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Media and Collective Identity - Theory

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1 Hegemony - Stuart Hall "This operates, not because the dominant classes can

prescribe and proscribe, in detail, the mental content of the lives of subordinate classes (they too 'live' in their own ideologies), but because they strive and to a degree succeed in framing all competing definitions of reality within their range, bringing all alternatives within their horizon of thought. They set the limits - mental and structural - within which subordinate classes 'live' and make sense of their subordination in such a way as to sustain the dominance of those ruling over them"

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2 Pluralism - Albert Szymanski "Pluralism, although it stresses the group rather than

the individual, argues that the state in capitalist society is authentically democratic since 1) the state's policies derive from interaction among society's constituent groups, to which all people belong; 2) the groups are internally democratic, or at least as "voluntary associations" they accurately reflect their members' interests and concerns; and 3) the balance among these forces, reflected in state policy, essentially represents a fair and true equilibrium among all the various interest groups, with no great consistent bias in any direction."

+3 Identity - Kathryn Woodward

“ Identity gives us an idea of who we are and how we relate to others and to the world in which we live. “

+4. Identity - Brown and Dykers

‘Individuals actively and creatively sample available cultural symbols, myths and rituals as they produce their identities. For teens, the mass media are central to this process because they are a convenient source of cultural options.’

+5 Identity - Chandler

…constructing a personal home page can be seen as shaping not only the materials but also (in part through manipulating the various materials) one’s identity.

+6 Identity - Scruton

“The condition of man (sic) requires that the individual, while he exists and acts as an autonomous being, does so only because he can first identity himself as something greater - as a member of a society, group, class, state or nation, of some arrangement to which he may not attach a name, but which he recognises instinctively as home.”

+7 Collective Identity - Snow

“Although there is no consensual definition of collective identity, discussions of the concept invariably suggest that its essence resides in a shared sense of ‘one-ness’ or ‘we-ness’ anchored in real or imagined shared attributes and experiences among those who comprise the collectivity and in relation or contrast to one or more actual or imagined sets of ‘others’.”

+8 Collective Identity Poletta and Jasper

“...collective identity [is] an individual’s cognitive, moral and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. It is a perception of a shared status or rela-tion, which may be imagined rather than experienced directly, and it is distinct from personal identities, although it may form part of a personal identity. Cultural identities are expressed in cultural materials – names, narratives, symbols, verbal styles, rituals, clothing, and so on – but not all cultural materials express collective identities. Collective identity does not imply the rational calculus for evaluating choices that “interest” does. And unlike ideol-ogy, collective identity carries with it positive feelings for other members of the group”

+9 National Identity - Anderson

“Imagined community”

+10 – Performance Studies Butler

Main points raised: National Identity as a concept shaped by the media. Gender as a performance, led by social expectations.

+11 Identity - Gauntlett

‘Making is connecting’. It’s a perfectly simple phrase, of course. But having spent some time thinking about people making things, and people connecting with others – making and connecting – I realised that it was meaningful, and more pleasing, to note that these are one and the same process: making is connecting.

I mean this in three principal ways:

Making is connecting because you have to connect things together (materials, ideas, or both) to make something new;

Making is connecting because acts of creativity usually involve, at some point, a social dimension and connect us with other people;

And making is connecting because through making things and sharing them in the world, we increase our engagement and connection with our social and physical environments.

+12 Public Sphere -Habermas

“...a space...formed and realised between the economy and polity where people could be informed and discuss, so as to form decisions and act upon them.”

+13. National Culture - Hall

‘A national culture is a discourse – a way of constructing meanings which influence and organises both our actions and our conception of ourselves’

+14 National Identity - Hobsbawn and Ranger

“Nothing appears more ancient, and linked to a immemorial past, than the pageantry which surrounds the British monarchy and its public ceremonial manifestations. Yet ... In its modern form it is the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

+15. Race and Identity - Gilroy

‘It works to construct Blackness and Englishness as mutually exclusive categories.’

+16 Two views of Britishness - Chambers

““One is Anglo-centric, frequently conservative, backward looking, and increasingly located in a frozen and largely stereotyped idea of the national culture. The other is ex-centric, open ended, and multi-ethnic. The first is based on a homogenous ‘unity’ in which history, tradition, and individual biographies and roles, including ethnic and sexual ones, are fundamentally fixed and embalmed in the national epic, in the mere fact of being ‘British’. The other perspective suggests an overlapping network of histories and traditions, a heterogeneous complexity in which positions and identities, including that of the national, cannot be taken for granted are not interminably fixed but are in flux.” Iain Chambers

+17 Journalistic Ideals

Fairness

Accuracy

Balance

+Glasgow Media Group

Reinforces Stereotypes

Simple explanations to complex issues

Doesn’t question values of the system