There are some really wonderful theorists and players within the scholarly framing of representation. Two of my favourite theorists are Stuart Hall and bell hooks. I find their work riveting and their viewpoints both enlightening and enlivening.
They make me look inside myself to see where are my biases as a person born white. They throw up issues around the imaging of certain groups, genders, religions, and make me question the education I had, the worldview of the society I grew up in, and the constant barrage of images that I absorb each day from the media.
Stuart Hall, in a doco on current media representations, says that images 'have become the priviledged sign of late modern culture'. He maintains that, on a global scale, they have become the 'saturating medium' of something represented, or 're-presented' by the media.
As a media worker in my past, I wondered how often i had assumed, even adopted, a mediated sterrotype of certain groups or issues. As a current affairs producer and journalist, I wondered if the information I had garnered was positioned within the accepted or hegemonic worldview of the time. But what I did not realise, perhaps, was the effect this view was having on audences.
For Hall, representation delivers meaning. He states that: 'Representation is the way MEANING is given to the things depicted' through the various mediums being used to project a particular text or image.
In relation to religion and social and religious groups, how are certain religions or groups depicted in the media and in popular culture? bell hooks, in anohter online vid doco. discusses her approach to representations using her marvellous book, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation (1994) to describe the essence of representations and the way to resist representations.
Like Hall, hooks uses the vehicle of popular culture to frame and embellish her arguments. The media presents a powerful imagining which, she notes, can help the audience understand the politics of difference. She sees popular culture as a pedogogy for realising the world.
Importantly, hooks urges us, as viewers and audiences, to 'think critically' about the world and the way different 'worlds' are shown and which aspects are highlighted. Her view is that there is a 'direct link' between representations and the choices we make in our lives'.
Her fear is that certain groups in society, or even in the academy, will dismiss the plethora of images and storylines around, for example, sexual and racial violence as not affecting or influencing people's worldviews or 'the choices they make in [their] lives'. Her critique extends to Hollywood and to which groups and what stories are being told and by whom - and what impact that screen blockbusters like Mel Gibson's Braveheart have on audiences. The industry priviledges the white gaze, in this case, the political liberals and white male powerbrokers.
The important question to ask in such cases is - in whose interest is this kind of representation? I remember when I went to see the film Braveheart, I was moved not by the independence movement in Scotland, the theme of the movie, but by what was happening at the time in the Balkans and the atrocities being perpetrated. I'd gone to the theatre with my elderly mother who was really puzzled when, after the film, I was visbily shaken. 'What's the matter with you?', she asked. All I could reply was 'Bosnia', explaining the extent of violence in the war that was all-pervasive.
Questions
- How does media represent and affect different groups in society?
- What is the impact of this representation of stories and images on audiences? And on the people being depicted?
- What role does the media have in countering negative stereotypes?
- Could the media do this? What would you recommend?
Sources:
Media Education Foundation: bell hooks: Cultural criticism, part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLMVqnyTo_0&feature=related
Media Education Foundation: Representation and the media, featuring Stuart Hall, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTzMsPqssOY
Image source:
http://www.fromoldbooks.org/DelamotteOrnamentalAlphabets/pages/051-16th-Century-letter-r/
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