IDEOLOGY II

• Last week we spoke of ideology in the

media as working at the level of
Interpellation, where it isolates and places
an individual to receive it in some way.’
• This process takes place at the level of
identity – individuals are identified as
audiences of media products, and defined
through their identities
 Identity
• Identity refers to who we are in relation to others
in society.
• People are constantly in search of who they are.
This is part of the identity crisis. Identity is not
fixed
• The media has become a significant site for
reproducing identities
• Previously, people used the traditional sources
of identity such as the family, work and religion
• The wide-spread nature of the media has
ensured that it occupies a major position
in defining identities.
• Media’s cultural content is informed by
differences in identities
 Media audiences
• There are two forms of media audiences
defined around identity:
– Audiences as markets
– Audiences as social and cultural products
 The audience as market
• Audience – social construction used to refer to
people who consume a particular product or the
imagined recipient of a media product.
• It is an ideological concept
• It exists in the way it is defined by particular
groups for particular purposes
• How the audience is constructed determines
how it can function and how the relationship
between the media and their audiences can be
described, measured and evaluated.
 Audience as market
• The audience is often seen as a potential
or potentially overlapping market (one
person can occupy several positions of
audience)
• A market identifies a subsection of the
population as potential consumers of a
particular identifiable product or set of
products.
 Example
• How can you tell the potential market of a
magazine?
– Female? Why?
– Letters section?
– Themes
– The example of the two Kenyan magazines,
Adam and Eve.
• The audience as market is not a
composite whole. It can vary in size,
duration and stability/flexibility
• Markets have identities attached to them
eg Sex and The City; WWF wrestling,
CNN news
• Beyond finding appropriate audiences,
producers also include content that will
keep others out of an audience
• Adam magazine
– Men first
– Hummer
– F1
– Strip clubs
• Eve Magazine
– Motherhood
– Good wife
• True Love
– Maids in Mzansi-Why eve doesn’t want a black
madam
– Dream your way to better sex, think like a man etc
• Audiences are therefore defined as consumers
or commodities
• As consumers, the media producer always has
in mind the person who is going to consume the
product.
• This idea is referred to as a market type.
• People also categorize themselves according to
their consumer positions (I wouldn’t live in
Hillbrow; I like plasma TVs; I watch cartoons; I
like RnB or 80s music)
• Producers must therefore develop specific
ways to attract this audience
• They do this in three ways
– Demographics
– Tastes and cultures
– Lifestyle cultures
 Demographics
• Quantitative description according to a set
of social or sociological variables.
• Age, race, gender, income level,
educational level, place of residence.
• The producers make assumptions about
consumers when making market
categorizations.
• That is why media organizations carry out
extensive market researches
• This helps them to determine marketing
strategies and advertising styles
• Why do soccer adverts mostly feature
black people and rugby feature white
people? What is the demographic
assumption?
 Tastes and culture
• This depends on the continuing
commitment of a group of people to some
type of product.
• Watch SABC 1, SABC 2 and SABC 3.
Look at the kinds of adverts. What are the
assumptions regarding taste and cultures
of those who watch these SABC
channels?
• Producers operating with an
understanding of the audience as taste n
cultures construct media products
according to their understanding of the
features of the product that hold such
tastes and cultures together rather than
according to their image of a particular
demographic group of consumers.
 Lifestyle clusters
• This is a mixture of demographic and
consumption habits and tastes.
• A lifestyle cluster represents a segment of
the population that tends to purchase
certain kinds of products or to make
certain decisions, including voting
– SAFM
• A lifestyle cluster creates groups in the
population whose members have several
characteristics in common.
• These members often spend their money
and time in similar ways.
• Advertisers and media producers can
target a specific lifestyle cluster
• E.g Adam and Eve
• Shopping Malls – A pick n Pay in Hillbrow
and one in Sandton – what would be the
differences?
• Time magazine and Drum magazine?
• The need to make people think of
themselves as consumers
• Media – instrumental in constructing the
idea of consumers (one identity)
 Origins of consumerism
• Industrial development
• Mass production
• People had to be convinced to spend their
money
• Modern mass media – how to be a
consumer
• This consumer is active - choices
• So the producer has to convince
• The media reminds the audience to be a
consumer.
 The Audience as commodity
• The audience as commodity exists as an
object to be sold for profit.
• Think of how advertising works
• The media produce an audience for their
own media products then deliver that
audience to another media producer – the
advertiser
• When people watch TC shows, they are
also watching adverts
• One can argue that this audience can
move away from the channels during
adverts; buy DVDs and avoid them etc
• Genres such as music sell their audiences
– they sell them to clothing houses, Think
of the Hannah Montana brands,
 Cultural identities
• Beyond being consumers and commodities, the
audience can also be defined as cultural
identities
• Given that id is a product of a variety of social
groups and differences, audiences are defined
using multiple terms
• In media, the question to ask is: what is the
relationship between the images and sounds of
identities made available through the media
• How do people take up and live their own
identities and relate to others inhabiting other
identities
 Categories
• 1) Essentialist – representation of identity
is natural, accurate and universal
• 2)Non – essentialist – Categories of
identity are culturally constructed
 Stereotypes in the media
• The media provides pictures of people and
descriptions of different social groups and
social identities
• What do we think of how we are
represented in the media?
• Stereotyping – help to categorize,
however, often viewed as biased.
• The biasness can be in the form of
absences, negative portrayals, distortions
• The media contributes to the construction of
stereotypes as a result of systematic biases
• The west’s view of Africa in the movies
– Hunger
– Salvation and salvaging
– Disease
– Blood Diamonds, Constant Gardner
– South African movies – blackness
• Tsotsi
• Jerusalema
• Hijack stories
 Representation as a cultural
construction
• Media representations are actively
involved in construction of identity
• In culture
– How is a category of identity established
– How are individuals assigned to it
– How is meaning determined?
• Categories of identity such as gender and race
are products of cultural codes which select some
aspects of the body and make them significant
signifiers whereas others remain just other parts
of the anatomy.
• Such codes organize signs in relation to
difference, so that any signifier of identity is only
significant insofar as its difference from other
signifiers is provided as a code itself
• Culture selects the relevant dimensions
that will constitute people’s identity and
organize them into relations of difference
• One term is always dominant and defines
the norm. This norm is neither –ve nor
+ve. It is neutral. E.g femaleness is
measured against maleness; poverty
against wealth; black against white
• In media, people are interpellated to get
into their appropriate positions – women
seem to be largely defined or placed as
the object of male pleasure
 ANNOUNCEMENT
• NEXT QUARTER WE CHANGE OUR
CLASSES TO TUESDAYS 14:00-15:45
• Same venue