HOW DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT REPRESENT PARTICULAR SOCIAL GROUPS?

WHAT IS A SOCIAL GROUP?A social group is a group of two or more people that share some social relation or have similar characteristics.

There are may different kinds of social groups, some of these being gender, age, religion, ability/disability/ ethnicity.

In relation to my magazine, groups such as rock fans or magazine readers are also classed as social groups.

MY MAGAZINEMy media product includes several social groups. These being: gender, age and rock fans.

It represents these mainly through the images I have included into the production of my pages.

It however does not represent social groups such as religion and ethnicity. This is because suiting to either of the groups needs would not effect my product, therefore they are in no way shown throughout the publication.

GENDERI have completely challenged the stereotypes of rock artists in rock magazines within my publication.

In real media products males normally strongly, if not completely, dominate the artists included. This is because as viewers and readers of art and music, we stereotype males as rock artists. Although female rock artists do exist they are not publicised in the same manner or as widely as males.

I have gone from one extreme to the other in my magazine by all but one of my images being of female artists.

The reason as to why I did this was because of my target audience, which was both male and female and typically there are more male rock fans than female. So I thought if I included more aspects of female rock artists that it would help my magazine appeal more to the female section of my audience.

AGEAge is represented again through the images I have used. By including mainly images of artists within the ages of my target audience, this helps in the appeal to them.

It is also shown through the language used, as I have used appropriate language for the ages of my target audience, which is 16-25.

The reason that I have done this is so that it makes the product more relatable and accessible for the readers.

I have tried to draw attention to the appropriate language within my double page spread article by selecting a certain part and extracting it as a pull quote, “I can vibe off them”.

ROCK FANSRock is represented through the style of the magazine, the colours used in the design, the mise en scene of the images and the body language and expressions of the artists.

The style and colour scheme of my magazine portrays rock in the blacks, reds and whites I have used throughout.

The mise en scene also represents rock as there is graffiti on the walls and an electric guitar included on the cover image and contents page. There are checked shirts and dungarees included in the costumes and red lipstick and heavy eyeliner included in the makeup.

The facial expressions of the artists are all hard and moody. This was done on purpose to show rock through the images. The reason for this was because rock artists are often mysterious looking and don’t have smiles plastered across their faces.

Not a single image in my magazine is of an artist/model with a smile as their expression.

ABILITY/DISABILITY

Ability and disability are not featured or represented throughout my media product in any way.

This is because they do not have an impact on the design or production of my pages

There is however, an element of ability/disability that would effect whether the person was able to read my magazine.

This would be having a disability of blindness.

This social group was not included within the representation because, as mentioned before, it does not have an effect on the production.