borrowed interest - a primer

A great example of borrowed interest or media inter-textuality from the Sun

RETURN OF THE SON OF BEACH BODY READY - REMEMBER?

Last year we spent a few happy lessons dealing with the fall-out from a controversial advert : the are you beach body ready campaign.

Here is another campaign that treads similar ground



slimming-pills-xls-medical-ad-banned-irresponsible-approach-body-image

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/dec/15/as-itv-prepares-for-the-sound-of-music-live-are-we-watching-tvs-future

BUNS AND STUFF

In case the news-blip passed you by, Amanda Platell  a columnist for the Daily Mail made ripples by suggesting in print that one of the Bake-off contestants, a middle-class woman called Flora Shedden, and her chocolate carousel, were booted off the BBC’s Bake Off cake contest in favour of Muslim mum Nadiya Hussain, gay doctor Tamal Ray and “new man” Ian Cumming, because she wasn’t “politically correct” enough. Perhaps, wrote Platell, “if she’d made a chocolate mosque she’d have stood a better chance”.


Follow the link below to the article on the Daily Mail coverage of Bake-off. How can a programme about buns create such an ideological storm?
In the lesson today we're going to explore some of these issues



DAILY MAIL AND BAKE-OFF

LESSON 920152: WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

The figure of the vampire has been a rich source of ideas for films for almost 100 years.  Frederick Murnau's Nosferatu [1921] being the first great introduction to a figure familiar to audiences from literature and stage adaptations of the Bram Stoker novel.
The first talking Dracula - and the genre setting template - was Universal Film's DRACULA [1931] starring Bela Lugosi that went on to have a series of film's based around the immortal figure of the Count.  The Hammer Films series in the 1960s has become a classic representation of the vampire. the late 20th Century saw a glut of vampire inspired films - Francis Ford Coppola's DRACULA ; INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE; VAMPIRE 2000; BLADE TRILOGY - all of which explored the vampire legend.
Post 9/11 the figure has seemingly developed into a much more sexualised figure with TWILIGHT franchise and representations on TV such as TRUE-BLOOD, BEING HUMAN.
Each generation has seemingly constructed a version that reflects that era's concerns and values: the zeitgeist
Consider that in the post WW1 era of the 1920s with concerns of re-populating a European society devastated by war and the destruction of the 'flower of humanity' the vampire was a figure that represented a homophobic ideology.  In the 1930s it represented the blood-sucking rich preying on the working poor [the time of the Great Depression].  In the liberated 1960s the representation was sexual and sexualised represented by the change in victims and their seduction by the creature. In the 1990s - with the repeal of capital punishment and a more liberal approach to mental health -  the vampire is no longer a monster but a figure to be understood rather than hunted and destroyed. Post 9/11 the desire for romantic escape from the horrors of an uncertain world and the issues of 'living together' underpin Twilight and True Blood and certainly Being Human.
Much of the enduring fascination has been ascribed by psychologists [and they should surely know!] to a sense of The Other.

,Vampire’s can be found in the folklore of virtually all cultures.  Their physical appearance may have changed but their social function has remained the same, suggesting that the vampire is as much a symbolic being as a supernatural one.

Within Eastern European lore vampires are often depicted as dirty, stumbling and mindless peasants whose victims are often their own family or neighbours. Their existence was used to explain sudden deaths or the spread of disease within the community, clearly indicating that the image of the vampire, for this culture at least, was one of a contagious pestilence. From what you have already researched it should be clear that such a description is dramatically different to the image most Western readers and audiences are familiar with. To us, [despite the gruesome representation in Murnau’s Nosferatu – which itself clearly owes much to the mid-European background of the auteur himself] the vampire of Hollywood has - in general - come to be represented as a clean and sophisticated creature, a supernatural being that is personified by the Count in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). In this narrative, the vampire comes to English shores from abroad and begins its seduction of virginal young women, biting their necks and turning them into his undead brides. Even from this simple description of Stoker’s complex narrative, a similar symbolic value to the East European folklore emerges: this time the vampire is a sexual predator that infects the innocent with their disease.

From these examples emerge two of the vampire’s most potent symbolic qualities:

·         they are a direct threat to the safety of the family unit  

·         their primary symbolic function is to represent that which is Other.

The Other

As a broad definition, the term the Other refers to those characters who stand in opposition to characters who represent the ‘normal’ within any narrative. In essence, the Other is simply that which is wholly different to the ‘normal’. Relating this to the vampire, consider any adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula: here ‘normal’ is represented by the protagonists Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing whilst the Other is, obviously, Count Dracula and those he infects. The opposition is obvious in that Harker and Helsing are good, moral, and pure, whereas Dracula is evil, immoral, and diseased. To take the character’s symbolic values further, it can be suggested that the protagonists represent a patriarchal, heterosexual and (more than likely) Christian society that is attacked by the satanic force of the vampire.

Clearly then the vampire, in all of its manifestations, is a prime example of the Other. But, in recent years the figure of the vampire has steadily changed: although historically depicted as a disease-ridden, aggressive and uncommunicative creature, contemporary depictions of the vampire have given them back their humanity and their voice so that they can communicate the pain of their ‘illness’ and reflect, in a melancholy manner, upon the horrors of immortality. Films such as  Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) and Interview with a Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994) all provide the opportunity for their vampire (anti)heroes to speak about their condition and so elicit the audience’s sympathy. Some vampires have such a loathing for their condition that they actively hunt and kill their own kind [Blade; Seline]. Such a transition clearly lends a certain sense of humanity to them as they talk of their human past, of those they have left behind and the horror of the vampiric infection. These recollections add a further sense of sympathy to these creatures, suggesting that most, if not all, contemporary vampires are as much victim as villain, and remind the audience that they were once us. In this context, these vampires can be read as ambiguous as they question their status as Other: their sense of disgust and regret for their condition implies a yearning to return to the normal, to be accepted as human as opposed to inhuman. Yet, for all of this, their fundamental sense of Otherness still remains: they are still vampiric regardless of their emotions, their regret and the ‘good’ deeds they perform. It would seem then that once one has become the Other there is no possibility of a return to the ‘normal’.

With this in mind, we can now begin to explore a very contemporary spin on the mythic tale of the Other, the ideas surrounding the representation of vampires in  David Slade’s 30 Days of Night (2007) returns the vampire to its original state as visceral and brutal monsters who crave only one thing – blood.
TASK:
From the sequence viewed [the arrest of the stranger to the group of survivors taking refuge in the attic] in what ways have the vampires been represented as 'Other' 

LESSON 820152: THE OTHER

We now need to move on with a consideration of a different representation of 'monster' : the vampire.
We will be using some ideas that have found their way into popular culture from cinemas changing representations of what has become a classic monster.
As we shall see, each generation creates a reinterpretation of the vampire. such evolving representations tell us much about the values and concerns of each era - the zeitgeist.  the fact that the figure of the vampire is capable of constant reinvention also says much for how it resonates with deep psychological needs of audiences over a period of almost 100 years.
The accompanying booklet to the lessons fills in some of the history and developments of this classic monster enabling us to spend the next few lessons exploring a contemporary manifestation of the vampire in David Slade's 2007 film  30 Days of Night.  In this we are concerned with notions of the Other and in the vampire as terrorist.

In the opening sequence we have the 'Classic hollywood Realist' conventions of the horror genre layered on top of the Todorov narrative structure we are now familiar with.

Equilibrium-disruption-complicating events-climax-resolution-new equilibrium.

The film opens with a sketched outline of the lives of the people of Barrow - their domestic situations, their frustrations, their coping with the particular climate of Barrow.

TASK:

What observations does it offer of small town American life?
What impression do we have of its people and their values?

RLA Digital Media: Lessons 1-5

After a few technical issues, I'm finally able to post on the blog!

Digital media is any media that is encoded in a machine-readable format. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified and preserved on computers. Computer programs and software; digital imagery; digital video; web pages and websites including social media; data and databases; digital audio such as mp3s; and e-books are all examples of digital media.
Digital media is frequently contrasted with print media, such as printed newspapers and magazines, and other traditional or analog media, such as film and audio tape.

We looked at our individual consumption of such media formats, and many were shocked to discover the huge amount of time we spend consuming digital media! On average, we discovered that youth tend to skew the data of the overall public, and that you babies of the digital revolution consume far more digital media in the form of social networking, music and video streaming and computer games than your older counterparts, who tend to use digital media more for video calling, reading e books and doing research.

You can see from

But why have they had this effect on our media consumption?

You can use a smartphone to:

• Watch TV (both legally through sites like iPlayer or Netflix.com, and illegally through streaming websites).
• Stream films (again, both legally and illegally)
• Shop online
• Be advertised to in the form of banner ads on games, internet sites, apps etc.
• Broadcast advertising is quickly becoming far more usable and prevalent on smartphones - youtube has started using adverts before their videos on phones now, not just on desktop accessed videos. This change only came into effect in 2014, a big change in how they advertise to us!

 Simply put, this is technological convergence, a buzzword from your AS Media Studies exam in May.

Jenkins says that convergence is:

"the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted“

Essentially, when focusing on technological convergence alone, it is the accessing of multiple media platforms from a single device, or the ability to do so. Not to be confused with synergy!

Mobile Apps study
U.S users spend the majority of their time consuming digital media within mobile applications, according to a new study released by comscore in 2014.
That means mobile apps, including the number 1 most popular app Facebook, eat up more of our time than desktop usage or mobile web surfing, accounting for 52% of the time spent using digital media.
Combined with mobile web, mobile usage as a whole accounts for 60% of time spent, while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up the remaining 40%.
Apps today are driving the majority of media consumption activity, the report claims, now accounting for 7 out of every 8 minutes of media consumption on mobile devices. On smartphones, app activity is even higher, at 88% usage versus 82% on tablets.

 

As you can see, it is clear that desktop usage is falling whilst mobile usage, particularly in the form of "apps" is increasing month by month, with a huge leap of 12% in just over a year.
Why are apps so appealing?

Well, they are converged technology access through more converged technology! The average consumer is lazy; we like to access our media "on the go" and instantly, with minimal effort on own part. Apps allow us to do this in the easiest possible way. They are often free, or very low cost, have easy user interfaces than their web-counterparts, and speed up the process of accessing the media products we love.

So, with all of this in mind, think back to your AS media exam and consider the question you were asked:

[TASK] What impact has convergence had on the way that audiences access and consume the media product from your case study?