AQA A-Level Media Studies representation overview quiz quiz

Because the media always tell the literal, unmediated truth

Because audiences are unable to understand reality for themselves

Because producers select and mediate what audiences see

Because every representation is always purely fictional

Denotation and connotation

Repetition and difference

Encoding and decoding

Selection and mediation

By selecting and exaggerating a few traits and repeating them

By representing a group fully, accurately and in all its real diversity

By carefully avoiding any reference to a group at all

By using only positive counter-types

A stereotype that is repeated very often across many products

A representation that challenges a stereotype by contradicting the expected image

A representation that carries no connotations or hidden meanings whatsoever for its audience

A particular type of binary opposition

Always represents social groups in a wholly positive and flattering light

Has no link whatsoever to ideology

Reduces, essentialises and fixes difference, operating through power

Only ever applies to fictional media products

Fixed, stable and singular for life

Determined entirely by media producers with no audience input at all

Largely irrelevant to media studies

Fluid and constructed by audiences from diverse representations

Visual media positioning the spectator as male and presenting women as objects to be looked at

Male characters being consistently represented as passive objects of desire to be looked at by women

Audiences of all kinds completely ignoring questions of gender when they view a media text

The particular way in which men tend to watch the television news

That gender is the only social factor that really matters in any analysis

That race, class and gender combine and must be analysed together

That feminism is no longer necessary

That all audiences read media texts in the same way

Has now fully overcome its old colonial attitudes

Completely ignores all questions of race and nation

Perpetuates colonial discourse and racial hierarchies

Treats all identities as entirely fixed, stable and natural

Where the audience members physically choose to sit in a cinema

The total number of people who actually watch a given product across its whole release window

The genre and form of a product

The way a product guides audiences towards a preferred interpretation and set of values

Preferred, negotiated, oppositional

Literal, figurative and symbolic

Active, passive and neutral

Denotative, connotative and finally mythic

When, where, why and exactly how much

Who is represented, how, by whom, and whose interests it serves

What genre, what media form, what platform and what production budget

How long, how loud, how bright and how fast