1. Collective Identity
Prompt Question 3

2. Social Implications
• In today’s media it often seems as if children
but particularly young people or teenagers are
represented as the most recent threat to
society.

3. Social Implications
• If we look at the historical representation of
young people in the media they hardly feature
at all until the 1950s when suddenly it was
realised that they had money and were a
consumer group just waiting to be sold to and
with this sudden power they also became a
threat.

4. • To what extent are audiences active
in constructing their own sense of
identity?

5. Copy Cat (Audience effects theory)
• Refers to how the media influence and affects the
audience behaviour and how they think.
• It relates to something publicized in the media
that creates a lot of attention, causing other
people to imitate in order to gain the same level
attention.
• The well- known example of this is copycat
murders, suicides and other violent acts that
come with no other motive other than
attention, caused by seeing the same acts in the
media.

6. Encoding – Decoding Theory
(Audience reception theory)
• Stuart Hall suggests that the audience does
not simply passively accept a text. There
are, in his views, three ways in which
audiences can read or decode and understand
a text:

7. Preferred Reading
• Preferred Reading/Dominant Hegemonic -
when an audience interprets the message as it
was meant to be understood, they are
operating in the dominant code. The
producers and the audience are in harmony

8. Negotiated Reading -
• Not all audiences may understand what media
producers take for granted.
• Audiences will understand the over-riding
dominant ideologies within the text but they
may not agree with all the views/ideas;
audiences will make their own ground rules to
get to the agreed dominant ideology (they will
take a different path).

9. Oppositional Reading/'counter-
hegemonic' –
• when an audience understands the context of
the media text but they will decode the text in
a completely different way; opposing the
encoded text.

10. Social Identity Theory
• Social identity theory was developed by Henri
Tajfel and John Turner in 1979.
• Social identity is a person’s sense of who they
are based on their group membership(s)

11. Social Identity Theory
• In order to increase our self-image we enhance
the status of the group to which we belong.
• For example, ‘Adults know best’ We can also
increase our self-image by discriminating and
being prejudice against the out group (the group
we don’t belong to).
• For example, youths and the elderly are not
capable to make ‘right’ decisions.
• Therefore we divided the world into “them” and
“us”

12. Passive consumption
• Repetitive negative representation of young
people in TV and Film could cause the ‘out
group’ (those who do not belong to the youth
culture) to gain further negative assumptions
increasing the gap between collective groups.

13. Eysenck and Nias (1978)
• Argue that recurrent representations of
violence in the media desensitive audiences to
violent behavior and actions.