First things first, swipe your ID card... Always remember to swipe your card.
Really thought a lecture hall would be crazily different but i think i'm kind of used to it already. I love the high tech foldy chairs which come with a cute little foldy table! May have got way too excited about that. Once the lecture began i found myself understanding the basics of what was being said, this part of the course will focus on particular module themes -
- Power and Control
- Meanings and Culture
- Audiences and Effects
- 'New' and 'Old Media
Within all of these themes there are key areas of media concepts -
- Production - Media industries produce goods and services. To what extent should media production be compared to other patterns of industrial production?
Media production is imaginative, unique and creative where the producer has to think, whereas industrial production is manual and requires less creativity in the production.
- Consumption - Media audiences consume media texts and services. How much control do media consumers have over media production?
- Representation - Media texts structure symbols and images in particular ways to represent meanings.
- Identity - Media texts frequently draw on images and ideas to construct identities to do with locality, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, 'otherness' etc...
- Regulation - Practices are established to shape or encourage media production and media representation to occur in particular ways.
Now, in terms of advertising, power and control is important. It is such a huge industry, with a whopping $663.4 Billion spent on advertising globally in 2008. This shows that advertising does control peoples decision into spending.. even when some resist the power of advertising, the industry is becoming bigger. Old media becomes more vulnerable as new media is introduced and attracts more people.
Meaning and culture is related to power and control by the need to address the 'core buyers' for the product. For example, when looking at a L'Oreal advert everyone recognises the target buyers to be young women with disposable income, so when a picture of pensioners was placed on the advert it is an example of resisting the power of advertising.
Trying to regulate advertising is deemed impossible with online and viral ads everywhere - addressing audiences in different ways - Parody and Humour.
