Lecture 6... Globalisation

- Definitions of globalisation:

- Socialist: The process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces.

- Capitalist: The elimination of state-enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result.

- Globalisation: Covering a wide range of distinct political, economic, and cultural trends, fashionable buzzword. Synonym for the following - the pursuit of classical liberal (or free market), policies in the world economy (economic

liberalization), the growing dominance of western (or even American)

forms of political, economic, and cultural life (westernization or Americanization), the proliferation of new information technologies (the

Internet Revolution), as well as the notion that humanity stands at the

threshold of realizing one single unified community in which major

sources of social conflict have vanished (global integration)’.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/globalization/

- George Ritzer: ‘McDonaldization’ describes wide ranging sociocultural processes by which the principles of fast-food restaurants are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American societies as well as the rest of the world.

- Staff: Limited skills.

- Menu: Limited, cheap, fast.

- Marshall McLuhan: from sixties.

- Electric technology – humanity will be more conscious – world like a village, everyone cares.

- Everyone will work together – seeing what’s going on.

- ‘Electric technology…would seem to render individualism obsolete and corporate interdependence mandatory’. – images make humans desensitised e.g. 9/11.

- Technological determinism – assumption that technology will make world a better place: Global village.

- In world: Centripetal forces, pushing globalisation.

- Centrifugal forces- splitting world, wars etc.

- Mark Juergensmeyer – growth of secularisation – a ‘new cold war’ between religion and secular state.

- Cultural imperialism – Global village is run with a set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one.

- Media conglomerates operate as oligopolies e.g. Timewarner: AOL, HBO, New Line Cinema.

- Propoganda: views of individual transferred.

- News corporate – Market interest

1. North America

2. W. Europe, Japan and Australia.

3. Developing economies and regular producers (India, China, Brazil, E. Europe)

4. Rest of world.

- US Media Power: New form of imperialism

- Local cultures destroyed in this process and new forms of cultural dependency shapes, mirroring old school colonialism.

- Schiller – dominance of US driven commercial media forces US model of broadcasting onto the rest of world but also inculcates US style consumerism in societies that can ill afford it!

- India – great seller of skin whitening cream.

- Chomsky and Herman (1998) ‘Manufacturing Consent’

- 5 Basic Filters: Ownership, Funding, Sourcing, Flak, Anti-communist ideology.

- Ownership – Rupert Murdoch

- News of the World

- The Sun

- The Sunday Times

- The Times

- NY Post

- BSkyB

- Fox TV

- News = business

- Needs money to operate.

- Only as good as it needs to be.

- Funding – controls content – from sponsors, pleasing paymasters.

- Flak = controls content

- Slant on stories.

- Media pressure group – forces stories on news agencies.

- Anti ideologies – makes agree by making others seem ridiculous.

- Film: An Inconvenient Truth

- Retreat of glaciers

- Since 1880, temperature increased.

- Keeling curve, carbon dioxide rising.

- America = cause.

- Flat Earthers

- Jim Inhofe – Global warming, biggest hoax ever.

- To make a green planet: overthrow capitalism.

- Greenwashing: No green credentials, but trying to tap into green market e.g. McDonalds is green, but nothing has changed.

Task Four

Use Shannon & Weaver's model of the communication process to write a 300-400 word analysis of a work of Graphic Design. Comment on the ways in which the piece of Graphic Design attempts to communicate to a specific audience, using techniques of redundancy, entropy or noise.



This piece of Graphic Design is a Topshop advertisement, and works with the Shannon and Weaver model of communication theory, in terms of the poster communicating a message. The information source in this case is the client, who may have come up with the idea/concept for the piece, the next step in communication is the transmitter, a designer or design studio is responsible for this step, as is it their job to transmit the information from the source. This transmission is transferred to the receiver which in the case of Graphics means to transfer on to a medium, there is a large variety of ways this can be done, print, screen, and signage. Finally is destination, this message is received by the audience, who could be a potential or existing customer or a traveller.

There are problems with communication in Graphics that can occur sometimes. Noise can alter the effectiveness of the message; noise is anything added between the transmitter and receiver. Redundancy is the repetition of the message, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as it can help to clarify the message. Finally, there is entropy, which is uncertainty in the message. Redundancy can make the message more long winded but it can help to reduce entropy.

In this case, the message is quite straight forward, ‘these clothes are from Topshop’, and without the type it would just be a photo. However, without the photo, it is still an advert, for the shop, and not those exact clothes. So, it could be argued that the photo is redundancy, but it is acting as clarification.
Noise could really affect the way the destination receives the message, as this image is not in context, it is not certain whether this is a bus stop advert, or a magazine advert, and the two places receive different audiences, a bus stop will receive males and females of all ages, gender, ethnicity and background, but if it is a Vogue advert, then only a certain demographic will be receiving that message.
Relating to this is the external noise, what surrounds the advert, if it is next to a Benetton campaign about sweatshops, the advert might not be so warmly welcomed due to the many accusations of Topshop using child labour.
Visual noise will have an effect too, the colours surrounding the advert, and lighting, if it is in a dimly lit corridor, it may not be so noticeable, however if it is on a lightboard, it would stand out much more.

Reading List For Essay...

Some texts which will be useful to me for my essay:

Johnson, P (2009) British Board of Film Classification in: Papadopoulos, Dr. L. (2010) Sexualisation of Young People: Review, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100418065544/http:/homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/Sexualisation-of-young-people.html

This is a printed document in the library, and looks into how today's images and messages are extremely sexualised and the effect that this has on the young people of today. This will be really helpful in assessing the younger generation of females today.

Meehan, D M (1983): Ladies of the Evening: Women Characters of Prime-Time Television. Metuchen, NJ, Scarecrow.

In my Sociology A-Level we briefly covered Meehan's work on soaps, and the list of stereotypes she came up with that featured in each soap, this will be useful in assessing the accuracy of representation of women in the media.

Wolf, N. (1991) The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, Vintage, UK.

Naomi Wolf's work will be essential to my essay, The Beauty Myth looks at beauty as a social construct, which is an idea constructed by society, and again will be good in backing up the representation of women.

Livingstone, S. (2007) From Family Television to Bedroom Culture: Young Peoples Media at Home. In Devereux, E. Media Studies: Key Issues and Debates, Sage, London.

Another work covered in my Sociology qualification, which looks at the growth of the media which correlates with today's youth spend more time in 'bedrooms' than playing outdoors.

Task Three

Essay Proposal:

Title: Does the media shape the role of women?

- Social pressures leading to self-fulfilling prophecy - skinny celebrities -eating disorders - size zero (Nicole Richie).

- Beauty adverts - pressuring women to buy their products to keep youthful looks etc.

- Nuts and Zoo magazines show scantily clad women with surgically enhanced breasts - women believe this is how they should look to find and keep a man happy (Lucy Pinder).

- Contradicting point of women's magazines/books promoting the independent woman lifestyle - not needing a man to be happy.

Images that could support the essay:

Texts to support the essay:

Naomi Klein - The Beauty Myth - How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women
'During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty...'

Lecture 5... Reality, Virtuality & Hyperreality

- Haddon Sundblom illustrations from the 1930s: Coca-Cola shaped Santa Claus, which has become the icon of Christmas.

- People only taste the branding of Coca-Cola – proven in blind taste test, between Pepsi and Coca Cola, no matter which drink was in the glass, if it had the Coca Cola label on, people preferred it.

- Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007) French philosopher, cultural theorist; associated with post-structuralism.

- Post-structuralist thinkers: Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous

- Structuralist thinkers: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser

- Other precursors: Karl Marx (Marxism), Guy Debord, Marcel Mauss

- Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle (1987) - revised Marx’s main concepts to analyse commodity-relations in the age of consumer culture.

- Marx: Pioneering philosopher, ‘critique of political economy’

- Baudrillard : Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

- Simulacra: simulacra are copies either of the thing they are intended to represent or stand in for or - in recent history - are merely copies of other copies.

- The Holy Sacrament: ‘reflection of a profound reality’ - Gargoyle as an example of ‘maleficence’ - ‘masks and denatures a profound reality’

- Malficent, from Sleeping Beauty – ‘has no relation to any reality whatsoever, it is its own pure simulacrum’

- Hence: Coke or Santa aren’t ‘real’ in the sense of ‘profound reality’, because they are ‘pure simulacra’ (copies of copies that do not refer to a pre-existing reality).

- Christkindl Market in Leeds: festive example of simulation.

- Charlie Brooker video – Reality TV Editing: TV isn’t real, it’s hyperreal.

- Baudrillard - Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) -three orders of simulacra

1. Counterfeit - dominant scheme - ‘classical period’

2. Production - dominant schema - industrial era

3. Simulation - dominant schema - current code-governed phase

- September 11 – Before it happened – game on web where player defends the twin towers.

Task Three

Initial thoughts for the dissertation...

Topics of interest:
- Film Theory and the Gaze

- Hyperreality

- Panopticon and Surveillance

Lecture 4... Communication Theory

Laswell's maxim: Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect.



Information or Cybernetic Theory of Communication



- Shannon and Weaver Bell Laboraties (1949)

Evaluation of model:
+ Good for researching how effectively your work communicates, as a designer.
- Linear process, not concerned with meaning which is a socially mediated process.

This model can be used to show effective communication by replacing each step with:
- Info. source with Client.
- Transmitter with Designer.
- Receiver with Media Outlet.
- Destination with Target Audience.

Three levels of potential communciation problems

Level 1: Techinical
- Accuracy
- Systems of encoding/decoding
- Compatibility of systems/ need for specialist knowledge.

Level 2: Semantic
- Precision of language.
- How much of the message can be lost without meaning being lost?
- What language to use?

Level 3: Effectiveness
- Does the message affect behaviour the way we want it to?
- What can be done if the required effect fails to happen?

- Japanese bikes (Honda): used communicative methods with consumers to improve bikes.

Systems Theory

+ Can switch between mathematical, biological, psychological and sociological frames of reference.

BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board)

- Categories - men, women , children, categories, housewives.
- Further divided in to social class and age.
- Social class is determined by the household, rather than the individual.

Class:
AB - Higher (A) Middle Management, Administrative, or Professional (B)
C1 - Supervisory, Clerical and Junior Management.
C2 - Skilled manual workers.
DE- Semi-skilled and unskilled workers and non wage earners.

* The top two categories are sometimes classes as 'upmarket' and the latter as downmarket.

Semiotics

- Semantics: addresses what a sign stands for.

- Syntactics: relationships among signs.

- Pragmatics: studies practical use.

Semiosphere

- Semiotics examines signs as if they are part of a language.
- Problem: semiotics in clothes portrays a message, however may have just woke up and shoved something on.
- Levi Strauss - ethnography - myth, kinship rules.
- Lacan - unconscious; psychology 'language is first of all, a foreign one'.

- Trainers - bought to send signs 'money and coolness' - how object (material) used in contemporary society to create cultural value.

- Advertising uses semiotics 'buy this and it will do this for you'.

- Panzini - great e.g. of semiotics. -Codes: linguistics and image.

- Works for visual language too e.g. signs.
Danger (Red Triangle) + Plane = Airport Sign
[Danger to alert those in the proximity in which the incoming aircraft fly at a very low altitude over a road]

Phenomenological Tradition

- Process of knowing through direct experience. It is the way in which we understand the world.
- Phenomenon - refers to appearance of an object or condition in one's perception.
- A failure in communication can be seen as an absence of, or failure in human relationships.
- Phenomology reacts to the 'Embodied Mind'.
- Communication seen as an extension of the nervous system starts with an awareness of the body.
- Face recognition - based on life experience.
- Process of interpretation is central.
- Unlike semiotics, where interpretation is separate from reality, in the phenomenological tradition - interested in what is real for the person.