Representation Notes

Representation

Representation is the process by which the media presents the ‘real world’ to an audience. Media texts construct meanings about the world – a picture, a film, a T.V programme or a newspaper article represents the world to help audiences make sense of it.

What is the real world? Can it ever be presented to us in a wholly unconstructed way and is there a process that presents ‘reality’ as it really is?
Representation is not just about how we see people, places and objects but also how we interpret what our senses tell us. This is very dependant on who we are, what we read, see or hear.

In some cases, the text may have a persuasive representation as in a T.V commercial. It can have ideological connotations – you, the audience, can also share the aspirations ideals and lifestyle of characters in friends and you can share the ideals of the consumerist American dream. In a simple case of political representation: his insurgent is your freedom fighter; one country’s resistance movement is another’s rebel army.


Mediation
Every time we encounter a media text, we are not seeing reality, but someone's version of it. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is something that is easily forgotten when we get caught up in enjoying a text. The media place us at one remove from reality: they take something that is real, a person or an event and they change its form to produce whatever text we end up with. This is called mediation.

You should be looking for this with any media text. Think about the new Oasis album, for example- this is not just the sound of five musicians playing together in a studio. Instead, the reality of the sound that they might make has been mediated before it reaches you. Engineers and producers have re- modelled the sound and artists have packaged the album. Newspapers and magazines have reported the group and created a context for the album so that most people probably had an opinion about it before it came out. Once again, whatever sound the group made in the studio has been highly mediated before it gets to you.

If you ever go to see a comedy show recorded for the television, you will see the process of mediation in action. What might end up as a half hour broadcast, will be recorded over an entire evening - jokes that might seem spontaneous when watched on the TV will have been endlessly repeated until "just right". The studio audience will have been trained into laughing in exactly the right way by warm up men and the text that finally reaches the public will also be given context by use of soundtrack music and computer graphics. The whole experience of hearing a few jokes will have been mediated.

Of course, most of us are aware of this- we know that what we are seeing in a film or a Soap isn't real- we just allow ourselves to forget for the time that the programme is on that it is a fiction. At the same time we all have ideas in our heads of some kinds of texts which might be somehow less mediated- it is obvious that a fictional programme isn't real but when we encounter something like the television news, we are more likely to believe in the straightforward nature of the "truth" we are receiving.

In fact, the News is just as sure to be mediated as anything else- someone has decided that these are the few news items that are the most "newsworthy" and has chosen the shots that are used to tell the stories, the graphics that will go with them and the tie that the presenter will be wearing which will distract you so much while you are watching. Whatever version you get of what has gone on will end up being highly mediated- very different from the experience of someone who was at the scene- as you will know if you have ever seen a news event taking place.

Mediation- three things to look for:

Selection- Whatever ends up on the screen or in the paper, much more will have been left out- any news story has been selected from hundreds of others which the producers decided for you were less interesting, any picture has been chosen from an enormous number of alternatives.

Organisation- The various elements will be organised carefully in ways that real life is not- in visual media this involves mise-en-scene and the organisation of narrative, in the recording of an album the production might involve re-mixing a track. Any medium you can think of will have an equivalent to these. This organisation of the material will result in…….

Focusing- mediation always ends up with us, the audience being pushed towards concentrating on one aspect of the text and ignoring others. If you are watching a film the camera will pan towards an important character, in a tabloid the headlines will scream, for your attention. It can be easy to ignore how different from our everyday lives this is. If you are walking through a field, you are unlikely to see a sign saying "look at this amazing tree." You make your own decisions about what is worth our attention. The media text, through mediation, tries to do this for us.

Representation

The result of this process of mediation is that we are given a version of reality which is altered- those are never the real people that we are seeing but representations of them which have somehow been created. It is time now to look at this idea of representation and how it happens.

What is representation?

The Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions of the word:
To represent something is to describe or depict it, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal…..; to place a likeness of it before us in our mind.
To represent also means to symbolise, stand for, to be a specimen of or to substitute for; as in the sentence, "In Christianity, the cross represents the suffering and crucifixion of Christ."
It is worth thinking about each of these for a moment- the first one is the more straightforward- the media are in the business of describing things to us- they represent people and types of people to us so that we end up feeling that we know what they are like.
In most of these cases it is unlikely that you know these people personally- what impression that you have of them must come from the media. They have given us descriptions that have affected our views of these people.

The second of the two dictionary definitions is slightly more difficult but also useful. A representation is something that symbolises something else. The example the dictionary gives of the cross is an obvious one, but in the media you can find plenty of others. Liam Gallagher, as he is represented in the media is not just the singer in Oasis, but also a symbol of many things which some in the media think is wrong with young people in England today- drug-taking, hooliganism lack of originality etc.

Society, the individual and representation

Of course it is too simple to talk just about the media mediating reality and creating representations- we need a more subtle understanding of the process. To get this we need to look briefly at some different ideas people have had about how representation works.
You could broadly separate these into three:

The Reflective view of representing
According to this view, when we represent something, we are taking its true meaning and trying to create a replica of it in the mind of our audience- like a reflection. This is the view that many people have of how news works- the news producers take the truth of news events and simply present it to us as accurately as possible.

The Intentional view
This is the opposite of the Reflective idea. This time the most important thing in the process of representation is the person doing the representing- they are presenting their view of the thing they are representing and the words or images that they use mean what they intend them to mean. According to this theory, if you see a picture of an attractive person drinking a can of Coke in an advert, it will have the same meaning to you as the advertiser intended- go away and buy some!

The Constructionist view
This is really a response to what have been seen a weakness in the other two theories- constructionists feel that a representation can never just be the truth or the version of the truth that someone wants you to hear since that is ignoring your ability as an individual to make up your own mind and the influences of the society that you live in on the way that you do so. This text will broadly be taking a Constructionist approach to representation so it is worth spelling out this idea again.

Any representation is a mixture of:
The thing itself.
The opinions of the people doing the representation
The reaction of the individual to the representation
The context of the society in which the representation is taking place.

Here's an example of how this works:
If you've seen the film Independence Day, you may have been amused or annoyed at the way that British people were represented as upper class idiots. If you consider the different parts of the Constructionist approach to representation, they would work like this:
There must be some British people who the producers either encountered in reality or in other media texts.
They formed an opinion of them that they were stuck up idiots which they used as the basis of their representation.
As an individual watching this, you chose whether to believe the representation was valid or not.
In doing this, you were influenced by the fact that you are yourself British- an American watching the film would probably have come to a different conclusion.
In the last two parts of this equation- the individual and society are an enormously difficult area. For now it is worth thinking about the influence of society on what representations we receive. In society there are ardent royalists and republicans, people who hate loud women and those who respect them- a multitude of views- so how can we say that society has an influence on our views of someone or something? The truth is that amid all this confusion of opinions, some kinds of ideas dominate and are shared by a majority of people.

We call views about how things should be and how people should behave an ideology and if an ideology is shared by the majority of people in a culture it is called the dominant ideology.
The group of ideas that make up the dominant ideology in Britain are not something that remains static- they change as new ideas enter the are encountered and people discuss them. For example the dominant ideology in Britain used to be anti- gay but this is happily changing at the moment.

Here are some things that are generally agreed to be part of the dominant ideology in Britain:

People should put their families first.
People should work for their money and not show off too much about how much they have.
Women should behave modestly.
Women should look after their appearance.
You may not agree with all of these morals, but they are part of the dominant ideology, the chances are that they are the feelings of most people.Stereotypes
We've spent quite a long time dealing with society and how it effects the process of representation, it's worth now looking in more detail at what is going on in the other parts of the process- the individuals and the media and their relationship with what is being represented. This brings us on to the question of stereotypes- another word which is maybe worth a dictionary definition:
A standardised, usually oversimplified, mental picture or attitude that is held in common by members of a group.

A stereotype is a simplification that we use to make sense of a real person or group which is much more complicated. In reality there are many different kinds of Germans who are all individuals, but it is much easier to fool ourselves into believing that all Germans cheat with beach towels and eat strange sausages. The example that I have just given may seem harmless, but in fact it is arguable that it is racist. Stereotypes are potentially highly dangerous but stereotyping itself is impossible to avoid- it is a natural function of the human mind- something that we all do in order to survive mentally in the confusing world around us. The following theory explains how it works.

Representation- How we stereotype:

Implicit Personality Theory
Finish the phrases below:

John is energetic, eager and (intelligent/stupid)
Julie is bright, lively and (thin/fat)
Joe is handsome, tall and (flabby/muscular)
Jane is attractive, intelligent and (likeable/unpleasant)
Susan is cheerful, positive and (attractive/unattractive)

If you compare your answers with those of others, the chances are that they will be exactly the same. There is no logical truth based reason for this- it is simply part of the way that we stereotype. The fact that we naturally see the world in this kind of shorthand way with connections between different character traits, allows the media to create simplistic representations which we find believable. Implicit personality theory explains this process.
As humans we use our own unique storehouse of knowledge about people when we judge them.
Our past experience is more important than the true features of the actual personality that we are judging.- traits exist more in the eye of the beholder than in reality.
We have each a system of rules that tells us which characteristics go with other characteristics.
We categorise people into types (e.g. workaholic, feminist etc.) to simplify the task of person perception.

Once we have in our minds a set of linked traits which seem to us to go together, they form a pattern of connections that can be called a prototype. In other words the mix of traits that we may consider "typical" of feminists are a prototype of what a feminist is like to us.
If we encounter someone in reality or in the media who seems to fit neatly into a prototype, we feel reassured. It confirms our stereotyped view- we do not need to think further.
Also once a few of the traits seem to fit our prototype, we will immediately bundle onto the person the rest of the traits from the prototype even if we do not know if they fit them in reality.
Research has shown that if we find people who do not fit into our prototypes, we will form very strong often impressions of them- it is surprising to us and disconcerting- it forces us to think more deeply.On the other hand, if it is at all possible, we will try to twist the truth to fit in with our prototype, often ignoring traits which do not fit into our neatly imagined pattern of characteristics. This will particularly happen as time passes and we have time to forget things that do not fit in. This can lead to enormous differences between our perceptions of people and the reality.
All of this distortion happens naturally in our minds before the media have had their chance to simplify and distort. We do a lot of the business of stereotyping ourselves. It is almost as if we conspire with the media to misunderstand the world
So stereotyping is something that we all do- a natural part of the way our minds work and not in itself necessarily a bad thing. If, for example, you were a teacher attempting to plan out a course which would be suitable for your class, you would need to work from the basis of a kind of stereotype of the needs of "typical" students. Having said this, even in cases where stereotypes are valuable like this, the good teacher would have then tried to go beyond the stereotype and looked for exceptions.
This is probably something we should all do when we encounter stereotypes- be aware that just as with the process of mediation the stereotypes involve selection, organisation and focusing of the complicated reality.

The four parts of a media stereotype

How can the media build a stereotype?
With any group of people, there will obviously be an enormous number of things that can be used in a stereotype, but because stereotyping is a form of simplification, normally the most obvious things are used. These are:

Appearance- this can include, physical appearance and clothing as well as the sound of the voice. e.g. "all teachers wear dreadful old clothes"

Behaviour - typical things that people in this group might do. "Grannies like to knit"(These first two features of media stereotypes are the same when we make our own stereotypes. They simply involve us thinking of something that may be true of some of the group in question and applying it to all)The third feature of media stereotyping is peculiar to the media:
The stereotype is constructed in ways that fit the particular mediumThis is more difficult to understand but it is crucial for you to look for it. If you watch a film such as Silence of the Lambs and then look at the tabloid coverage of Fred West, you are seeing the same stereotype (the typical Serial Killer) being used, but there are obviously big differences which will depend on the specifics of the media used. The film will use close ups of the killer's leering face, soundtrack music and reaction shots of terrified victims to create their version of the stereotype. The newspaper will use emotive headlines, blurred pictures of victims and police mug-shots of the killer along with shocking text and interviews with survivors. In each case the text will create a stereotype which it's audience will find familiar, but it will do it in very different ways.
There will always be a comparison whether real or imaginary with "normal" behaviour.
The features which make up a stereotype are always those which seem somehow different from every-day behaviour. In fact you could almost start any stereotyped description by saying: "this group are different because they……."
Of course the idea of what is normal in any society is an absurdity and therefore in order to make it clear to us that the stereotyped characters are not behaving "normally" there will frequently be "normal" people used to act as a contrast to them.
So, to use an earlier example, Jodie Foster is used in Silence of the Lambs to give the audience someone to compare Lecter's behaviour with. On the news, tales of striking workers (another stereotype) are always contrasted with interviews with "normal" people who are suffering as a result of their actions.The normal person will act as a representative of us in the text- at the same time reflecting what we might feel, or telling us what to feel depending on your point of view.

Ways of strengthening the power of a representation-Realism.
Even taking the use of anchorage into account, it can still be sometimes surprising how easily we will believe the most astonishing stereotypes to be true. One of the reasons why we will often accept representations at face value is that they are presented to us within texts that seem realistic-but what does this word "realistic" actually mean? The following pages come from Graham Burton's book More Than Meets the Eye where he gives an excellent explanation of realism in the media.

Realism
At least for some of the time, we judge a great deal of media product in terms of whether or not it is realistic. This is especially true of story type product. So it is very common to hear people react to a film with phrases such as "it wasn't very realistic, was it?" Even the lyrics of popular music can be judged in this way : " it was just like something that happens to be, it was so truthful". And we expect newspapers to be about things that really happened. So it is important to look more closely at a "realism" because it suggests that some media product is more believable, and so we are likely to take it more seriously, and to take on its ideas more readily.
But the first problem that this idea raises is simply, what do we mean by realism?
There is a whole set of words which we use in various ways to define realism, without thinking about it. It is these words which we should now look at.

Definitions

Believable or credible: what we see or read is something which could have happened. That is to say it resembles the world as we know it. [But remember that there is a lot which we believe to be true, but which we have not really checked out for ourselves-so how violent are the streets of San Francisco?!]

Plausible: what we view or read is at least possible within its own terms of reference. Someone could have acted in the way they did in a given story, or the development of the story line is basically possible. There is some consistency in the material, even when we know it is basically fiction. So for example, we may find it implausible to be told that the murder has been committed by the long lost twin brother of the accused hero.

Actual/Actuality: the material seems to have an immediate kind of physical reality about it as if it is really happening before us, or even as if we are really there. Often documentary material has the quality of actuality.

Verisimilitude: this word, like " actuality" suggests that something is true to life. But we also tend to use it when we feel, for example, that people's behaviour has an authentic quality, that it is like life [as we believe it to be].

Truthful: this is an important word because material doesn't have to be entirely believable in a literal way to seem truthful. A story and say something truthful about human behaviour and motivation, even when it is improbable in terms of its situation and background. Many plays, not least Shakespeare's, are fairly improbable in terms of story lines, and certainly in terms of how real their settings are. But they might say something important about the beliefs and values of the characters, which the audience agrees with. These beliefs and values then become the "truth" that we are talking about.

Some criteria for realism

So when we say that something has the quality of realism we could be talking about a number of elements
How accurately the background is depicted
How believable the behaviour of people seems to be
How probable the story line is [if we're talking about fiction]
How true the points made by the material seem to be.
In all this the complication is that realism is all relative. It is relative to our experience. So if we have experienced or even read about something which then appears in a magazine, we may find it more believable than does someone who has not had that experience. It is also relative to the mode of realism.

Modes of realism
These are the categories of realism that we learn and have in our heads when we are making judgements based on ideas such as realism, truth, believability. We change the basis of our judgements according to the mode of realism that we think we are dealing with. We do not expect a computer game to be all that realistic ; we do not expect it to look as real as film material, nor the situations to be as plausible as those we read about in a newspaper. We do expect a TV documentary to be realistic; we expect it to be more real and believable than a dramatic novel, for example.

Conventions
We are back to these hidden rules. The fact is that all these different modes of realism have different rules. A change in the rules changes what is expected. The particular medium, or mode within the medium, has particular expectations. These expectations are aroused as soon as we start reading, viewing, listening. We expect an autobiography to be different from a novel; a situation comedy to be different from a current affairs programme, and so on. We have prior knowledge about the newspaper medium, we do not expect it to make up stories. We will have read reviews or publicity material about a film and so will know if it is fiction, and even what kind of fiction.
Ghostbusters 2 is not going to be the same in terms of realism as Gorillas in the Mist. In the case of television, programme title sequences are crucial in letting us know what set of conventions our brains should switch into before the main part of the programme starts.
The rules that we are talking about come across in many different ways. For example, in situation comedy canned laughter is acceptable. In documentary, long shots of someone talking to the camera are acceptable. In radio journalism recordings of someone talking through a poor telephone link line are acceptable. In film fiction, sudden bursts of romantic music are acceptable-you can easily extend these examples. But generally we don't mix these sets of rules. So once we have locked into a particular set of rules for a particular kind of realism then we have set up particular standards for and expectations of the quality of realism in the product.

Sources of realism
It is important to remind ourselves that all our views about what is real or truthful depend on a number of kinds of experience.
One is cultural experience. We draw on the years of learning throughout our lives about what our culture sees as real. For example, we have learned a language of visual imagery and so believe that a larger object concealing a smaller one in a picture is closer to us than the smaller one. But this is just a convention of the code of visual communication. It is just another one of these sets of rules. Another culture which has not learned the rules this way would say, what a silly picture [painting, photograph or film] -- the creator has put one thing in the way on another-or-the big object must be more important than the smaller one. And of course all the sets of rules for the various modes of realism are learned through our upbringing in our culture.Another experience is that of all real life. That is to say we may judge what is or is not real on the basis of what we have seen, done, felt. In particular, we may judge realism in terms of probability from our life's experience. From life we know something about cause and effect, about likely human behaviour. So then from that experience we can judge whether or not what happens in the media is probable.
Another experience is that of the media themselves. This is also woven into our reality. If we have seen part of a documentary about American Indians, and then watch a TV drama set among Indians in New Mexico, we will judge the realism of that drama partly in the light of the other piece of media material. The point is that we may never have been to New Mexico in our lives. So we will base our judgement on this second-hand media experience which someone else has created.

Realism and production
Realism affects how we relate to media material, especially fictions. It is important to understand it because is affects the credibility of messages in the material. And for both those reasons the media producers find it important to maintain and promote the various modes of realism and their rules. It is convenient to package material into kinds of realism just as it is pre-packaged into genres. The producers want the audience to feel comfortable with their product, to know where they stand. They want the relatively realist modes such as documentary, or media such as newspapers to have credibility. It is especially important in the case of television that viewers are able to distinguish one programme from another in the endless stream of material. If you take up books from shelves labelled fiction or travel, then you have a pretty good idea about their kinds of realism before you start. But television is like an endless procession of open books in different modes, without the shelf labels. This is where the title sequences and programme reviews come in, as well as the cues in the programs themselves.
It is perhaps no accident that some of the most hot-tempered public debates about the media revolve around television in particular. The arguments, while sometimes seeming to be about programme content, are actually as much about programme treatment. In other words, the debates about bias in news on television are also debates about how items are handled, about the fact that it is generally believed that people believe what they see on the news. Similarly, the debates about certain dramas-Death of a Princess, showing a fictional Arabian royal family in a partly unfavourable light-are often about how conventions of realism are used. There was concern that documentary treatment implied that this was a true story and so had to be taken seriously as a criticism of the behaviour of the real Saudi royal family. Drama documentary productions such as this example are by definition a blurring of the lines between fact and fiction. The argument about this drama had a particular edge because it looked pretty real and because parts of the story line had some connection with known events in real life.

News and fiction
The truth of the matter is that there is no absolute reality or truth in the media. We may like to think there is, we may find it convenient to have sets of rules to define relative kinds of reality and truth. But look of the facts. A newspaper such as the Independent reads as somehow more realistic than the Mirror. The former has more hard news stories and a less dramatised style than the latter. And yet one cannot say that because the Mirror may prefer a majority of human interest items [perhaps a film star's divorce] to an item about what is happening in the House of Lords, that the divorce item is not actually true-not real. Similarly, television news, while not being simply untruthful, has qualities of drama in the way that it selects some exciting stories or makes excitement out of something like a kidnap story. And it certainly is not simply THE TRUTH. If it could achieve this then we could make do with one news programme only. So the lines between one kind of realism and another may be more blurred than we think.
All of these notes from Burton's book about realism may not seem obviously to relate to representation, but there is an important link-if we remain unconvinced by the modes of realism that the media adopt, we will be more likely to question the representations and stereotypes that they produce. On the other hand, if modes of realism have been carefully manufactured, these representations will seem natural and therefore truthful.
Representations changing over time
It can be easy to become quite depressed by the skill that the media can use in creating representations and stereotypes which are convincing and persuasive. However if we return to Schramm's model, we are reminded that the communication of the media producers with the audience is a circular process-he suggests that the media do respond in the end to our beliefs and therefore that representations and stereotypes will change over time.