Representation is the way that certain places and people, including age, gender and race, are portrayed in the media. Stuart Hall says that media shows us things in society, using careful mediation, as to say that the media can give us an idea of the way these people and places should be viewed. All media texts have messages, which are either obvious to the reader, or are encoded so that it is harder to see these messages. I will look at my A2 Music Video for Swedish House Mafia - Save The World, a dance song, in relation to these representations and look at theorists who talk about it.
Marxism states that there is always a hegemonic view of society, which is to say that the mass medias that the public consume give them ideologies to follow and agree with. When exercising their influence they are able to encode messages into what they produce i.e. newspapers, videos, television programmes and this would tell the public what to think. The music video that we produced did a similar thing, with it having a message encoded in it. In the scenes where the main character is transformed from an ordinary student into a crime-fighting superhero it gives out messages, such as telling people to believe in themselves. It also tells them that if they do believe in themselves then there is no limit on what they could do. This technique that we have used represents our main character as a good role model for people who could be in the same, or similar, position. It has some elements of escapism, as it shows people that if you act as this character does then you can do what they do.
O'Sullivan was a theorists who talked about stereotypes and the ways in which they acted like labels to certain groups in society. He said that it was easier to label these people as a collective group e.g. chavs, goths, scene, rather than see what these people are like individually, and then represent them for who they are, and not the groups they are part of. He says that having these stereotypes shorten our ideologies and allow us to make our decision more quickly. We have stereotypes in our video, with the superhero being a male, and being a dominant character, having control over the situations that he is involved in. We also have the stereotypical damsel in distress, with there being a woman who is being mugged and then needs the male superhero to come and save her. These are common in the media, as they like to show these stereotypical elements because it means that the audiences that they attract will be able to relate to the characters.
Perkins says that stereotyping is not that simple, and if it was then these stereotypes would not work as a cultural brand. For example, if one of your characters was a stereotype of an British male, he may not be recognised as that in somewhere like America or Australia, where the culture is different. She also says that counter-types exist, to challenge the stereotypes that have been created. We use counter-types in our video with the hero needing to save a man, which isn't usually expected, as it is usually a woman who is shown as the weaker individual. This means that we are able to challenge the usual representations of the males always being the dominant strong characters, and the females being weak and submissive. This could make our audience think, and this can mean that we are able to let them look deeper into the meanings that we have created in our videos.
Baudrillard says that there is now a culture of hyper-reality, where the society is one of simulacra. This means that there are certain aspects of life where people prefer to be in this hyper real world, and this has aspects of escapism, with them wanting to be somewhere that they don't have to face normal life and can live one of enjoyment. In our music video we reflect this, with the student sat in college, daydreaming about being a powerful superhero, rather being in that hyper-real world, rather than being sat in a lecture. This is an idea that the audience that watches our video would be able to relate to, with them being in a similar age group and college/ university/ work environment most of the time. The representation here is to show that people in the media reflect the public idea that they would like to escape from the monotonous day to day tasks and do something exciting that they will enjoy. By having the idea of escapism and hyper-reality twinned together we are able to show the way that the character is feeling, due to the way he acts and the pictures that are shown on the screen.
Strinati said that media producers use pastiches, parodies and intertextual references to make their texts recognisable to the audiences. He says that by using things that the audiences had seen before, that they would recognise things like genre, due to the way that it was represented in the media. For example, in a rock video you would expect band shots a lot and when you seen this in a video that is the what you'd expect to hear, just because of how they were represented. In our video we both adhered to and challenged this theory, by both using things you would expect at points and then things that you wouldn't at others. For example, we used thought beats at the beginning of the video, which you'd expect to see in a dance music video. This was the way in which we adhered to the conventions, alongside having parts of hyper-reality, which is common in dance music videos, such as Day n Nite by Kid Cudi. The video features a montage of speech bubbles on the video and a talking cat. In our video we had 'Pow' signs to get away from real violence and this was part of the conventions of a dance music video. We also challenged the conventions by using parts of other genres suck as shots of instruments being played, which challenged his ideas that you would always see the things that you's expect in these music videos.
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