Week 7

Griffin (2009, p.334) defined cultural studies as "A neo-Marxist critique that sets forth the position that mass media manufacture consent for dominant ideologies." While Priest (1996, p.240) defined cultural studies as a "branch out communication scholarship that looks at the mass media as products of a particular cultural tradition with a certain set of ideological beliefs. The cultural studies approach originated in Great Britain." In my point of view, its the study of what people do in their daily life, how one persons idea becomes a standard definition to other and also, on the cultural differences in the society.

Before we go more further with cultural studies, we also have to understand the definition of visual culture. Visual culture is "the shared practice of a group, community, or society through which meanings are made out of the visual, aural and textual world of representation and the ways that looking practices are engaged in symbolic and communicative activities." (Sturken and Cartwright, 2009, p.3). In this post I will use the famous Television Series called "Glee" as an example.

The key terms in cultural studies is representation, discourse, ideology and politics. According to Lacey (1998, p.131), representation is "the conventions which are used to represent the world to the audience." The conventions used are also called as referent. Representation involves with interpretation. For example; "Glee" represents how life of a high school student, the challenges of being an American student, the rankings in high school like the jocks, the cheerleaders, the nerds and so on, and also the life of an American teen.

Discourse is also known as cultural frameworks or as Griffin (2009, 337) stated that discourse is "frameworks of interpretation". According Fairclough (1999, p.310), "discourse is the language used in representation a given social practice from a particular point of view." In other words, whenever there's a representation, there's always a discourse. The discourse of glee is the "L" symbol on the forehead or just plain doing the "L" symbol.

According to Griffin (2009, p.335), Ideology is "frameworks through which we interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence." In other words Ideology is commonsense. Where there's ideology, there's discourse. The ideology of Glee is that American High School Teens has to follow the two divisions of class which is popular kids and non popular kids. There's no mean of equality of there high school society, however, when they socialize with each other the popular will automatically become unpopular also known as the "underdogs".

The major problem of ideology in a discourse is that they don't represent the whole truth. Counter discourse and counter ideology is the part of the ideology and discourse which people don't want to hear or see.

Stuart Hall defined politics as "struggle over meaning". The politics in Glee is that they're trying their best to promote equality of high school stereotype and they also focus on the gay and lesbian controversy in America whereas they still struggle the equality of acceptance. In conclusion, certain cultures follow the stereotype ideology of social norm.

External Reference

Fairclough, N. (1999). Critical Analysis of Media Discourse. In Marris, P. and Thonham, S. (1999). Media Studies; A Reader (2nd Ed.).

Griffin, E. (2009). A first look at communication theory. (7th Ed). Glencoe, IL: McGrawhill.

Lacey, N. (1998). Image and Representation; Key Concepts in Media Studies. MacMillan Press Ltd: New York.

Sturken, M. and Cartwright, L. ( 2009). Practice of Looking