age, gender, what it's like to be a teen? We represented troubles in teenage relationships but subverted the stereotype of females being sexualised, and used binary opposition to show the male as a protagonist.. how does this influence the audience's opinion? Who are they alligned with and why? Could talk about active, passive and negotiating spectator.

Barthes' theory 'Death of the author' is that the author has no control.

Barthes believed that 'readers' i.e. the audiences. create their own meanings so the texts are always 'open to question'. Barthes' draws anology between texts and textiles, declaring that a 'text is a tissue of quotations' drawn from innumerable centres of culture, rather than from one, individual experience - Postmodernism.

Our work:

After our audience feedback we concluded that we did have some control over the intended meaning of our piece, controlled through the mise-en-scene e.g. clothing showing good/evil creating a protagonist but also our choice of camera angles creating certain allignments, however: we also feel that our media piece was ambiguous enough for other readings.

Althusser explained how the ideological state apparatus i.e. the government, media etc interpellate the subjects (people) into ideological positions e.g. a police man who calls us is interpellating us into a subject position.

My work:

In my music video I feel we could have interpellated our audience into believing that 'relationships are like this' or 'gender is like this' although there is a sense of supernatural and unrealistic scenes as they are filmed underwater and are more for an artistic perspective, the situations are realistic and relatable which can always lead to an audience being interpellated into them and/or believeing them to be true representations.

In our music video we represented teenage relationships as having troubles as the male cheats on the female, represented through the mise-en-scene and his dark clothing that is in binary opposition to the female who is in a long white dress to represent innocence.. this could be seen as a subversion to Mulvey's 'Male Gaze' theory, we also interpellate the audience into being alligned with the female as most camera angles are over the shoulder from her perspective, and we see her point of view. However, further binary oppositions with the male writing a letter contrasting with the intricate editing show contrast with new/old tradition and interpellate the audience into perhaps feeling sympathetic towards the male as he appears to make an effort.