Instructions - read this first
For this week, you will be working under your own steam to finish off our class analysis of Adbusters. There are 4.5 hours worth of work to do here. You can split this in to three 1.5 hour chunks. Or five 54 minute chunks. Or whatever you want to do as long as you finish each and every task listed here. Please.
For each lesson, read everything. Don't skip ahead. It won't make sense. Make notes as you would in a normal lesson. Copy paste the key definitions. And complete every task.
Please publish these tasks to three separate clearly labelled posts on your blog. If I can't find your work, you will get a 'U' grade. Everything you do in this subject contributes to your progress and predicted grades. So take it seriously.
Brief introduction
Let's take a moment to recall what we have learned about Adbusters in basic terms:
Adbusters is...
...atypical
...lacks anchorage
...subversive in its presentation representations
...anticapitalist
...explicitly political
...deliberately controversial
So, it can be considered a binary opposition to Woman magazine.
Much of our lessons have focused on how inscrutable and difficult to analyse Adbusters is... which is kind of the point. Adbusters is deliberately challenging and presents itself as an anticapitalist, not for profit venture. However, beneath the nihilistic, confrontational ideological perspectives is an at times fairly conventional arts/poltics/alternative lifestyle magazine. All this you will find out about this week
Lesson 1 - Exploring the Adbusters website - for this lesson, you'll be spending time on the Adbusters website, taking screenshots and coming up with explicit examples to support your arguments for the final exam
One thing that Adbusters has that Woman definitely did not have is n official website. The reason for this is obvious: the internet only became widely popularised in the 1990s, and only really became mainstream from the early 21st century!
Therefore, this technology can be referred to as a newly emergent (new) digitally convergent technology
Digitally convergent technologies: the coming together of previously separate industries thanks to digital (computer based) technologies. A good example is the Adbusters website, which combines film (videos), photography and journalism (text). If this seems obvious, that's because you've grown up with the internet!
Exploring the website
Take a little time to click around on the website, watch some videos, visit some links, and generally get acquainted. Is it a conventional website? What do you think?
- How are ideological perspectives encoded in the Adbusters website?
- What messages and values are presented on the Adbuster's website? How do you know? Three explicit examples please!
- What are three things you can do on the Adbusters website that you absolutely cannot do with the Adbusters print magazine? EXPLICIT examples please.
Lesson 2 - Audience responses and audience positioning - in this lesson, you will be revising Stuart Hall's reception theory, and you will also be practicing the concept of audience positioning with a bunch of examples. Remember, doing things again and again will help you to practice and do it better!
Reception theory - refers to how the audience receives or interprets the ideology of the producer. While producers will do everything possible to ensure that audiences agree with the ideology (PREFERRED READING), audiences may only partially agree (NEGOTIATED READING), completely reject the ideology (OPPOSITIONAL READING) or just totally misunderstand what is going on (ABARENT READING)
Let's look at an example of this to get the ball rolling
An example of audience negotiation of the front cover of the set edition of Woman magazine
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| Remember her? |
- A preferred reading would be the audience accepting the dominant ideology of the producer. Therefore, the audience would agree that this woman was hegemonically attractive, relatable and aspirational. The preferred reading would also see the audience agreeing that women should partake in housework (seven star improvements etc) and would be intrigued and even flattered by Alfred Hitchcock's pull quote on the main cover line: they're like snow capped volcanoes. This reading reinforces the status quo!
- A negotiated reading may involve the audience feeling that the cover was a bit sexist. They may decide that the reference to kitchens and makeup was demeaning, but they may still see the model as aspirational, and may be attracted by the hermeneutic potential of the 'lively lingerie' article
- An oppositional reading would likely be from the perspective of a second wave feminist. They would reject everything about the front cover, including the traitorous cover model, the sexualisation of Hitchcock, and they would pick up on the infantilization of 'are you an A-level beauty'. The oppositional reading here would probably be quite angry!
- The aberrant reading would be something very odd. For example, if the audience felt this was an erotic magazine targeting heterosexual men, they've totally missed the point!
Further examples of audience negotiation - Pick three pages (or spreads) from Woman and Adbusters. So you might pick one from Adbusters, two from Woman, or vice versa (you can't pick the cover from Woman). Paste these pictures in to your blog, and, using the example above as an... example, offer a preferred, negotiated and oppositional (and maybe aberrant) reading of all three
TOP TIP: if you work out the ideology of the product, it makes it easier to work out the audience responses. We've spent so long talking about the ideological perspectives of these magazines, but, once more, with feeling,
Woman - singular, straightforward and patriarchally hegemonic representations of women and society
Adbusters - atypical, anticapitalist and subversive representations of everything, to communicate what an awful world we live in (and that it's our responsibility to fix it)
Audience positioning
Audience positioning - where the producer uses media techniques, such as varying shot type, to place or situate an audience member in a media product. This can be used to anchor the ideology of the producer, and therefore enforce the preferred reading
A really good thing to ask yourself when analysing a media product is 'where are we'? are we near or far? Higher or lower? Dominant or subordinate? Male or female? Gay or straight? One of the gang or a voyeur?
An example of audience positioning
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| She's back! |
The Woman magazine front cover makes use of a full page, mid shot cover image to position the female, middle aged target audience in a comfortable and relatable mode of address. The selection of a hegemonically attractive model allows audience members to identify with the unnamed model, though the deliberate selection of a 'normal' and relatable model also allows the audience to relate to her without feeling threatened. Finally, while the woman's smile is approachable, she is slightly younger than the target audience, which, along with her impeccable makeup and ivory white teeth, creates an aspirational and potentially unobtainable mode of address. This helps the producer to anchor the message of the magazine to reinforce the dominant ideological perspective encoded throughout the magazine: that in order to be successful in 60's Britain, women must be hegemonically attractive and conform to certain stereotypical and patriarchally enforced standards.
Further examples of audience positioning - For each of the following images, write a short paragraph, detailing WHERE we are, and WHAT techniques/media language positions us (the audience)
Lesson 3 - Cold, hard facts - in this lesson, you will fill out a factsheet for Woman and Adbusters, and will build a portfolio of facts that can be used directly in the exam
I think it's time to fill out a fact sheet...
Click here to access the worksheet
You will need to either download the file, or click file then 'save a copy' to your own Drive. You'll need to be logged in to your Google account, obviously.
If this somehow doesn't work, here's a screenie, which will take you about two and a half minutes to recreate
Where do I find this information?
- Google, naturally
- This very blog
- Wikipedia
- Corporate websites
- Your classmates (don't be a stranger!)