Question 1B

Narrative, genre, audience, representation, media language

Narrative

• Narrative is the coherence/organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. We connect events and make interpretations based on those connections.

• In everything we have a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. Each text becomes part of the previous and the next through its relationship with the audience.

Barthes theory of narrative

Genre

• Genre does not rely simply on what's in a media text but also on the way it is put together .

• EXAMPLE - when distinguishing between a horror movie and a thriller, which can deal with similar subject matter, and look the same — lots of action set at night — but belong to separate genres.

Audience

• All media texts are made with an audience in mind, ie a group of people who will receive it and make some sort of sense out of it. And generally, but not always, the producers make some money out of that audience. Therefore it is important to understand what happens when an audience "meets" a media text. When a media text is being planned, perhaps the most important question the producers consider is "Does it have an audience?" If the answer to this is 'no', then there is no point in going any further.

Uses and gratifications theory

• The uses and gratifications theory is a popular approach to understanding mass communication.

• It is said that the uses and gratifications theory has to fulfil one of the following when we choose a form of media:

- Personal Identity – being able to recognise a product in front of you, role models that reflect similar values to yours, aspiration to be someone else.

- Information – being able to acquire information, knowledge and understanding.

- Entertain - what you are consuming should give you an enjoyment and also some form of escapism enabling us to forget our worries temporarily.

- Social interaction – the ability for media products to produce a topic of conversation between other people, sparks debates

Representation

• representation is all about understanding the choices that are made when it comes to portraying something or someone in a mass media text. It's impossible to portray every aspect of an individual in a photograph, or even in a feature film, so certain features of their personality and appearance get highlighted, and are often enhanced, when it comes to constructing the representation that the audience will see. When representing a person, media texts often focus on their:

• Age• Gender• Race/Ethnicity• Financial Status• Job• Culture/nationality

Media language

• Media conventions, formats, symbols and narrative structures which cue the audience to meaning. The symbolic language of electronic media work much the same way as grammar works in print media.