Remember to start by considering the media mantra:
WHAT TYPE OF PRODUCT IS IT? [WHAT IS ITS INTENTION?] WHO IS IT AIMED AT? [AUDIENCE] WHAT MIGHT BE THAT AUDIENCES EXPECTATIONS OF SUCH A PRODUCT? DOES THIS PRODUCT MEET SUCH EXPECTATIONS - HOW? WHY NOT? IS THE PRODUCT EFFECTIVE IN ITS INTENTIONS?
We then need to look at application of theory - how might Hall be applied to this one?
Here we're going to take a look at two very different adverts for products that both feature celebrity footballers endorsing their products. We here go beyond two-step flow to explore what these products indicate about the prevailing zeitgeist and our world of obsession with celebrity and the lives of others.
Product 1 is an advert for Dr Dre Beats headphones. Product 2 is part of the campaign for Adidas football boots. [1] How do the two products represent the life of celebrity footballers? [2] Media commentator and theorist John Fiske wrote : ‘our society teaches men that their masculinity depends upon successful performance’ (Fiske, 2010) and that 'the media promotes unrealistic and dangerous role models.'
How do media products such as these reinforce or contradict such a view?
[3] How have changes in social media [these two adverts totaled over 27,000,000 hits on You Tube] impacted on the spread of commercial messages and how advertisers promote their products?
Judith Butler is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California. She is a well known theorist who talks about power, gender, sexuality and identity.
'Performativity' is her theory as to how identities are a performance of day to day life, and that identity is not a fixed state but one which is constantly changing. In her theory it is not so much who we are but what we do, our performance, that defines us You act differently with your parents compared to your best friend: teachers act differently within class compared to what they would at home. So we have the clear sense of not being just one person, but instead being one person who shows different sides of personalities and performs differently all the time depending on the context and the identities around them.
The media over the years has constructed a stereotypical image of teenagers through the television they watch, in the newspapers they read, in the music listened to - these stereotypical images surround us. Relating to Butler's theory on performance, we can see that the majority of teenagers in this modern world are performing in a way they believe is expected of them; they are performing to societies expectations.
So from this studywe might ask of such events as the 2011 riots: is it all just a performancewith youth acting to the expectations which the public have of British Teenagers? In a majority of the newspapers covering the riot stories, they featured shocking images entailing teenagers during the riots and the destruction in which they caused. for many, they looked as if there were acting out scenes from 'Kidulthood' or Skins or any other modern youth drama
