• FACTS:
• Part of a development in lifestyle and environmental movements of the early twenty first century
• Re-branded consumerism as an ethical movement.
• Its reflects feminist movement (authenticity and empowerment) over stereotypes –  focus on creativity and quirkiness.
• Focus on women as artists, entrepreneurs, athletes and musicians (empowerment)
• Absence of focuses on men
• Rep of social groups: focuses on culture and the environment – Values
• Contrasting from Men’s Health magazine, Oh is an
• Independent magazine published by Iceberg Press (small London publisher – 1 other title)
• Targets a niche audience
• Prints over multiple media forms
• THEORISTS:
  • Hall – the way messages are coded and decoded – Oh codes themes and messages about empowerment for the audience
  • Van Zoonen – believes the media portray images of stereotypical women and this behaviour reinforces societal views.  This magazine breaks this stereotypes by showing female empowerment and therefore, promoting and enforcing these attributes of female behaviour in society.
• Gender Prformativity (Butler) – the stylisted repetition of women as empowered and strong leads to these characteristic learnt and encouraged

• Critically analyse the relationship between media work and the media industry
• Wrote a seminal book, The Culture Industries 
• From The Cultural Industries: ‘the distinctive organisational form of the cultural industries has considerable implications for the conditions under which symbolic creativity is carried out’
• there must be serious concerns about the extent to which this business-driven, economic agenda is compatible with the quality of working life and of human well-being in the creative industries (Banks, M., & Hesmondhalgh, D. (2009) International Journal of Cultural Policy, 415-430.)
• Looked at ‘myth-making’ process surrounding the potential digital future for young creatives – the individualising discourses of ‘talent’ and ‘celebrity’ and the promise of future fame or consecration, have special purchase in creative work, and are often instrumental in ensuring compliance with the sometimes invidious demands of managers, organisations and the industry (Banks & Hesmondhalgh, p. 420).
• Young people are brainwashed by the media to see it as a ‘utopian presentation, creative work is now imagined only as a self-actualising pleasure, rather than a potentially arduous or problematic obligation undertaken through material necessity (2009, p. 417)’. And do not understand that it is hard work and a difficult, competitive industry.
• Mostly successful through family business.
• Role of luck chance and coincidence.

• Media concentration =
• Conglomerates =
• Globalisation (in terms of media ownership) = across the world
• Vertical Integration – when somebody own multiple/all companies in the production and distribution chain.
• Horizontal Integration = making/producing multiple things
• Gatekeepers = in charge of what happens – hold power – allows certain things to happen
• Regulation = instating regulations and restrictions – law and government
• Deregulation = removal of regulations and restrictions
• Free market = made by the people for the people, truth and not for profit or dominance.
• Monopolies = when one company/person owns/dominates the market – lacks diversity – dominated/overpowered
• Mergers = when two companies merge together
• Neo-liberalism =
• Alt-Right = ideological grouping of reactionary viewpoints, through the use of online media to disseminate controversial content.
• Surveillance = observing/recording something
• Privacy = right to do ones own thing without expose or observation
• Security =
• GDPR =

QUOTES:

For many, the wider social, political, historical and cultural contexts are not just clearly connected to media studies but they are in some ways more important.

“I’ve always said you can’t understand the world without the media nor the media without the world” (Professor Natalie Fenton, quoted in Fake news vs Media Studies J. McDougall

“I do spend long periods of time with my gaze turned away from the media, because I’m seeking to understand what’s going on out there, and then the role of the media in that context. I’m always putting the social, the political and the economic (contexts) first.” (ibid) p.17 2019, Palgrave)

• War of the worlds an invasion of Fascism on the eve of WW2

• Letter to the Free – provocative campaign – Black life matters – Post Colonialism

• Conceptional, theoretical idea that helps us to understand the times we are now
• Characterized by new technology
• Fragmentary set of interrelationships
• References its self – self-referential
• He’s self-referential
• He is fragmentary
• Often characterized by parody and pastiche
• Pastiche Imitates work of a previous artist
• Parody – irony/mocks/ridicules
• Characterized by intertextuality – surfaces signs, gesture, play, self-referential – preoccupation with visual style – lacks dept and deeper meaning
• Worry there is no/dis-concern meta-narrative (overall big structure) – deeper meaning/big questions
• Bricolage – involves rearrangement and juxtapose of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning.
• Post Modernism – how do we know anything – fiction from reality? – How do we distinguish
• Live in a consumerist, materialistic world – all for a big company
• Rearrangement for previously seen things – Memento
• Surfaces and styles become the most important in Post-modern world – feeding consumerist world.

LETTERS TO THE FREE:

How can you apply the concept of Orientalism to Common’s Letter to the Free?

• The way the west characterise the black and oriental cultures.
• The video uses western stereotypes about different cultures such as the location is a prison, linking to crime and slavery.
• Links between culture, imperial power & colonialism is seen through the modern music video, with messages such as anti-racism and equality, linking to slavery and colonialism.
• The way in which imperial cultures have the power to create ideologies and stereotypes through portrayal.

How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellated)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

• The audience are included by the use of direct address, ‘Letters to the free’, addressing the free and in particular those in power to end racism and create equality.
• The audience are also drawn in through the use of explicit lyrics ‘hung from’, to create emotional responses and the desire for equality.
• Drawn in by the use of colour, black and white, representing simplicity and truth as well as division between races and cultures.

GHOST TOWN:

Where can you identify ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’ in this music video?

Hybridity – seen through the two-toned music style of pop and ska and the mixture of races within the band members.   

Ambiguity – the deeper meanings behind the song such as unity and equality between races and culture and how the hybridity of music has positive impacts on society etc.  

Cultural Polyvalency – the music is a blend of two different popular music styles for multiple cultures which joined together and created a new joined style, embraced by multiple, combined cultures.

How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellation)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

• The audience are drawn due to the two-tone music, which was a popular style at the time and the cultural significance and messages it conveys such as equality.
• The audience are addressed by the use of local London scenes, which the audience can relate to and understand the current troubles that are occurring such as the recession and racism.
• Drawn in by lyrics, such as ‘No jobs to be found in the country’, which again conveys the struggles of unemployment and racism of the time.

• Way of seeing and understanding the world (you, community and world.)
• Postmodernism can be understood as a philosophy that is characterised by concepts such as RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE
• Characterised by copying, referencing etc

• pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist
• parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

• BRICOLAGE : ‘involves the rearrangment and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’ (Barker & Jane, 2016:237)
• INTERTEXTUALITY – It suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs and that meaning is therefore a complex process of decoding/encoding with individuals both taking and creating meaning in the process of reading texts
• Shuker refers Fredric Jameson’s (1984) – the fragmentary, decentred nature of music videos that break up traditional understandings of time and space so that audiences are ‘no longer able to distinguish ‘fiction’ from ‘reality’, part of the postmodern condition’ (ibid).
•  the concept that the meaning of a text does not reside in the text, but is produced by the reader in relation not only to the text in question, but also the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process.
•  ‘their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.’ (2001:167). Shuker
• Surface and style over substance – surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture‘ (Strinati: 234)

• 1959, Richard Hoggart (Uses of Literacy *

• neighborhood lives’, which was ‘an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near

• Consumerism underpinned for want not need, never satisfied.

• In other words, there is an argument that postmodern culture is a consumer culture, where the emphasis on style eclipses the emphasis on utility or need

• Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities.

• Individual consumption – service, superficial, individual identity.
• fragmentation of identity
• alienation individuals
• Post modern world is precarious

• John Baudrillard’ points out that ‘the distinction between culture and society is being eroded’ From a societal perspective the ‘real’ seems to be imploding in on itself, a ‘process leading to the collapse of boundaries between the real and simulations
• What is reality – simulation – simulation vs reality
• Jean-Francois Lyotard’s
• Fredric Jameson 
• Breaking up due to loss of a meta narrative – Christian religion – story = God
• Science changed it, new ideas. – Only reveals so much

• SIMULACRA. – representation of real is now the real.
• Copying and simulation is the new real
•  HYPERREAL – exaggerated real
• sims establishing an identity – lacon – scizophrenic – ongoing project –

• Looking at identity, representation and the self, specifically through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.
• From perspective of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Racism + Post Colonialism)

• ORIENTALISM: Said
• The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism – theory/critical approach by Edward Said.
• Wrote culture and imperialism
• Looked at canon in literature – West – white, male, imperial perspective
• Culture is as important in creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness’.
• How do people allow slavery to happen? authority figure? – complexity
• Through Lit and culture can legitimates – through beliefs and visions – if everyone does it – create environment where it is acceptable
• Lens of empire creates ideas of the world (slavery allowed)
• Dominate cultures can have… the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism – Edward Said Culture and Imperialism, 1993: xiii
• V. G. Kiernan (American: The New Imperialism) (cit in Said, 1993:350 -‘an economic system like a nation or a religion, lives not by bread alone, but by beliefs, visions, daydreams as well, and these may be no less vital to it for being erroneous’
•  Paul Gilroy puts it, ‘a civilising mission that had to conceal its own systematic brutality in order to be effective and attractive’ (2004:8)

Jacques Lacan – Mirror Stage (First time children see themselves in the mirror – unnerving. Only see what they aren’t not what they are.)

• Socially constructed
• cannot see of know ourselves
• only through exploring the other – what we are not
• Representation of the East as the Other -CONSTRUCTED through the lens of WESTERN COLONIAL POWER.
• Theory of the other – people are the living embodiment of being the other.
• Wrote in 1980s

Louis Althusser: ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’:

• Ideological state apparatus (ISA) – structures full of ideas and beliefs, connected to state/dominate interest.
• Socially constructed
• Interpellation and haling – way in which identity is formed/way you are seen therefore you seen yourself
• The way you are portrayed is the way you begin to see yourself and become – Not free
• Ideas that form you is the society of the ruling class – dominate ideas – ruling class – Marxism – want everyone to thing the same (Slavery and Genocide)
• Trapped in ideological state apparatus (ISA) – herd mentality
• Blackface – racism in art form

Frantz Fanon

• From a French Slave Colony – Interpellation
• The Wretched of the Earth (1961) – writes about treatment/experience
• saw him through lens of empire
• Faced derogatory phrases
• Came up with this 3 point pla:
• 1)Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
• 2)Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
• 3)Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.
• Music Video: Through music can see hegemony – nothing is fixed/fluid (Gramsci)- Hegemonic struggle the chance to reclaim …

Syncretism, Double Consciousness & Hybridisation

• These words are mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities.
• Paul Gilroy – double conciseness (Think consciously about two things).
• Wrote in 1990s – He was a Black Academic in London.
• Wrote a book called, ‘There a’nt not back in the union jack’.
• ‘Place of racism in comtempory political cultural’.
• Double conciseness – Gilroy developed idea from Dubois
• 1950s – needed cheap labor to rebuild people came from all over the world e.g.India
• Idea of being Black, British/Black-America – seeing themselves as duplicity – see a separation
• Multicultural – multiple cultures
• Hybirdity – many
• Ambiguous – changeable
• Cultural polyvalency – many cultural identities
• Music Videos: Emigrants came over and brought new music (reggae – two tones) – hybirdisation

Black History

• Roman, Tudor
• Slave owners compensated for loss of ‘probity’
• Slaves weren’t freed instantly

Dubois

• Wrote ‘Souls of black folk’, in 1903 – about the effects of racism on identity
• Disabling black people to reach full potential in society and therefore as human beings

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony: struggle for a better society.

• Systemic Societal Sexism:
• misogyny – fear or hatred of women (subordination)
• sexism – discriminatory technique
• patriarchy – male power
• institutional (groups, organisations) perspective and individual perspective

Feminism: critical articulation for equality

• 4 waves of feminism
• Michelene Wandor, ‘sexism was coined by analogy with the term racism in the American civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Defined simply, sexism refers to the systematic ways in which men and women are brought up to view each other antagonistically, on the assumption that the male is always superior to the female‘ (1981:13). – SECOND WAVE FEMINISM 60s, 70s – the pill, divorcee, sexuality
• 1st Wave – Suffer-gets
• fighting for the votes and parliamentary consideration
• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

Theorists:

• Jean Kilbourne – looked at magazines, saw structuralism in sexism – women in mass media – second wave
• Laura Mulvey * – 1975 wrote essay – Visual pleasure and narrative cinema – second wave
• Central to her thesis was the role of the male gaze, a theoretical approach that suggests the role of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look,’ in contemporary visual media.
• ‘What is visual pleasure’?
• Freud – scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze ‘
• Underpinned by Voyeurism (sexual pleasure in looking)
• Structured around patriarchy – ‘male lookers, females are the looked at’.
• Camera is representing male gaze – women exhibition
• Fetishism (‘the quality of a cut-out . . . stylised and fragmented‘), the way in which parts of the female body are presented as something to be ‘looked at’ and therefore ‘objectified‘ and ‘sexualised‘  – Freud-en idea – dehumanisng
• Mulvey draws on the work of Jacques Lacan (‘this mirror moment‘), highlighting the parallel between the ‘mirror stage’ of child development and the mirroring process that occurs between audience and screen – ‘a complex process of likeness and difference‘. – Identify formation
• If patriarchy control representation, children will grow up believing dominate ideology/representation
• Sut Jhally‘s same as Mulvey but with Music Videos. Language of music videos linking to representation of women.

3 and 4 Wave Feminism:

• 3 Wave Feminism – Raunch Culture*: mid 90s
• Second seemed to disappear
• Barker and Jane (2016) >
• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion – pluralism/ inter-sectional
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics – change cultural – cyber activism
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyber-activism
• the re-appropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity
• 4 more active in cultural + pluralism – deveolopment on first
• ‘Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in the media that can play into male stereotypes of women as highly sexually available, where its performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality’Hendry & Stephenson (2018:50

• Queer Theory – Intersectionality – multiple personalities/identities/representations
• Bell Hook(black feminist) – Multicultural Intersectionality
• power relationships between black and white women’. So that ‘in a postcolonial context, women carry the double burden of being colonized by imperial powers and subordinated by colonial and native men’.