Genre, Representation, Audience& language

Genre:
Genres can be seen as 'a means of controlling demand' (Neale 1980, 55).

The genre may be considered as a practical device for helping any mass medium to produce consistently and efficiently and to relate its production to the expectations of its customers. Since it is also a practical device for enabling individual media users to plan their choices, it can be considered as a mechanism for ordering the relations between the two main parties to mass communication. (McQuail 1987, 200)

Every genre positions those who participate in a text of that kind: as interviewer or interviewee, as listener or storyteller, as a reader or a writer, as a person interested in political matters, as someone to be instructed or as someone who instructs; each of these positioning implies different possibilities for response and for action. Each written text provides a 'reading position' for readers, a position constructed by the writer for the 'ideal reader' of the text. (Kress 1988, 107)

John Hartley suggests that 'we need to understand genre as a property of the relations between texts' (O'Sullivan et al. 1994, 128)

 'genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them' (Hodge & Kress 1988, 7),


Representation:

Dyer: 'How we are seen determines how we are treated'. ' a star is a image, not a real person.'

Mulvery: ' woman do things to attract male attention.'  MALE GAZE

Julian McDougall (2009): 'In the online age it is getting harder to convince a media audience as a table, identifiable group'

Stuart Hall (1997:61): Defines representation as 'the process by which members of a culture use language to provide meaning'. From this meaning he says, we can already see that. 'Representation' cannot possible be a fixed, unchangeable notion.

Audience:

reginal, nation&Global advertising revenue is vital to commercial institutions as funding comes from advertising.

David Morley: preferred, opposition & negotiated

Bulmer&Katz: individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications):

Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.

Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life

Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts

Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

Language:

Barthes: semiotics. Signs- symbolic- indexical- iconic