MediaSCHOOL

Introducing the Manifesto

2011-02-15T06:26:00.000-08:00

I've recently made a written contribution to Pete Fraser and Jon Wardle's project, A Manifesto for Media Education. This is a web based collection of rationales for media work in the classroom, sparked off by the current UK government's desire to turn the educational clock back fifty years to a time in which schooling was (I believe) deliberately narrow in order to exercise a rather insidious type of control over the vast majority of the population. The Manifesto is an important project, because it brings together a range of viewpoints from the broad church that is media education. My contribution to it is a the perspective that I have been able to enjoy while at Addington for the last four years; namely, a view of schooling that puts media education at its heart. The point that I want to make in the piece, which you can read at http://www.manifestoformediaeducation.co.uk/, is that Media education has for many of the young people I have taught, opened doors to all sorts of other educational opportunities. Michael Gove and his ilk seem to yearn for the kind of education where difficult, challenging concepts and facts dominate educational discourse. For me, media education, and more specifically media studies has been the one and only gateway to these difficult facts and concepts. For example, I wonder how good Gove is on Kantian apperception? I ask the question only because, the only place where I have ever discussed epistemology in a really challenging way is in the media classroom, where the necessity of uncovering the meaning of a priori and a posterori knowledge becomes obvious when talking about truth, realism and representation. The fact is that Gove wants hard, he wants difficult. Thats good, because I want hard and I want difficult too. I believe its also what the majority of media teachers want it to be, and that's good as well, because in my fifteen years experience of teaching, the media classroom is the only place I have found that level of challenge.

An investigation into the relationship between gender and production work in A-Level Media Studies

2010-12-02T13:50:00.000-08:00

A few people have asked me recently about my MA Dissertation, which focuses on the relationship between Gender and Production work in Media Studies. I've decided to put it online here, so that anyone who wants to reference it in further study can do. I do assert my right as the author to ask you to email me if you do reference it though, as this will allow me to send you the full catalogue reference for it rather than the web address.Here it is:

An investigation into the relationship between gender and production work in A-Level Media Studies by Stephen Connolly

Chapter 1 -Introduction.

Media Studies teachers often ask their students (rightly or wrongly)to start their production work from the perspective of the storyteller: “Produce a storyboard” or “Write a script for your trailer/film/advert/soap opera” is something that every Media Studies teacher will say at least once a week. The importance of the story or narrative is fundamental to Media teaching and research. What follows is an examination of many different stories – the stories that students choose to tell through their production work, as well as the real-life story of how they go about producing that work. It seems appropriate, then to start that examination with a story of my own.

A few years ago, when I was the Head of Media Studies in a large (1800 pupils) Comprehensive School on the outskirts of London, I often used to spend many hours after school supervising students who were finishing off production work in their own time. One afternoon, one of my Year 13 students came to me with the film she had made as her coursework production in Year 12, asking to re-edit and improve the finished product she had handed in a couple of months previously. I was slightly surprised at this, as she had achieved quite a high mark for the film (90 out of 120 – a solid B grade) and she had achieved an A-grade for the AS course overall, so I asked why she wanted to spend time trying to improve the film. At first she was reluctant to say, offering vague mutterings about the fact that she “could do it better now”. After some probing, she blurted out “I just want to show Martin and Paul that I can do it as well as them, that’s all”. Martin and Paul were two high-flying male students in the class who had both received very high marks (110 and 115 respectively) for the same piece of work, and had both been offered places on prestigious Media-related University courses – Paul on the Broadcasting degree at Leeds University and Martin on the Film Studies course at Warwick University. The female student in question also had applications in to these courses but had not had any kind of response. After some discussion, I agreed to let her re-edit the film, which did achieve a slightly higher mark. I relate this story because it is one of the (several) incidents which set me off on the train of thought which concludes with this dissertation. Why was it that this student wanted to compete with her male counterparts in practical work specifically, when she was easily beating them in the other areas of the course? And why was it that this incident was different to others in which I had female students in Year 13 confessing to me that they were terrified of using a camcorder? These and other occurrences led me to the exploration of the relationship between Production work and gender.

The problem of gender and how it affects classroom performance is a subject which has long bothered educational researchers, if only because it is clear to them (and many teachers) that there is a marked difference in the response given by male and female students. The issue for the teacher is one of both cause and effect. What kind of conditions give rise to the perceivable differences in attitude and achievement in their subject by girls and boys, and what kind of effect do these have on the indviduals performance and the class as a whole?

For Media Studies as a subject, the concern is compounded by two factors. Firstly the subject's unique status as a means of framing Popular Culture in the classroom, means that the assumptions about gender implicit within a lot of pop culture texts are likely to be carried in with students from the outside world. One might imagine for example, a situation in which a class full of 15 year old boys were asked to analyse magazines aimed at 15 year old girls for a Media Studies GCSE exam. To this study, the boys bring their experience of the discourse of gender and subsequently encounter an entirely different discourse. This is not a problem which is likely to face say , the teacher of Maths or Science. The second factor is that Media Studies involves production work, which in turn, by definition, must involve technology, and the relationship between gender technology is something which has occupied both sociological and educational researchers for some time. Indeed, their have been numerous studies into the relationships between gender and production work in subjects such as design and technology, but none as yet, in Media Studies. It is clear that because of historical discourses about gender that there will always be a connection between gender and the act of making things, even within the context of the classroom.

This study is then motivated by my own experience as a teacher of Media Studies in several large London Secondary schools. The above account notwithstanding, I often thought that I could detect a difference (anecdotally) between the types of production work male and female students engaged in and enjoyed. I often also thought that this involved preconceptions of and attitudes towards technology, particularly with regard to certain types of technology. I was initially convinced, for example, that girls enjoyed film and video work less than boys did, preferring to focus on the attention-to-detail and finishing required by say, print based products. The account with which I opened this chapter was one of the things which made me realise that the issue was not as straightforward as it seemed and deserved further investigation. The purpose of this study is then, to put these hypotheses to the test and to identify what kind of trends occur when one examines production work in Media Studies and its relationship to gender. Also, its purpose is to look at what kind of attitudes to and preconceptions of production work male and female students hold, and latterly perhaps to suggest ways of challenging them.

While there is no specific study that covers the ground attempted by this dissertation, there has been interest expressed in it. These theoretical observations will be given in due course, but it is worth while pointing out that there has been concern about the issue of gender and production work in Media Studies for some time. Indeed, the Second Cox report expressed a concern about girls and production work in Media Studies as long ago as 1989;

"Many aspects of media education and IT involve the use of machines…Our culture often regards machines as a male preserve, and girls may need opportunities and encouragement to show that they can be just as expert as boys in such areas" (Cox,1989)

Similarly, Jenny Grahame identified the relationship between gender and production work as one of a number of issues surrounding production in her work with David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green some years later:

"Issues such as the 'gendering' of particular technical competencies, from storyboarding to camera skills: the relationship between students ' cultural backgrounds and their perceptions of genre: and the way in which class, ethnic and gender interests might determine students understanding of narrative structure all demand fuller exploration."
(Buckingham, Grahame, Sefton-Green 1995:p.45)

This dissertation is centred around an analysis of the attitudes towards, and conduct of production projects carried out by Year 12 students at the Ursuline High School in Wimbledon, South West London who were studying for the OCR AS Level in Media Studies. It involves an analysis of the kind of things that they say about production work (through both interviews and questionnaire),a concomitant analysis of the production work they have done , as well as an examination of the things they have written about the production work experience in their evaluations of that work. This is analysis is carried out in the light of numerous theoretical perspectives: the place of production work within media studies; the pedagogy of production work; observations about gender within the Media Studies classroom; and some wider theoretical perspectives on language and discourse and education generally. What I hope to do by carrying out this analysis is to summarise the state of the relationship between gender and production work in the Media Studies classroom based on my observations. Rather than setting a single research question I think that there are four central questions that this study attempts to answer;

1) Is there a distinct difference between the type of production task which boys and girls are inclined to choose to do – and what reasons do they give for making that choice; for example is there an issue of technology here?
2) Do boys and girls differ in their attitudes towards practical work? If so why and does it matter?
3) Do boys and girls go about the production tasks set in a different way?

4) What kind of conclusions (about the nature of the relationship between production work and gender) can we draw from the content of students production work?

I firmly believe that answers to the above questions will also raise numerous questions themselves. An examination of production work and gender must by definition, also involve an examination of questions about identity, role playing, self-representation, the nature of learning (particularly in Lave and Wenger’s sense of social participation), genre and perhaps most pragmatically, the use of ICT in the classroom. The penultimate sections of this study will hopefully shed some light on these questions and some possible answers to them.

Finally, the study will deal with ways in which the issues raised may well affect the day to day running of the Media Studies classroom. This is in no way intended to be a “self-help manual” for any Media teacher who might read it, but rather as a way of drawing attention to those practical issues which do occupy classroom practitioners. This dissertation started with personal experience, and I hope it shall return there as a means of situating the observations made and the theoretical debates which are examined within it.

Chapter 2 Theoretical Perspectives: Pedagogy, Practical Work and Gender

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Media education in secondary schools has since its inception as a curriculum subject in the late 1960’s (Buckingham,2003:87) included some element of production work within its remit. In order to give some context to the discussion about production work and gender which follows, it is necessary to look at the way in which the role of production has developed within media education for two reasons. Firstly, discussions about the precise purpose of production work, may relate to the roles that male and female students take in the production process. For example, one might conjecture that one of the reasons why girls may be reluctant to undertake film and video production work is due to a dearth of role models in the film and video-industries. If one believes that production work has a vocational purpose then it may be a means of addressing this issue. Secondly it seems clear that students attitudes to practical work will be formed by the way in which the teacher presents that work to them. This presentation is to some extent dependent on the individual preferences of the teacher, but is also dependent upon the way in which production work is framed by the syllabus or specification that the teacher is delivering. In order to understand this framing process, and the subsequent attitudes to production work fostered, it is worth looking at how production work came to occupy the position that it does.

The place of production work in the Media classroom

Alvarado et al observe that production work within educational establishments in Britain has a long history. Since the 1950’s, film making has been taught at postgraduate level, and that it was being considered in schools not long afterwards, in the Newsom report on English teaching;

In 1963 the Newsom Report recommended film-making as an ‘interesting and useful’ activity for students self-expression, especially for the more disaffected pupil. Unconsciously influenced perhaps by the dominant critical view of the time that film should be recognised as an art form for individual self-expression, teachers introduced 8mm film-making into schools as an exciting extension to the general shift in English teaching away from the analytical towards an encouragement of the expressive. This pedagogic approach was given a boost in the 1970’s when advances in video technology seemed to offer the promise of everyone becoming a communicator producing their own DIY television show.
(Alvarado, Wollen and Gutch.1987:p29)
This account of the birth of production work is included here because it makes two valuable points in relation to the wider debate about the relationship between gender and production. Initially, the importance of self-expression is emphasised, and as we shall see later, this is a vital aspect of production work for both male and female students. Secondly, the notion of “everyone becoming a communicator” is even more relevant now – with the advent of the new media technologies- than it was in the 1970’s. It is this development, making media production, editing and transmission much easier FOR ALL STUDENTS, that is one of factors allowing the repositioning of gender roles within media production work.

However, the inception of production work within the media educators curriculum does not stop with the Newsom report. It is clearly not the case that production was brought painlessly into the world, not there one day, but present the next. Indeed there was (and still is) much discussion about the role. During the 1970’s and 1980’s much of the debate was characterized by arguments about production work as an expression of “creativity” and furthermore, what “creativity” actually meant. Some of the most interesting comments of the time were made by Bob Ferguson in his article “Practical Work and Pedagogy” published in Screen Education(1981). Ferguson was convinced that the vast amount of production work being done at the time was designed to occupy underachieving ( and for Ferguson, almost exclusively working-class) students, in order to stop them being disruptive to better behaved, middle class students:

The general context for practical media work has been linked with children who are expected, at best to be average. This has serious implications for the way in which practical work has been approached and it has ensured that teachers who felt themselves to be working with ‘above average’ children treated it as a diversion from more serious matters (Ferguson.1981.p42-43)

It is clear now that Ferguson did believe that there was a benefit to production work, but that this was not the benefit that many teachers saw at the time . Indeed Ferguson believed that it was essential for understanding the media from theoretical point of view;
Practical work in media studies is about making meaning and understanding how one has done it. It can be taught and practised. It does not include rationality, analysis and the desire to learn (ibid.p.42)

For Ferguson then, practical work is a means of raising issues about ideology and politics, rather than avoiding these challenging issues. He wants students’ experience of production work to involve an evaluation (if not an interrogation) of the ideas that the media product itself and the institution that created it, brings about. He illustrates these ideas with an observation that is particularly pertinent to this very study, when discussing what happens when students are not forced to confront the ideological concepts which lie behind their own production work:

A video-tape may be made about, for instance, a bank robbery. Students play out the kicking of someone’s ribs in front of the camera. They try to look as hard as The Professionals. It is a male-dominated activity and the female is often excluded or brought in in a manner which reinforces dominant sexual stereotypes. Personal experience of the media is not interrogated, contextualised, challenged or debated.
(ibid: p.48)

These comments, made over twenty years ago, highlight one of several different viewpoints about the possible purpose of production work. As we will see, others view Ferguson’s comments as limiting and limited in their scope. What is even more fascinating in the context of the current debate however, is that here, Ferguson identifies quite early on that the content of students production work can be gender-dependent. Additionally, he also notes that production work raises problematic questions about the producer and their view of issues such as gender. It would seem then, that questions about the relationship between gender (and race and class) and production work are implicit in discussions about the purpose of production.

The arguments about the purpose of practical work and the attached pedagogical approaches, rumble on, but a useful summary can be found in “Making Media: Practical Production in Media Education” by Buckingham et al. Here four key view points are presented: 1) Practical Work as Self-expression in which the creativity of the individual is emphasised through experimentation with the medium, generic conventions etc. 2)Practical Work as a Method of learning, in which the production work is designed as a means of developing or promoting certain types of skills e.g social or communication. 3)Practical Work as Vocational Training, where the production work is scene as a preparation or training for a career in the Media. 4) Practical work as deconstruction, which is the position which Ferguson, Masterman (Masterman, 1980) and others adopt, claiming that production work is a means of exploring and subverting the conventions of the media text. (Buckingham et al, 1995.p4-6). To re-iterate, I believe that the view of the purpose of production work will affect the way in which students perceive that work. While it is not the case that male and female students view production work in the above terms, it is evident that different students do view production work in different ways, dependent on their view of the wider subject, motivation and personal agendas in terms of career path, personal enjoyment etc. It is these views that will hopefully become evident in the subsequent analysis of what students say about their production work, along with how this is related to gender.

Gender and Production Work – What the Theorists (don’t) say
What of academic debates about gender and production work? As mentioned above, there is actually very little written on the topic specifically, though there is a good deal written about gender issues within Media studies generally and broadly speaking, statements about this topic fall into one of three categories: 1) Statements relating to the discussion of gender issues in the classroom; 2) Gendered behaviour in the Media classroom; and 3) The self-representation of gender by male and female students through practical and other work in Media Studies. For the purposes of this study, all three types of statement made by academics and practitioners within the theoretical field are worth consideration, as they give a sense of why gender might be important for the teacher of Media Studies in the Secondary classroom. Evidently, though it is the observations made in the third category which hold most interest here, as this brings in the element of production work.

There are a number of important pieces of research which generate statements from the first category, and these are usually reported as a arising out of the analysis of texts. Grahame (1990) and Brockie (1992) for example both comment on the kinds of discussions about gender which occur in the Media Studies classroom. While there is not sufficient room for a detailed analysis of these accounts here, what appears to be a common element in both is that they emphasise that students are aware of the way in which Media Studies frequently problematises gender by making students discuss something which they take for granted. Students realise that they are expected to comment on gender even if that means contradicting their own personal viewpoints. Grahame observes that a group of girls making a programme for a pre-school audience were highly critical of their own work because they were aware of the ideological content of it;

“…their story had been chosen because it was the only item in the programme to offer multicultural images; yet in evaluation, they were critical because there was no girl in the narrative, and the women were represented in conventional domestic roles…” (Grahame, reprinted in Alvarado & Boyd-Barrett 1992:p372)
Similarly Brockie observes that the boys in his Year 8 Tutor group know that perfume advertisers could sell the same fragrance to both men and women simply by using different images according to the intended audience, yet still will only respond to those adverts which target males. (Brockie, reprinted in Alvarado & Boyd-Barrett 1992:p372). For me, these observations and others which relate the kind of things students say about gender issues in class discussion, suggest an interesting connection with the wider aims of this dissertation. Why is it, when students are aware of the ideological baggage which comes with media texts, do they often “revert to type particularly when representing gender in production work? A good example of this will be closely examined in Chapter 5, which highlights the fact that, girls frequently want to produce film work which represents violence (sometimes highly sexualised) against women from a male point of view. These students have been taught about the objectification of the female body in mainstream cinema, agree that it is wrong, but still wish to carry on doing it in their own film work. While it is the case that numerous practitioners have offered some insight into this tension between ideological knowledge and experience (particularly Williamson, 1981) there seems to me to be a difference between what the student knows about gender issues in media studies and what they actually want to do (or not) with that knowledge. This observation could very probably be extended to any number of ideological discourses (race, class etc.) present within media texts, but it is in these observations about gender issues in discussion that are the most relevant here. They emphasise the point that the relationship between gender and media education is a problematic one and that production work is one site at which this problem may be explored.

The second type of observation or statement made about gender and media studies involves gendered behaviour in the classroom. One might say that this reflects a wider concern about gendered behaviour in school, full stop–but several pieces of research do point to the unique way in which male and female students respond to the tasks they are given in the context of media education. Andrew Burn, in his article “Spiders, Werewolves and Bad Girls” highlights this when he describes students reactions to watching The Company of Wolves;

Boy’s and girls reactions fall into distinct patterns. They sit separately to watch. Boys are more likely to crack jokes, comment aloud, follow startled reactions at shock or suspense by laughing aloud, debunk the horror…The girls comment much less, laugh much less, grimace at the horror frown when the narrative takes a complex turn, smile with appreciation… (Burn,1996;p163-164)

This would seem to indicate that the gendered difference in response to tasks set relies originates in the students relationship with the text. Here, boys laugh at the film as a means of asserting masculinity or power and as a way of establishing a bond with their fellow class mates. Girls on the other hand, seek to know the narrative and have perhaps a less knee-jerk reaction to the film. Burn’s observation here, will undoubtedly be born out by the anecdotal evidence of many Media teachers, and indeed, Buckingham comments on this phenomena at some length (Buckingham,2000;p138-141). I believe that this kind of theoretical perspective offers a link to the wider purposes of the work carried out here in that it may give some insight into what motivates students to choose certain types of practical projects.

The third type of statement is probably the most relevant here. The issue of gender in relation to production work and subsequent self-representation is tricky in that there is only really one major text on Production work in the classroom – “Making Media: Practical Production in Media Education” by Buckingham, Grahame and Sefton-Green – though David Buckingham’s most recent work also offers some interesting insights (Buckingham, 2003, p160-168). Chapter 7 of “Making Media” – (“Do I look like a prostitute?”) makes the point that representation and reality are problem areas for students and teachers when doing production work, and also raises the question of modality, which will be discussed further below. In this work, it is clear that the issue of realism with regard to self-representation is something that concerns students, especially if they end up asking the question, while producing a soap opera within Media studies, which makes up the title of this particular chapter . Perhaps more obliquely it demonstrates the fact that part of this concern is about gender;

The Second concern that is being invoked here is a more specifically educational one. In terms of our interests, we have to ask what (the student) thinks she is learning from dressing up like a prostitute; and in what ways acting the role might contribute to her understanding of, amongst other things, acting, making soaps and even being a prostitute. (Buckingham, Graham, Sefton-Green, 1995, p170)

What I am seeking here is what lies underneath the question which prompts Julian Sefton-Green to make the above statement. Not only is the question one of realism, but also one of self-realisation. “Do I look like a prostitute?” comes not only from the students desire to produce a realistic text, but also from a desire to create a text which presents the producer (either within the product as actor, or outside it as director) in as positive a way as possible. This idea is extended further in Buckingham’s account of the female students who produce a parody of Cosmopolitan entitled Slutmopolitan. Buckingham relates that the driving force behind this project is the student’s sense of humour, but that because of this the production ends up addressing some quite serious questions about gender representation in magazines.(Buckingham, 2003; p167-168) Both accounts rely upon the fact that ideas about gender were being explored through a kind of self-representation; in the soap-opera, as students took on roles and acted out character experiences, while in the case of Slutmopolitan, the students revealed their own views, feelings and ambiguity about women’s magazines. This inevitably leads to one of the questions set out at the start of this study - what exactly students are trying to say about gender through the content of their own practical work?
Within this quite narrow theoretical field, occupied by debates about the place of production within Media Education and the relationship between gender and media education – we can see that the questions generated by academics in their discussions deserve some further investigation – hopefully carried out here. Before conducting this investigation though, it is worth giving brief consideration to some wider theoretical perspectives which may be helpful.

Wider Theoretical Views – Situated Learning and Multimodality
It is clear that Media education in the classroom (and indeed outside of it) involves students learning in ways that are different to those adopted in other subjects. In this section I hope to touch on some theoretical views which may help us to understand this. The process, for example of learning to watch a moving image text, has parallels with print literacy but is obviously not the same thing. This idea is explored by Hodge & Tripp (1986, Ch.1) Buckingham (2003, Ch 3), Burn (unpublished Chs 1,2). As can be seen below, Buckingham and Burn particularly make use of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s notion of multimodality(Kress & Van Leeuwen,2001). Similarly the idea of how one learns production skills is difficult to assess – how do I learn to use a camcorder properly, or take a good picture? I would suggest that some insight into this might be gained by taking some ideas from Lave and Wenger’s concept of situated learning.

The idea of multimodality has a great deal of relevance for people researching the process of media education because it seeks to address a number of questions about the way in which students learn to deal with the substantive content of the media. Kress and Van Leeuwen argue for the idea that many texts that we encounter are multimodal in their nature; that is to say the producer making them combines several different modes of communication. A web page for example might involve written text, moving images, music and visual design. For educators the issue here is not simply that the supremacy of the written text is passing, but that their students need to develop a way of dealing with these multimodal texts that is wider than traditional print literacy, something that Kress and Van Leewen themselves advocate;

If schools are to equip students adequately for the new semiotic order…then the old boundaries between writing on the one hand…and, on the other hand, the visual arts…should be redrawn. This will have to involve modern computer technology, central as it is to the new semiotic landscape. But above all it is crucially dependent on having the means of analysis, the means for talking about the “new literacy”, about what is we do when we read and produce things.
(Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, reprinted in Burn 2002)

There is a link here in that the final sentence of the above quotation points back to one of the questions laid out at the start of this dissertation – what reasons do students have for choosing the type of production that they do and what does this have to do with technology? One of the aims of this study is to try and understand some of the differences in the way in which male and female students approach production work. This idea of “’the new literacy’, what it is we do when we read and produce things” means that part of the production process is finding a way of describing what and how we learnt. What students learn of this “multimodal discourse” will undoubtedly be revealed by the things that they say about their production work and these utterances could be the key to understanding this new literacy better.

As a teacher of Media studies I have often thought about the way in which students might learn production skills and concomitantly the best way of teaching those skills. As Buckingham points out, there are evident difficulties with managing the learning of production skills (Buckingham, 2003; p82-83), but the question that occupies me most here is how students learn outside the regular classroom situation, as I believe that this is where students spend most time on their production work. One of the things that may arise in a study of this kind is that male and female students learn in different ways through their production work. One may look to the work of Lave and Wenger to gain some perspective on this. They propose that in many cases individuals learn socially rather than by instruction, by entering in to what they term “communities of practice” where they learn by doing, rather than by receiving information (Lave and Wenger, 1991). This can be taken as a model for explaining how students acquire production skills. When students choose a production task, it is clearly not the initial instruction session given by the teacher which teaches them how to use a camcorder or take a picture or construct a web page. It is the process that occurs afterwards, when they consult each other and older, more experienced adults and enter a “community of practice” where they really learn the skills they need to complete the task. No one would deny that students consult older adults for help in other schools subjects (such as Maths, say) outside class, but it is only in Media studies, where students are expected to complete a task independently, that they are often “apprenticed” - to use Lave and Wenger’s term – to each other and to older adults. As the data in Chapter 4 indicates, some of the students choose a particular production brief precisely because of the ease with which they can apprentice themselves to a parent or older sibling.

Reviewing the literature surrounding the central questions set by this dissertation should lead us to the conclusion that there is good deal of work which skirts around the main issues relating to gender and production work. Several theoretical positions provide starting points to investigate the issue but none deals with it directly. As we shall see, this may be because there is evidently some difficulty in assessing a relationship that students and teachers are often not directly aware of but evidently does have some bearing on the work that they do.

Chapter 3 – Methodology

The bulk of the data for this study comes from the two Year 12 Media Studies classes at the Ursuline High School in Wimbledon. I have taught these two classes for the last 10 months, and the study focuses on both their comments about production work and the work they have done. UHS is primarily a 11-18, non-selective, Catholic Girls High School (NOR 1100) in Wimbledon, Southwest London, but it has a confederated 6th form with the nearby boys school, Wimbledon College. The cachment area of the school stretches from Streatham and Croydon in South London, to Hounslow in the West, via Kingston and large parts of North Surrey. The school is about 40% ethnic minority intake, and the two classes that are referred to in this study are both made up of boys and girls.

These students are following the OCR AS/A2 Media Studies course, in which the production constitutes 40% of the final mark. The work look at here is for the AS course, where students can opt for one of six different production briefs set by OCR, (see fig.1) working in a range of different Media. They have approximately 6 months to complete the project, which is assessed for a) Planning and Research, b) Construction and c) Production Report/Evaluation. Figure 1 outlines the Production briefs available to the students and also shows the number of students –male and female – opting for each one.

Figure 1: Choice of production tasks – male/female ratio

Brief 1)Film 2)TV 3)Print: Ads 4)Print Magazine 5)Radio 6) New Media Total male/female
Male 8 1 0 2 2 6 19
Female 10 4 2 9 0 3 28
Total 18 5 2 11 2 9 47

Here it can be seen that the Film brief – in which students had to make a two minute opening sequence from a thriller movie – was the most popular option for both male and female students. This is interesting in itself as it seemed to indicate that film making was as appealing for males and females. After this, the options were quite distinctly polarised, with Magazine making being much more popular with females than with males, and the New Media option being much more appealing for males than females, with double the number choosing this brief. What lies behind these figures is a complex set of reasons that are, I believe, connected to social class, technology, self-representation and identity and the subsequent study, will I hope bring them to light.

The raw data for this study comes from three sources. Initially I conducted three of semi-structured interviews with small groups of students. These consisted in raising a standard set of issues and topic questions I was interested in discussing with four or five students together to promote a group discussion. I conducted these interviews during the time when students were working on their productions, in most cases before or just after they had started construction work. I also asked all the students to complete a questionnaire (see appendix 3) after the completion of their practical work. The second source of data comes from the students finished production work itself. As can be seen in chapter 5, in analysing this I have taken an opportunity sample (Brown & Dowling, 1998; p.29-30) of six students (three male, three female) and looked at their finished productions, making observations about what the texts themselves say about their producers. In effect this is the kind of qualitative textual analysis outlined by Brown and Dowling (ibid;p85-89) in which the text, in this case the students production, is referred to the ideological concept of gender Finally, what the students say about their work in the arena of the production report comes under scrutiny. Chapter six consists in looking closely at what the same six students write in their production logs and what that reveals about the relationship between gender and production.

The reasoning behind a mixed approach to methodology is twofold. Firstly, by using a combination of interview, questionnaire, and qualitative textual analysis I hoped to uncover both the things that students say directly about gender, through interviews and analysis of production logs, as well as what they say indirectly through the content of the work they produce. As mentioned in Chapter 3, gender is a problem area for both teachers and students within Media Studies, and both may possess knowledge about gender without knowing what to do with it. The production work itself is , I believe, a means of demonstrating this dichotomy. Secondly, I fell that a mix of qualitative research methods would be more useful than any quantitative approach (such as content analysis, for example) as they would better enable me to establish generalizations about the nature of the relationship between gender and production work in media education.

Chapter 4 -Data Analysis: The Interviews and Questionnaires

The initial interviews focussed on the period before and during the period in which the students were working on the construction of the product. Students could opt to do one of six different productions (See Chapter 3, appendix 1) and the interviews posed a number of questions about the decisions surrounding and perceptions of, that production work. (see appendix 2). These questions were used as a starting point for a more wide ranging discussion, and this semi-structured interview technique (Deacon et al,2002: Brown & Dowling, 1998) was employed as a means of finding out about the gender differences in perceptions of practical work without "loading" the questions so that there was evidently a different set of questions asked of male and female students. Subsequently, at the end of the production period, I asked students to complete a questionnaire (see Appendix 3) regarding their work. This is analysed later on in the chapter.

In order to carry out the analysis of student responses in the interview situation, I decided to loosely code them into a number of different categories in order to establish whether or not a pattern emerged in terms of the kind of statements male and female students made about practical work and the issues surrounding it. This coding process equates with the fourth stage of Brown and Dowling's mode of interrogation, namely , the asking of the question "What is the general empirical field within which the work is located". As the research question focusses on the relationship between gender and the attitudes to and perceptions of practical work in Media Studies, the statements were coded into the following categories. 1) Statements made by either boys or girls: 2) Statements about Media Studies as a subject 3) Statements about practical work: 4) Statements about technology and 5) Statements about gender issues. Here, a statement is defined as any utterance longer than a “yes/no/nil” response. Clearly, some statements are likely to overlap and may fall into more than one category, but for the purposes of clarity, I have decided to allot statements to only one category.

This coding process revealed that boys and girls made roughly equal contributions to the interview discussion (53% - 47% with girls in the majority) and subsequently the majority of the discussion focussed on statements about the nature of production work itself and the technology used to produce it (60% of all statements were about these two topics, in fact). This information obviously comes with the caveat that the questions were designed to generate discussion about gender and technology, and thus slightly biased, it is clear that the students had a lot to say on these topics, which obviously occupied a good deal of their concern. While the number of statements about gender made was very small, these were, as can be seen below, quite revealing. What follows then, is analysis of this interview data.

Analysing the Interviews
Bearing the statements made by the Cox Report etc (see above) in mind one might expect girls to make negative statements about the technology involved in practical work, but I really want to go beyond this really rather vague generalisation and look at the apparently differing attitudes that girls and boys have to practical work. Indeed these statements about "girls and technology" do not appear to have a solid basis when one looks closely at what girls really have to say about the hardware and software that they use. Indeed, the initial figures brought to light in Chapter 3 suggest that female students are as equally at home with film-making as boys are, despite it being a “technology-heavy” medium.

In the interviews, there were some concerns raised by students of both sexes about the technological aspects. One male student, Jamie, expressed an inability to use a computer but then acknowledged that he would have to become familiar with one in order to edit his film. This was the reason why he chose not to do the Web-based or print based briefs.

Jamie: Um. I'm not much good at computers, so I thought that the web and print-based stuff would be a waste of time.

And later on:

Jamie: I've got no idea how to edit. So I've got to learn to do that today, so I can edit tomorrow!

Similarly, Kathleen said that she did not really feel able to use a computer confidently, despite the fact that she had chosen the film brief and would need to use a computer to edit the film.

Kathleen:I don't know about the website one… I don't really enjoy that side of the Media … you know the technology.
SC: But you've got really use to the camera
KM: I've come to like the camera yes.
SC: So why do you say you don't enjoy the technology but you like the camera?
KM: I've got a preconception about it…I'm a bit fearful of technology…I don't know…when you write things down on paper you know they're not going to go anywhere. Computers are a bit more dodgy than that.

It was clear that for these students, preconception was the key theme here. When pushed for an explanation about their apparent lack of confidence with the computer, it became clear that they didn't see the computer needed to create a website or magazine as the same computer they needed to edit their films. Indeed the process of editing seemed to be something isolated from the skills required to operate a PC. When pushed for an answer about any problems he anticipated with the editing process, Jamie replied "No, it'll be alright". (Notwithstanding his previous comments about not being very good with computers). Jamie's comments may well lead us to conjecture that there is status ascribed to the different types of activity that students might be carrying out under the guise of practical work.. Film-making, in which students feel that they are in some way imitating the glamour of Hollywood professionals, could for some students, be a higher-status activity than the anorak-coated world of the internet , despite the fact that both require a fairly high level of ICT skills to produce a good finished article.

Despite the concerns of these students, other students of both sexes had no qualms about the technology involved in practical work. Witness Ryan for example:

Ryan: I'm quite a whizz on the computer and I thought that making a website wouldn't be too hard. But now getting down to the work has been harder than I thought. I'm normally on the computer 24-7 anyway.

One might think that this is typically adoleascent male behaviour: bragging about one's proficiency with a computer, claiming that the work would be easy etc. However, Ryan's comments have a great deal in common with those of his female classmate, Kim;

Kim: I find it easy to do webpages because I'm OK with the computer, and I 've got one or two around the net that I've made before, so I found it easy. I did that rather than a film or adverts, because I'm not good at the whole-text writing thing. (??)
SC: What do you mean by that?
Kim: I mean writing enough to fill a whole supplement. And I don't have the patience to make a film. Too much editing and stuff.

In the light of the comments from the Second Cox report, one could easily have expected the things Kim says to be uttered by a boy. It seems that attitudes to technology are being formed less and less by gender and more and more by issues such as access to that technology, and by family background in which use of that technology is encouraged. This idea is ratified by Rebecca’s comments, who says of her production;

Rebecca: My family are involved in advertising. They sometimes do adverts at work, so I thought it would be quite easy to do.
Rebecca is undoubtedly working within what Lave and Wenger would call a “community of practice”. And later on;
Rebecca: I’m using my computer at home, and I don’t have any problems with that.

In order to give a theoretical perspective to this point, it is useful here to make reference to Pierre Bordieu’s ideas about cultural and academic capital. For Bordieu, there is a distinction between a) what an individual learns in school, b) what an individual learns at home and c) the combination of the two.
"Academic capital is, in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school (the efficiency of which depends on the amount of cultural capital directly inherited from the family)" (Bourdieu 1979, p.22,)
In respect of gender, the kind of comment which Cox makes in 1989, seems to place emphasis firmly on the fact that boys acquire certain kinds of cultural capital ( concerning ICT) outside school, in the home and in friendship groups, thus increasing the value of their academic capital. I would suggest that this implication is being rendered obsolete by a number of factors, not least the fact that ICT is now compulsory in Secondary schools in the UK. As girls adopt the skills and language of ICT, reinforced by access to that Technology at home and encouraged by parents who see computers as useful tools, the value of their academic capital increases, matching and surpassing that of their male counterparts. The comments above made by Kim and Rebecca, bear this out.

Kim , Rebecca and Ryan's academic capital appears to be of a higher value than Jamie and Kathleen's when it comes to ICT skills. This difference is not about the “gendering” of technology but about other social and educational factors – something which may surprise some observers.

While there were only a very small number of statements made by students about gender, these do prove both interesting. Two in particular are worth mentioning here, because I believe they relate, indirectly to perceptions about the kind of production work that male and female students are expected to engage in. Take Rob’s comment when asked about his choice of brief:

Rob: I’m a bit of a geek anyway so I did the computer one because I felt more comfortable with it.

The use of the word “geek” here is what should hold our attention. That Rob chooses to describe himself in these terms, which is essentially a view of himself mediated by other people, implies that it was almost inevitable that he chose the ICT brief. The use of the word geek to describe an someone (usually male) with an “obsessional interest” (Oxford Dictionary of New Words) in a particular topic – in this case computer technology – says a great deal about Rob and about his view of the kind of production work he not only wants to do, but is expected of him, being the kind of 17 year old male that he is. This may seem to contradict the observations made about the progress of girls and technology, but it must be emphasised that this seems to be a view Rob is imposing on himself, or thinks that other people have already imposed on him. We might see Rob as conforming to the view of gender and production work outline in the Cox Report, and as I have already asserted that this view is less and less relevant, it is important point that Rob was the only one of the 19 males included in the study to use a word like this. How the classroom teacher might handle this kind of expectation in the classroom will be considered in chapters 7 and 8.

It is also interesting to see that some of the female students see their male counterparts as source of information or authorities when it comes to technologies. Witness Krystal’s comments about the editing she will be doing.

Krystal: …I’m going to edit using Moviemaker. There’s a guy in the other class who’s used that and his film looks really good, and he says it’s easier to use than Adobe Premiere

Krystal is not making any admission of her own lack of competence here – she is going to edit using the Moviemaker package – but merely using the knowledge of a male student (perhaps the kind of knowledge that is implicit in Rob’s description of himself as a geek?) in order to help her as a task. Krystal is one of several females in the class who see their male classmates as a resource to be tapped, not in order to do the task for them, but so that they can learn about the technology required to do the job in hand.

From the interview transcripts, a picture emerges of two contrasting positions. The first is that technology and its use are, for some students, not related to gender, but to social factors, such as access and familial support. The second position suggests that in some respects, technology is still gendered, but that in a post-feminist culture, female students are much more prepared to use their male counterparts as a resource in order to gain the knowledge needed.

Analysing the Questionnaires
The questionnaires were written and administered by myself and a student from the Central School of Speech and Drama’s PGCE Media Ed. Course who was working with me at the time. They are similar in form to a general evaluation proforma that I use at the end of every major piece of practical work, but the questions are adapted to suit the purpose of this study and a piece of research work that the PGCE student was doing at the time. The questionnaires were anonymous, in order to encourage candour in student response, with the questions pertinent to this study being nos. 5-14, which relate directly to production work.The most interesting aspect of these responses was the differing things that male and female students said about their approaches to production work.
For example, the majority of female responses to question 8 ( “What area of practical word would you say your strengths lay and why?”) involved the word “creative”, with students here describing themselves as “being creative” or enjoying the “creativity” of the subject. Male students on the other hand tended to respond by describing a particular skills that they were good at, such as “editing” or “storyboarding”. I believe that this points to one of the differences in male and female students attitudes to production work. This would seem to indicate that for males, one of the things that they enjoy about production work is the chance to acquire specific skills. This is reinforced if we momentarily return to the interview stage of the study, and take a look at two responses (from Jamie and Peter);

Peter: I’m pretty comfortable with it. I mean I’ve learnt new skills along the way, but generally I just got on with it, you know…taught myself.

And;

Jamie: I've got no idea how to edit. So I've got to learn to do that today,

For female students it seems to be the opportunity to be creative that is appealing, and specifically, the chance to create a good finished product. One questionnaire response stated that “I’d like to think I’m visually creative, because my finished piece looked good”. This was written by a female student who was doing the Brief 3 (Magazine), and is fairly typical of students like her, who felt that their work “achieved the best grade possible” or felt they “could have done a better evaluation. This attention to detail contrasts with male students, many of whom felt their work was “badly planned” or could have been better if they had to do “less other work”. However, if we go beyond these responses, it becomes clear that the male students do take a positive delight in the actual process of making the product. Not only does this link back to the notion of acquiring specific skills mentioned above, but also points to the idea that the male students would rather be “doing it” than “planning it”. Whereas several female responses to the questions about their finished product mentioned things like enjoying |”researching and compiling information”, male responses often included things like “ (when) filming, I knew what I wanted and I was good at directing people to achieve this” and “the ICT brief allowed me to experiment with sound and video at the same time” or “I think I’m a hands on person”. This last comment was made by one of the students who described his work as “badly planned” thus seeming to highlight this contrast between planning and doing.

Something that the questionnaires reinforced however was that there was no apparent gender difference in male and female students willingness to use technology. Witness these two female responses;

“I find I’m really good with computers, so I would say my strengths lay in computers and photography”
and
“I felt I’d be more capable of accomplishing Brief 3 …due to the fact that I had software at home”

Again the notion of access to technology is more important here than gender. It seems that the majority of girls in the class were quite happy to use computers, camcorders, digital cameras etc, to achieve the task in hand.

To conclude then, it is clear that the questionnaires indicate some basic differences between male and female attitudes to production work in the class. Male students seem to enjoy the actual production process; female students seem to take pleasure in the planning and organisation and arrival at the finished product. The responses also raise the thorny problem of creativity again, something which caused debate in Chapter 2. It seems to be the case that female students use the word more freely than their male classmates to describe what they enjoy. I would posit that this does not mean that male students are any less creative than females but that females use the word creative to describe the process they go through when they are developing their ideas – the “planning” and “organising” that many of them talk about. The male students use this word less because they seem to be less concerned with these areas of the production, but it is undoubtedly in the “doing it” that their creative instincts are to be found. It is my belief that these views are supported through a closer examination of the production and evaluation work itself which follows in the subsequent two chapters.

Chapter 5 – Analysing the Data: Production Work

This chapter and the one that follows it both focus on the work of six students in the class, three of whom are female (Louise, Tania and Sarah) and three of whom are male (Hendrix, Rob and Tom). Of these students, only two, Sarah and Rob, had taken part in the interview stage of the study, though all had completed a questionnaire. This opportunity sample of six was chosen primarily because they were some of the students whose work had not been sent to the moderator, but also because they provided a chance to view work done for the most popular briefs. Louise, Tania, Hendrix and Tom all chose Brief 1, which involved constructing the opening of a thriller. Sarah, chose Brief 3, which was to produce the colour supplement for a new Sunday newspaper and Rob chose Brief 6 – producing a new entertainment Website. These students are a broad cross section of the class, and their unmoderated final marks ranged from 110 out of 120 to 80 out of 120, where the lowest mark in the class was 67 and the highest 113. Here , there actual finished product will be analysed and in Chapter 6 closer attention will be paid to what the students wrote about the production process in their reports. In Chapter 6, only five production reports are analysed as one student (Tom), did not hand his in. Hopefully this analysis will give some answers to the fourth question posed in Chapter 1 – what the content of students production work tells us about its relation to gender.

Louise –“ The Case”
Louise’s production work is a short (4 minute) film opening in which a woman returns to the scene of a crime she committed some years before. At the opening of the sequence, we see her returning to the scene and encountering another woman, who it transpires she stole a case from. The film then moves from this encounter to a flashback sequence in which the actual theft is shown. In her log Louise refers to these two characters simply as the “protagonist” and the “antagonist” respectively. After the flashback sequence the narrative returns to the encounter between these two, and the extract ends with the opening titles appearing over shots of the antagonist chasing the protagonist down the street.
What is most interesting about watching Louise’s film is the aggression with which her characters behave. Her cast of four is entirely female, and yet they move around the screen with the vigour of all male action heroes. They leap around rooms, dive into hiding places, confront each other aggressively, and chase each other, full pelt down streets and through gardens . As we shall see in her production log Louise is very clear about why she wants her characters to behave in this way, but even without her written input it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that this is a female student who has spent a lot of time watching films targeted at men and wants to make a film like the ones she has seen but with women.
The film is well edited, contrasting (perhaps a little stereotypically) black and white film to show past action and colour film to show present. Also interesting is the choice of music for the extract, which moves from an atmospheric remix of Portishead’s “Glory Box” to the frenetic guitar-thrash of “All My Life” by the Foo Fighters. What is obvious is that this music was chosen with the kind of deliberation which one would expect of a real life director. The freeze-frames in the chase scene are deliberately timed to coincide at the points where the music stops, and then, when the music starts again, the action continues.
Outside observers might see the content of Louise’s work as being more typical of that done by boys, but she is only one of several female students whose film work represents women in this way – in essence as strong, aggressive and as devious as any man. What we have here is the female filmmaker who enjoys “male” genres and wants to work with them using female protagonists Louise has obviously watched a lot of suspenseful, psychological and violent thrillers (her product research focuses on Pulp Fiction, Silence of the Lambs, Psycho and Alien) and sees no reason why they should not be made by girls.

Tania: Loved to Death
Tania, like Louise, has produced the opening to a thriller in which two women have mobile phone conversations and then one of them ends up dead, with the editing implying that the other is the murderer. It differs from Louise’s in two main respects; firstly, while we do see a dead body, we do not see the level of confrontation and aggression that features in the first film. Secondly the editing, is remarkably skilful in that it frequently allows the producer to play tricks on its audience. We see the women talking on the phone and assume that they are talking to each other, though at the end of the film it is clear that the victim at least has been talking to the police. Similarly at one point, the audience is convinced into thinking that one woman is asleep on a bus shelter bench, when in fact only closer examination, she is dead. The editing process that allowed Tania to create these effects is something which occupies a great deal of time and thought for students in this particular age group, as shall be seen below in the analysis of production logs. Tania for example, used iMovie to edit her film as she had access to it at home; Louise on the other hand, used Adobe Premiere, which is the package available to students at the school. Both students however, mastered the software to the point at which they could create quite sophisticated effects with it, and were able to doing things such as cross-cutting between two different timelines in order to create a sense of continuity. As Andrew Burn has commented on several different occasions (Burn & Parker 2001, p33 Burn et al 2001, p34 -40) the nature of digital video means that manipulation of film and images means that the creation of film is something that is now accessible to everyone. I would say that here “everyone” is quite definitely male and female students, as Tania demonstrates.

Sarah: Sundae
Sarah chose Brief 3, which involved producing the supplement for a new Sunday Newspaper. This kind of print based brief is still a popular choice for many students and teachers and indeed, as a moderator of both A-Level and GCSE coursework, I have often found entire centres of 100+ students producing this kind of work. Anecdotally, many teachers would identify this kind of production as being popular with female students, and so at first glance, Sarah’s work seems to be reverting to type. However what is most interesting here is the way in which she has used technology, and what the content of her work says about the way she sees the production.
The front cover of the magazine consists of a large image of a girls face (the model) stretched to cover the whole of the A4 front cover. Over this have been laid a masthead, sell-lines, puffs and other standard layout conventions of a magazine. Aside from the slight graininess of the main photo, which occurs because a normal sized photo has been blown up to A4, the cover looks very accomplished, demonstrating Sarah’s ability to use appropriate fonts, colours and styles for the task. It is quite clear that she has mastered some of the more arcane aspects of Microsoft Publisher. The heart shaped puffs at the bottom of the cover are not unlike the kind of techniques the News of the World’s Sunday magazine frequently use.
While much of the promised content of Sarah’s magazine is standard female-orientated fare, the double page spread that she chooses to include is a little untypical. The review of the Barnett Newman exhibition is not unusual for a Sunday Supplement but is, I would argue, what some teachers might not expect from a female student when asked to do this kind of task. As Buckingham notes, the kind of work that female students produce when faced with magazine making has (historically) tended to be about representing the interests of the producer or as a space for pushing back the boundaries of acceptable comment in a school context. Sarah is only one student but she is an example of the fact that it may not do to generalize about what male and female students will produce when faced with a practical task.

Rob : pubmaster.com
Rob chose brief 6, which asked students to create a homepage and six linked pages from a new entertainment webzine. Pubmaster.com focuses on what people might do for a night out in Wimbledon, the locality in which Rob lives. The Home page is divided into three different sections – pubs, bars and clubs and features pictures, reviews and ratings. The pictures of the inside and outside of venues are taken with a digital camera and the pages have been generated with the help of a software package (Microsoft FrontPage).
What comes across immediately from this work is it’s organisation. Everything is very clearly labelled, navigation bars are easy to use and the work has a clear sense of what a good website should be like. Here it is obvious that Rob has not only mastered the technology but also has an attention to detail, which some observers might feel is uncharacteristic of male students. Certainly, some of Rob’s male classmates who also did this brief did not organize their work as well as he did. It is also interesting to note that he takes A-Level Design Technology, which may account for the presentation of his work.
Despite the meticulous neatness of the work, it is very much male orientated. The idea of a website devoted to pubs is something which is unsurprising in the current cultural climate, and indeed Rob takes as his model similar websites, based on the Monopoly Board and Circle Line pub crawls , both of which are authored by men. The website is presented in a striking blue and black colour scheme, seemingly asserting the creators masculinity. Rob’s work however reinforces the idea that new media technology facilitates students skills and imagination in a way that perhaps old media technologies do not. Here is a male student with a good eye for design who has been allowed to progress beyond the traditional print based project of magazine making, rather in the same way that Louise and Tania have been allowed access to the previously “secret” (and male?) world of film-making through their use of iMovie and Adobe Premiere. In Rob’s case the facility of Microsoft FrontPage makes it possible for him to combine his (feminine?) attention to detail with technology to produce a male orientated product.

Hendrix: Critical Data
Hendrix ’work is another piece of film making, this time a bizarre introduction to a film in which the narrator relates the story of how a computer disk with some vital information came into his possession and then how a masked intruder followed him and fought him for possession of the disk. A large proportion of the film is taken up by an extended martial arts – style fight scene, at the end of which the narrator wins and retains the disk.
This film, like a great deal of film work done by male students at this level relies on a good deal of violence and dramatic changes of camera angle to sustain the “interest” of its audience ( see figure 1). For many male students undertaking this brief, “thriller” means violence, but what often makes them unconvincing is the location in which these are filmed. Indeed the comments Bob Ferguson makes in 1981 often still seem to ring true today (see above)

Fig 1. Stills from “Critical Data”

For example, as an external moderator I frequently see “Sarf-London” gangster movies that have been shot in rural Buckinghamshire. Hendrix’ film is no exception as it tends to degenerate into a kind of kung-fu film which is set in a suburban garden. However, some of Hendrix difficulties with the genre that he is meant to be working in are caused by his relationship with the technology he is using, something that he elaboarates upon in his production report (see below). He also demonstrates something that is quite common amongst many male students, which is over-ambition. He wanted to do some quite complex things in editing, but did not leave himself enough time to do them. When questioned about this though, he did not regret his lack of organisation, but commented that the most important thing was that he had shot the film, as this was the thing he had enjoyed the most. Hendrix’ comments reinforce the ideas that came out in the interviews and questionnaires – namely that the ideas and the process of realizing the idea itself is much more important to male students than finishing the product.

Tom : Cassandra
The final piece of work examined here is another opening to a film. In “Cassandra” two women meet in a London Café . While in conversation they begin to discuss a locket that one of them is wearing. The implication is that the locket has secret powers and that great misfortune befalls the person who has opened it and sure enough, towards the end of the opening, one of the two women has a minor accident.
Cassandra is short on action and heavy on dialogue, and consequently did not achieve the highest of marks, but , for the purposes of this study it raises some interesting questions about representation. Tom, a male film maker features two women as his central characters, and his script gives some clue as to how he views women. His protagonists are professional, smart women who “do coffee” and work in journalism. Here we see a male student attempting to give a more representative (if a little clichéd) portrayal of women by making them central to his production. I would suggest that in the same way Louise has watched a lot of “male” genres before producing her film, Tom has watched a lot of “female” genres, and uses these as the basis for his representation of women. Here we see the idea that the relationship between gender and representation in production work is changing.Tom’s piece of one of six or seven done by male students in this cohort whose filmic protagonist is a woman and who attempt to make more complex representations of women beyond the wife, girlfriend or victim stereotypes which have historically populated student film work.

The production work presented by these students does bear out some of the issues and contradictions raised by the interview stage of the study, and indeed, demonstrates that the relationship between production work and gender is more complex than some of the initial views expressed on it suggest. It is in an examination of the production reports that one finds an elaboration of some of these issues.

Chapter 6: Data Analysis – The Production Logs

Upon completion of the construction of their product, students are expected to write a 2000 word evaluation of the process called a Production Log, which is worth around 25% of the final mark that students receive for the production module. Almost inevitably, it is often the thing that students leave until the last minute, but a close analysis of this piece of writing often reveals how students truly feel about the production process, as it is often the climax of the project where they have expended the most energy. I believe that it is here that we will find some of the most interesting insights into the relationship between production work and gender.

Louise: “…women also possess physical strength….”
Louise’s evaluation provides us with some insight into the thought process that were going on when she filled her film with the aggressive female protagonists that she does. In the final section of her log, she writes;
“ I wanted to illustrate how women possess physical strength and can go against the conventional concept that women are the physically weaker gender, both physically and mentally…The antagonist wants to use physical strength to retrieve the case from the protagonist, though she fails and a chase ensues, suggesting their may be violence later on”

This is a bit more than just wanting to even up the playing field in terms of the portrayal of men and women. It seems as if Louise wants to reinforce the post-feminist idea that not only can women be as tough as men, but they can retain their femininity. She cites an interesting female precedent for her work;

“The only mainstream film where a woman appears in an action role and is not a feeble, ineffectual woman is Terminator 2. Sarah Connor, played by Linda Hamilton, is both physically strong and intelligent, telling the men what to do and when to do it. She is the mother to mankind’s saviour, John Connor, possessing maternal qualities (and)…a physically strong freedom”

Sweeping statements aside, Louise’s perception of Sarah Connor as a kind of gun-toting Virgin Mary demonstrates that she is aware of the stereotypical representation of men and women in action thrillers and wants to change that. Her film work becomes a space where she can challenge what she has seen and present an alternative view. It may well lead us to the view that production work in Media Studies, like many other areas of cultural life and education is a place where this post-feminist view of the world can be expressed.

Louise does not spend any time in her evaluation discussing the technological process of constructing the film. There is no discussion about using the camera, or about the use of software to edit the film. Given the high quality of the finished product, it seems safe to assume that this was not a problem for her, and that the project of creating a film that is “different” is the main concern. Indeed, she spends quite some time giving theoretical justifications for her choice of camera angle, mise-en-scene and soundtrack. Louise wants to create something that competes with the boys on every level; in terms of content, practical skill and theoretical perspective – but make something that is definitely by and for the girls.

Tania: “Dogs kept barking and running into the shot…”

Unlike Louise’s production log, Tania’s does not give any theoretical justifications for the decisions taken in production but is largely a straightforward account of the process of making her film. Perhaps the oddest thing about the account is the part where she relates her original idea for the film;

“My original idea for the content/storyline of my opening sequence was gang rape…However after careful consideration, I changed my original idea from rape to murder as I felt that I would be able to convey this more easily to an audience”

Tania is a quiet student from a middle class family of South Asian extraction. The fact that she wanted to make a gang rape the central theme of her film puzzled me, as she did not seem to be the type of student to be interested in this kind of subject matter. In fact, she only changed her idea because her audience research showed her that quite a lot of her classmates were shocked by the idea. Tania refused to be drawn on where her original idea came from, but it was clear that she thought that “rape, murder and bodily harm” were the things that should form the content of a thriller. Tania’s ideas here are indicative of something that I would suggest is occurring more frequently in production work. Unlike Louise, who is to some extent, making the film for herself and her female audience, Tania is making the film she believes men will want to watch. She sees the thriller as a male genre, a brief which has been set by a male Chief examiner and will be seen by her male classmates and teacher (me). This is disturbing but not untypical.

Apparently, Tania’s main technical problems were to do with locations and actors and subsequently the things that happened to those locations and actions. She writes;

“The scene in the park, where the girl was lying on the floor dead was difficult to film because dogs kept barking and running into the shot, yet after many takes we completed it.”

These kinds of difficulty are the sorts of things that occupy Tania’s mind during the production process; weather, actors, locations etc. Like Louise she does not see the process of editing as at all problematic.

“Luckily I was able to edit at home, otherwise it would have been a rush to edit at school, due to the fact that I missed my time slots because I hadn’t finished filming.”
Again access to the technology is what is governing the students use of it. Tania’s comments in her production log bear out the idea that for many female students technology is not about whether or not they see themselves as able to use it, but whether or not they can get at it.

Sarah: “You can’t really get a bleed on the paper”

The most interesting aspect of Sarah’s production log is its obsession with software. Sarah used several different packages and she talks at some length about them. This would seem to indicate one of two things; either she is very proficient with the software concerned, or she believes that mentioning them will in some way get her extra credit. As I had explained to the students that this latter belief was incorrect, we can assume her proficiency. For example;

“I constructed my product using a combination of Microsoft Works Word processor, Coral Print House and Coral Photo house. I use Microsoft Works Word processor for the basic layout and printing of the product. I used HP director package to scan my images into the computer. Once they were in the computer I used Coral Photo house to manipulate and improve my images for the articles”

Sarah is an individual who has an eye for detail. She, like Rob also studies design, but here is using the technology as a means of improving her finished product.She does not see the technology as an obstacle to her producing the supplement, but as a means to making it better.

Also interesting is Sarah’s adoption of a technical vernacular when describing the production process;
“When I printed it off for the first time I realised I had to change the page layout because it wouldn’t have looked like a supplement article, it would have been too small. So I changed the settings so that the galleys would go as close to the edge as possible. But knowing that you can’t really get a bleed on the paper I knew I wouldn’t get it as perfect as I would have wanted.”
It is important to dwell on the linguistic choices that Sarah makes here. Use of the terms “galleys”, “page layout” and “bleed” all imply an absorption of the language of the magazine medium or industry and a desire to demonstrate the knowledge of it that has been acquired. Perhaps more telling though, is the last line. The desire to “get it perfect” is something that characterises students work (often girls) in the print and ICT based media.

Rob: “I have learnt the hard way…”
In the very first paragraph of Rob’s evaluation, we may find a clue to one of the complex reasons why and how male students make the choices that they do when they are deciding about production work;

“When choosing, I looked at my own personal strengths and weaknesses. I had no previous experience of using a camcorder and the editing suite so I decided to rule out the film-making idea”

Rob presents us with with the idea that for male students, their may be a loss of face involved in choosing to work with a medium that one is not entirely comfortable with. Rather than making statements of the kind that we heard from Jamie (in Chapter 4), it is clear that Rob is confident in the medium with which he is working.
Rob’s production report is, like his practical work, extremely methodical in its presentation and he takes his reader through every stage of the production process. For example, in his audience research, he chose to use a focus group as his chief tool of qualitative research, and his evaluation is quick to point out that there is a problem in responding to the vast amounts of data that this generates. This kind of observation would seem to indicate that in many ways, Rob is not a typical male student, but moreover an extremely bright one.
Rob, like Sarah, spends a good deal of time talking about software and the way that he uses ICT to complete the project, adopting the kind of vernacular that one expects of a teenage “computer geek” (the students own words). What this seems to demonstrate is that again, students familiarity with the technology is more important than their gender. Rob does, however do something in his evaluation which is common to many male students, which is to self-deprecate their own organisational skills.
For example I have learnt the hard way the importance of backing up your work regularly and the importance of using decent equipment such as a camera with a good flash.
This kind of evidence reflects some of the observations evident in chapter 4; namely that boys see themselves as disorganised, and poor planners of the work in hand. In Rob’s case this could not be further from the truth – his work is neither disorganised or poorly planned. What I believe is occurring here is the attachment to a self fulfilling prophesy; teachers believe boys to be poorly organised, tell them so and subsequently, boys believe it to be the case even when it may not be. Here then lies a truth about teachers perceptions of gender and its relation to production work.

Hendrix – “I thought that producing your own film would be great fun”
Hendrix’ production log sometimes (unfortunately, but entertainingly) reads as diary of the internecine strife he , and the people who helped him, experienced when making his film . There is a lengthy description of how he had to shoot his film twice, because his originally tape got damaged, and an amusing admission that he could not quite film everything in the way in which he wanted because his mum wouldn’t let him “trash” his house. More important than this amusing diversion though, is what Hendrix says about the structure and style of his film.
As observed in Chapter 5, the film is problematic as it is not really a thriller at all; more a sort of martial-arts/sci-fi hybrid, with lots of dramatic changes of camera angle. While this probably lost Hendrix marks, (for lack of control) it is fascinating to see what he says about his production decisions in his report. For example when talking about his storyboard, he says;
It allows myself and the audience to get a quick glimpse of what the film may look like, even before filming is made (sic). It is like a raw process of a movie, experimenting using different angles. And if one scene looks a bit dodgy I can easily change it by drawing another idea.
We return here to another idea first aired in Chapter 4 – that of risk taking and experimentation; the idea of “Doing it” to see what happens. This is for Hendrix, a key part of the pleasure of production work. He continues;
…as we moved out into the garden, where the fight scene began, I moved away from the idea of a thriller movie to the idea of an action movie. I think this is losing me marks but I’m not surprised.
This seems to be a reinforcement of the notion that for boys, production work is about process, rather than product. Hendrix’ carefree attitude to loss of marks is something that does not bother him, because messing around with camera angles, arranging fight scenes and so on is what he wants to do, and indeed, is why he chose to do Media Studies in the first place. As we shall see below, when we set his attitude against some of the theoretical arguments about the purpose of production work we find ourselves facing a conundrum.

Some conclusions about the data
From these five production logs, we can begin to draw a number of conclusions which reinforce those drawn from the interview and questionnaire stage of the study. Firstly, that production work can be used as a space in which to present views which challenge dominant ideology, and that bright students can view them as such. For female students this may allow them to compete with boys in the areas that have previously been seen as dominated by males. Secondly, while there are certain expectations held by students about the content of production, (cf. Tania, above) the gender related issue here is not to do with technology, or fear of technology, as demonstrated by Sarah, but is more to do with the difference in attitudes towards product and process.
The comments made by Hendrix, highlighting his nonchalance about ignoring the brief, are interesting when viewed in the light of some of the theoretical perspectives laid out it Chapter 2. When Ferguson claims that “personal experience of the Media is not interrogated” (Ferguson, 1981,p48) Hendrix is likely to say “so what?”. He took Media Studies so that he could make the kind of film that he wanted, which is what he has done. When we are faced with the kind of (frequently male) student who simply does what they want in production work it is quite hard to challenge them. Hendrix work is technically proficient and thus scores a reasonable mark for construction. One might be inclined to say that Hendrix has interrogated his own experience of the media, but that it has confessed to nothing, and so he has carried on regardless. Hendrix is not making the kind of impromptu roll-about that Ferguson describes. He can talk about his choice of shots, connotation, signification and a range of other technical terms. The fact is that like, Tania, his work reflects the point made in Chapter 2, that there is a difference between the knowing about the theoretical background to a production task and what you do with that knowledge. This seems to indicate that the purposes of production work which Ferguson desires, and which Buckingham outlines are being subverted. The students wish, in some respect, to use the production work for their own ends.
With the analysis of this data complete we can now draw some wider conclusions from the study.

Chapter 7 - Group work and a word about intervention

From the analysis of the data made in the preceding three chapters, it should be fairly clear that there are some evident differences in the way in which male and female students perceive and conduct their production work. While some students do seem to conform to the preconceptions about gender and production work with which I began this dissertation, it is also clear that some students do not. Notwithstanding this, the question of how the classroom teacher might deal with a situation in which a students access to the production work curriculum is limited when these attitudes prevail, still rears its head. It would be easy to say for example that the girls who do not have any qualms about using ICT in this study come from priveliged (or at least middle class) backgrounds. How might a teacher working in a different school, where there is less access to ICT for their students, deal with these preconceptions?

It is worth while pointing out here that all the students involved in this study work individually. This is something that I frequently impose on students as it makes things easier for me as a teacher. Also for the purposes of this study, it is easier to make clear distinctions between the kind of judgements that male and female students make about their work. However, for students and teachers who find themselves in situations where production work is prohibited by gendered attitudes, group work may of course, provide an answer.

There are numerous accounts of the use of group work and its benefits to students (Bowker, 1991,pp18-26, Buckingham et al 1995, pp75-103, Buckingham 2003,p.83) and indeed in some accounts it is seen as fairly vital for the success of production work within the secondary classroom. As Buckingham comments;

Group work is often regarded as an unavoidable consequence of the complex technologies involved; video production for example is generally seen to entail several distinct roles that will be performed by different students.
(Buckingham et al, 1995. p.75)
While taking issue with the above statement – I believe that in the age of digital video it is quite possible for a student to produce a video without recourse to anyone else – I do accept that group work does serve other purposes. Bowker points out that production work is important on a social and institutional level;

Practical activities…frequently involve group work. Both types of practice thus highlight the social nature of media production and consumption, and accentuate the need to talk compromise and negotiate. (Bowker, 1991 p.18)

One might suggest that this is a site at which, by making male and female students work together, some of the attitudes related to gender could be tackled. Kathleen’s preconception about the technology involved in making a website (see Chapter 2) might be overcome by engendering a situation in which male and female students help each other work in different media. As Buckingham observes though, this “ideal world is sometimes hard to achieve in the classroom

In the case of media production, for example, gender differences have frequently been seen as a particular problem in this respect: boys, it is argued, always hog the equipment, while girls are left in the more exposed position of performers…boys and girls are likely to approach both the technology and situation of small group work with different expectations and orientations
(Buckingham et al 1995, p77)

My own experience as a classroom teacher bears out the observations made above, and indeed this is one of the reasons why I have often encouraged students to work individually. However, it seems that a good way of dealing with a situation in which the kind of attitudes which may be held by boys and girls in relation to production work might well be helped by having students work in single sex groups. Thus by placing together those students who are confident at working in a particular medium, there can be a transfer of skills while avoiding the situation that Buckingham describes above. The teacher here has to intervene, by loading the groups so that those (usually female) students who are more confident with the use of technology than some of the others within their gender group can benefit them. This study has demonstrated implicitly that if a teacher wishes to tackle some of the more problematic issues surrounding gender and production work then they must, use their most valuable assets to deal with them – namely their students.

Chapter 8 – Conclusions

At the end of the first chapter of this dissertation, I set out four questions which I believed needed to be answered in order to investigate the relationship between gender and production work. These were as follows;

5) Is there a distinct difference between the type of production task which boys and girls are inclined to choose to do – and what reasons do they give for making that choice; for example is there an issue of technology here?
6) Do boys and girls differ in their attitudes towards practical work? If so why and does it matter?
7) Do boys and girls go about the production tasks set in a different way?

8) What kind of conclusions (about the nature of the relationship between production work and gender) can we draw from the content of students production work?
There are undoubtedly some clear answers to the first two questions posed here, so these will be dealt with first, but the latter two are harder to respond to .

There is on one level a difference between the type of production task that male and females will choose to do. The majority of the students involved in this study wanted to make films, and of this majority, there was almost an equal number of girls and boys. After this, certain production tasks became more popular with each gender group. What is clear, is that girls are not put off film-making, despite its image as a “technology-heavy” medium. This idea is connected to the fact that technology now appears to be less of a stumbling block for girls doing production work than it was say, ten or fifteen years ago. Many girls are quite at home with technology and give this as a reason for choosing to do particular types of production work. Boys reasons for choosing production tasks, particularly film, are linked to the answers to the above question 2, which are outlined below.
Boys and girls attitudes to production work evidently do differ, and this should matter to both student and teacher for a number of reasons. Boys enjoy the process of production, the actual “Doing” of production work – sometimes even at the expense of their final mark. Girls on the other hand are more concerned with the finished product, the way it looks and what they have achieved. Consequently, if you are a female student you seem to be doing exactly what the examiner wants. If you are a male student and the moderator only sees your final product, it doesn’t really matter how much experimentation or risk-taking you have engaged in, if you haven’t done your evaluation, then you will lose marks. Teachers may well be concerned at this, and future studies may look at how to harness this attitude.
Do boys and girls go about production tasks in different ways? Probably only to the extent that is characterised by the response to question number 2 – boys concentration on process means that this is likely to take up a lot of time for them, whereas for girls, it will be the presentation of the end product which takes up their time. What is clearer is that there are both male and female students who take time and care with their work and male and female students who do not. Going about your work methodically is not simply the province of girls, and being poorly organised is not simply the province of boys, despite the fact that many teachers and boys believe this to be the case.
What kind of conclusions can we draw from the content of students work? This is the trickiest question to answer of all, because the scale of this study is quite small and the content of the work is quite varied. There is some evidence that female students want to produce the kind of content that males have traditionally produced, but this is complicated by the fact that some students seem to be doing it as a challenge to male dominance, while others seem to do it as an implicit acceptance of that dominance. Similarly, there is some evidence that male students will simply create whatever content they want to, regardless of the brief. The sort of study that might be better equipped to answer this question, would involve many students all working on similar or identical briefs.

To conclude then, this dissertation has shed some light on the complex relationship between gender and production work in Media Studies at Secondary school level. This study is a relatively small scale one, and in order to investigate the problem further, one might wish to take a larger group of students from a range of class and educational backgrounds. What is clear though is that there a number of issues arising from the relationship between gender and production work, but that these are not the issues that classroom practitioners suspect there to be. The role of technology, forexample, within Media Studies is developing all the time, but it must not be forgotten that students develop outside school as well as within – perhaps as part of the communities of practice identified by Lave and Wenger. What also becomes clear however is that there are issues for the classroom teacher in the way that gender can affect the outcome of production work. I include no empirical evidence here, but I am fairly sure that there is a marked difference between the final marks for production for males and females; a possible consequence of the process/product dichotomy identified earlier.
This study might be then , the starting point for a wider study into gender and production work. One which would need to involve, a closer examination of the production processes of a larger group of students and a colder examination of the way that work was assessed. This would reinforce the ideas that are clearly emergent here, but not concretely evident enough in a study of this scale and would also provide more insight into what could be a topic with a great deal of impact on the work of Media students in schools.

Bibliography

Cox, B, (1989)English for ages 5-16, London, DES,

Buckingham, D., Sefton-Greene, J., Grahame, J. (1995)Making Media: Practical Production in Media Education London, English & Media Centre,

Buckingham, D. (2003)Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture Cambridge, Polity Press,

Alvarado, M., Wollen, T., Gutch, R. (1987) Learning the Media London, Macmillan,

Ferguson, R. (1981) Practical Work and Pedagogy Screen Education 38

Brown, A & Dowling P. (2000) Reading Research/Doing Research London, Macmillan

Grahame J. (1990) ”Playtime: Learning About Media Institutions through Practical Work”, from Buckingham D. (1990) Watching Media Learning: Making Sense of Media Education, London, Falmer

Alvarado, M. and Boyd-Barrett, O. (eds). (1992) Media Education : An Introduction London, BFI/Open University Press

Brockie, D.(1992) ”Sniffing Out Stereotypes: Using Fragrances to Explore Gender Imageds in Advertising”taken from Alvarado, M. and Boyd-Barrett, O. (eds). (1992) Media Education : An Introduction London, BFI/Open University Press

Burn, A. (1996) Spiders, Werewolves and Bad Girls Changing English Vol. 3, No.2

Hodge, B & Tripp, D. (1986) Children and Television: A semiotic approach, Cambridge, Polity Press

Burn (2003) Unpublished book, Chapter 1 MultiModality and Textual Analysis

Kress G., & Van Leeuwen, T.(2001) Multimodal Discourse London, Arnold

Burn, A. & Reed, K. (1999) “Digiteens: Media Literacies and digital technologies in the Secondary Classroom” English in Education 3

Animation 4 Life Conference, Bristol

2010-11-19T23:56:00.000-08:00

I have just got back from the Animation 4 Life conference in Bristol, a marvellous shindig organised by Ross Garner, the man responsible for Stop Motion Pro. The aim of the conference was to bring together people in many different areas of practice (education, art therapy, psychotherapy, social work, probation work etc.) to look at the socially useful and therapeutic ways that animation might be used. I was there to talk about the New Addington Primary School's Animation Project (see posts below) but as a speaker I found myself in very esteemed company indeed; Nick Kallincos, and Australian animator and educator who worked in remote aboriginal communities; Hanna Pedersen, a Danish Animator who was using animation to tackle issues of literacy and finally Helen Mason, a consultant occupational therapist who was looking at the way animation could be used to help people with anxiety, OCD and other psychological issues. They all showed a great deal of work, but one of the most affecting things I saw was "Dog" which I've embedded below so that other people can see it. Its an animated film which was, I believe made with the express purpose of dealing with some of the issues that arise in grief counselling, and it was shown by Helen Mason to demonstrate that animation can reach some areas that other media cannot.
There will be more on Animation 4 Life soon, with the intention that it becomes an annual event. I sincerely hope so, as this kind of work is exactly the sort of thing that a specialist media arts school should be involved in.

TV Drama - A postscript

2010-10-04T15:39:00.001-07:00

It's clear to me that lots of people have been reading my 2006 article, The International Landscape of TV Drama. Thanks for all your comments. It is really interesting to read people's views and to think that what I wrote four years ago might be useful in some way. As soon as I can I will probably write an updated version of this - there have been so many programmes that have changed that landscape in the last few years (the end of Lost, Caprica, Ugly Betty to name but a few). With the third series of the absolutely brilliant French cop show Spiral about to kick off shortly, I would also want to emphasise that it is now much easier for people to access TV Drama that is truly international and not just American or British. Watch this space, as there will be some developments shortly! In the mean time, I would ask all the people who commented on either TV Drama to give some consideration to the following question: Do you think that TV Drama should reflect the experiences (national, social, political, sexual or whatever) of the people watching? Or should it be allowed to be sensationally, radically and perhaps entertainingly different from that experience? All views welcomed......

Institutions: The media kind and others....

2010-10-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

I've been talking today at the Knowlege Lab about the role of Institutions, especially in the creation of news and factual programming. One of the ideas that I've been trying to get at in my PhD thesis is that when a student creates a media text, they are often not just learning about and critiqueing media institutions, but also other institutions, such as schools, exam boards and other authorities. A perfect case in point is a piece of work done by some students I worked with about six years ago now, called "Wildlife at Haydon". I've put it up here because I think it might demonstrate what I mean quite well. I've made every effort to trace and seek permission from all the producers of it, but if anyone I didn't contact feels aggreived, please contact me at the usual address!..

Wordleing

2010-08-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

A Wordle is a really interesting way of viewing anything that you have written. It visually represents the words you use in a text by relating frequency of use to size. Here for example, is the Wordle of this blog:

So now a little puzzle - I just Wordled all 64 pages of my MA Dissertation. Can you guess what it was about from the Wordle below?

If you want to do your own Wordle, go to http://www.wordle.net/

A review of Media Teaching: Language, Audience, Production

2009-08-28T03:56:00.000-07:00

The book "Media Teaching" has received a very positive review on the NATE website. The review was written by Andy Goodwyn and can be found at
http://www.nate.org.uk/index.php?page=3&rev=387
Hopefully it will be helpful to people who may be thinking about using the book.

TV Drama, Manuelgate and the Paradox of Public Broadcasting

2008-11-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

First of all a big thankyou and hello to all those students and teachers who have commented on the TV Drama article. I didn't have any idea when I wrote it that it would provoke such a response, but I guess now that the TV Drama topic at A-Level has become really popular it is inevitable. All the comments from students at Reigate College, Wood Green High and other institutions are really interesting, - if you go to the comments tab at the bottom of that article, I've written a response to some of them, and would welcome further discussion.Also, your comments give me an opportunity to throw out some other ideas that people might want to consider right now. I'm writing this at the back end of a week which has seen two seemingly unrelated events demonstrate the paradoxical nature of public broadcasting. The first relatively insignificant one is the first airing of Little Dorrit, the BBC's new Dickens adaptation. A big budget affair with an expensive cast that brings a touch of Eastenders to the Victoriana we have got used to seeing on a Sunday night. One might say that this is what the BBC is meant to do. High quality, well intentioned period drama, with a few good looking stars (a la Matthew McFadyen) to get the interest of the young 'uns. Seemingly unconnected to this is the monumental fuss made over what the Daily Mirror has christened (with a startling lack of imagination) "Manuelgate"- aka Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand being naughty little school boys and making prank calls to the answerphone of actor Andrew Sachs, originally of Fawlty Towers fame, but now Mr Voiceover.

Both these events illustrate what I would call the "paradox of the public service broadcaster". A PSB like the BBC is a publicly funded body, paid for through the licence fee. As such it is meant to be free from the shackles of commercial pressure and should feel free to be as radical, experimental, edgy or downright rude as it likes, because it does not have to please advertisers. However, because it is publicly funded, the great British public have paid for it and hence feel that it shoud be accountable to them. And so it is trapped - it encourages its talent (and I don't really mean people like Brand here, who I personally think couldn't tell a proper gag to save his life, but rather its writers and producers) to do stuff that is innovative and new, but then is forced into abysmal self-flagellation when some sections of the public, stirred up by the blue-rinsers at the Daily Mail, get upset and complain.

So what does the BBC do? One could argue that it should stick to stuff like Little Dorrit. After all, as many of you have commented on the TV Drama article, the Americans don't seem to be able to do that sort of stuff at all way (or at least not without British help). This seems a bit limited though, as a lot of the stuff that has really had an impact on the public consciousness ovr the last twenty years has come out of the BBC giving people a chance and letting them make a few mistakes first. Blackadder, Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and the Mighty Boosh are all examples of things that commercial TV would never have touched with a ten foot pole. And it's not just comedy. Check out Edge of Darkness, State of Play and the televising of Jerry Springer the Opera which are all things that both ask questions of the establishment and yet at the same time play to a mainstream audience. This then, is the real paradox of public broadcasting - that a PSB can both narrowcast and broadcast at the same time, appealing to both mass and niche audiences - while all along justifying a lot of public money.

Heroes and Other Foreigners

2007-12-03T12:48:00.001-08:00

This week, an article I wrote about Battlestar Galactica for Media Magazine some 6 months ago is finally published. (The delay was quite deliberate - they were saving it as this issue is a "Small Screen special") Its publication is quite timely, firstly because BG is about to reappear for its fourth - and possibly final series in the new year, but also because the treatment it has given to certain themes is being echoed in that other great televisual event of the moment, namely the last episodes of the first series of Heroes on BBC2.

This weekend John Patterson, TV critic at The Guardian described Heroes, as well some others of its ilk (see my comments on "enigma TV" in the BG Article, Media Magazine 22) as having "ambitions (that are) not equalled by execution, and whose immense complexity often proves self-defeating". I am interested in this, not because I agree with it, but because I think that it shows that TV critics often miss the point of viewing in their hurry to get to the end of their sentence. When watching both Battlestar Galactica and Heroes, I am often reminded of that phrase "it is better to travel that to arrive", because the most pleasurable thing about watching them is to live in that moment which is the episode itself; to just think about the excitement of watching what will happen and to just consider it not as an overarching narrative but to think about it as a single slice of TV.

The "Five Years Gone" episode of Heroes, in which Hiro travelled to a possible future in which he met his future self and realised that he had failed to stop the destruction of New York was a beautifully crafted piece of dystopia that could quite easily have been viewed entirely indpendently of the rest of the series. In and of its self it featured so many motifs and tropes which highlight the fact that Heroes, like Battlestar is a place where America is working out its own issues with itself.

The above mentioned episode shows a future in which the heroes - those possessed of superhuman powers- are regarded as terrorists and sent to Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay. They are blamed for the destruction of New York - in itself, a 9/11 style inferno which razed tall buildings to the ground. This idenification of the Heroes as "other" - it is clear that it is not just Muslims, but anybody who is seen as different - is one of the ways in which the show seeks to give voice to the feelings that America has about itsef in its post-9/11 existence. In the same way in which the crew of the Galactica rediscover their old religion and turn into "insurgents" on the surface of New Caprica, the Heroes travel in small groups, operate in cells and convince each other that they will build a new society. In other words the Heroes and the the colonists are as complicated, diverse and contradictory as Americans are.

So what we have then, is a situation in which these TV shows demonstrate an America that is talking to itself. Within them are views both liberal (Suresh) and conservative (Bennett), insular(Sprague) and global (Hiro), American (Nathan) and profoundly un-American (Sylar). While these ideas are buried deep in a labyrinthine plot and wrapped up in many enigmas, their complexity should show us that America itself is often more complex than we might give it credit for.

©Steve Connolly 2007

Introducing Diploma Watch

2007-11-13T11:42:00.001-08:00

Hello again! After a year long hiatus - mainly forced by getting a new job - I am back and blogging again. I've got lots of articles in the pipeline to post up here, especially aimed at media teachers and undergraduates. This first post though, is aimed at telling you about another blog, namely DiplomaWatch. As a member of the MEA Executive I've been asked to gather people's views and opinions on the new Creative and Media Diploma which will be piloted from 2008. As a Senior Leader involved in the bidding process, I do have my own experiences which I am recording, but if any teachers (or for that matter students) have any opinions on it, then follow the link on the right of this page to the diploma watch blog. There you can read about how the development of the diploma is proceeding from my own point of view, and you can chip in with your own experiences. Check it out....

Textual Value: An addendum

2006-09-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

A recent email from Roy Stafford (editor of the excellent In the Picture magazine, amongst other notable achievements) has offered some more perspective on Julian McDougall's arguments about textual perspective discussed in the last post. Roy was one of the people who quizzed Julian about his views when The Media Teachers Book first came out, and asked him for his views about textual value. Roy writes:

"I'd just like to say that I concur with your posting in general terms, but I'd put some of the points a little differently. I agree that all texts are available for analysis and that it is worthwhile to study them. But it is clear to me that different texts are interesting for different reasons. I think that the issue is diversity. Students should be exposed to and engage with a wide range of texts. The analogy with food is quite interesting. All foodstuffs have nutritional value and a good diet has a mix of different kinds of foods. Someone fed on a diet of just one sort of food is malnourished. I can see that some would argue that some food is junk and other food is 'wholesome'. I don't buy that for single texts, but I do for too much of one kind of food. My argument with Julian is simply that media teachers have a responsibility to make sure that their students have sufficient diversity in their cultural diet (without being dogmatic about what the mix should be). I agree that there are no single texts that students have to study, but also that only mainstream films or gameshows is a poor diet - as is only art films or HBO programmes."

I should say that Roy is of course, absolutely right and I may not have made it clear enough that I wasn't in any way undervaluing or devaluing Jane Austen or Art Films or any kind of cultural text - of course these texts are of the utmost importance. What I wanted to do was say that there can be equal value in texts that seem to be of no value at all (the soap opera, the pop video, the viral advert). Diversity is, as Roy says, the key, and it is interesting to note that I, like him, see the breadth of Media Studies as its strength. This is quite opposed to the views espoused by many critics of the subject who see this as a weakness - but I am convinced that the wider the range of texts we study the more we challenge and prepare our students to interrogate the media texts that they use and find around them.

Two final things: for anyone interested at all in media education, Julian McDougall's book is essential. Go buy it now. It's called The Media Teacher's Book and is published by Hodder Arnold. It will make us all into better teachers. Secondly, I've added a link below to the ITP magazine blog, which Roy is trying to make more of a forum for discussion about media education issues. I am quite ashamed that I have not added a link to it before now, but perhaps I can make up for my reticence by encouraging everyone who reads this page to click on it when you finish here.

Big Macs and Jane Austen: Media Teachers and “Textual Emotivism”

2006-07-13T03:00:00.000-07:00

Julian McDougall’s comments on the recent pages of "In The Picture" Magazine have led to some interesting discussions in my school and with other colleagues about the idea of textual value – or the idea that one media text is necessarily any more valuable or worthy of study than any other media text. In schools. One might expect English teachers to uphold notions of textual value, as English Literature requires that students concentrate on some texts while ignoring others, but I am often surprised by the number of media and film teachers who also espouse that view. I have worked with teachers who have told me that students shouldn’t be watching certain types of film because they were “trash”. I once sat at a conference, not far away from Julian McDougall, as it happens, and listened to a lengthy monologue delivered by a teacher who thought that having students study gameshows was an example of how the subject was being dumbed-down. I have written at some length (cf. “Goodfellas and the Problem of Popular Culture” ) about why texts from popular culture have value, but not necessarily canonical value. What I want do here is outline some of the philosophical and educational reasons why I don’t believe in a hierarchy of texts with an implicit sense of any one text being more valuable than any other.

I take the view that I do for three reasons. Firstly, I believe that any notion of value in a text is positioned there by the reader and not by a text. Meanings, ideas and values are all largely generated by the reader. The person who watches an episode of Eastenders, derives their own set of meanings from that viewing experience. That experience may or may not be the experience that the producer of that programme intended them to have, but what is certain is that there is not a uniform experience. For example if I see the same Freudian overtones in Ruby Allen’s relationship with her father as I see in King Lear, the relative status of the text (in terms of what has cultural value and what doesn’t) becomes irrelevant. I am using the text for my own ends and taking control of it rather than it controlling me by making me feel inferior or superior for reading it. I don’t believe this is too strong a way of putting it, either. The idea of a canon, in which certain texts are seen as superior to others is a means of controlling not only what gets read or watched, but also who gets to read or watch it. Media Studies should be about popular culture and about what occupies and forms culture right now. It should only be limited by the limits of what people experience as culture.

Secondly, I believe that what we should be attempting to find out in Media and Cultural Studies is where texts come from, how they operate on their audiences and why they operate in that way. Studying something just because people think it is good idea to, is a fairly pointless exercise because it doesn’t really tell you anything about the people who made it or the institutional pressures that they were exposed to. The example of this I always use with teachers (who are usually enraged by it) and students is of the Big Mac. The Big Mac is a cultural product and as such is as worthy of study as Pride and Prejudice. Why ? Well think for a moment of the number of discourses that the Big Mac sits at the heart of ; America, industrialisation, capitalism, the obesity epidemic, Fordism, economic prosperity and agronomy to name but a few. The discourses that Pride and Prejudice sits within are no less significant (Feminism, 19th Century Literature, Victorian Society etc) but much more time is spent on them in classrooms from secondary level upwards.

Now, before someone from the Daily Mail gets hold of this and starts accusing me of suggesting that we start Big Mac studies courses at your local University, I want to emphasise that it is not the text, but the approach that is wrong. The fact is that even when we do study things like Pride and Prejudice or Battleship Potemkin, we often don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the conditions in which they were produced and the discourses that this involved. I am quite happy to have students work on Austen provided that they are made aware of the way that books were published at the time – a vital piece of knowledge if we are to understand why Austen became popular. At the same time, this is what makes the Big Mac as worthy of study as the novel. After all, neither the novel or the burger has any inherent value - the worth of both is entirely socially negotiated.

Thirdly, it is obvious to me that most of the time, people’s pronouncements on textual value are usually really about approval or disapproval. To explain this further, I would borrow an idea from philosophy, which might explain why ideas about the relative superiority or inferiority of textual value don’t really work.

A J Ayer, amongst others was of the view that statements about morality (as well as theology and aesthetics) were not ones that could be proved to be true or false, but were simply statements of approval. Thus Ayer interpreted the statement “Killing people is wrong” to mean “Killing People? Boo!” or the statement “Helping people is good” to mean “Helping people? Hooray!”. This idea is easily transferable to statements of textual value. When someone says “Citizen Kane is a film that all young people should be made to watch” (Which I have heard come from Media teachers lips on more than one occasion) what they are really saying is “Citizen Kane. Hooray – I want everyone else to share my approval”. This is, I believe all that people like Harold Bloom mean when they say things like this : “Feminist or Marxist readings of Hamlet, for example, would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but nothing about Hamlet itself, and Hamlet is good whether a majority of readers enjoy it or not.”. Bloom is just expressing his approval of Hamlet as a text and his ignorance of the reader.

So where should this leave media teachers and students? Hopefully with a good deal more freedom to pursue a wider range of texts. Remember, I’m not saying that texts have no value, but rather that ideas about a hierarchy of values are often misplaced, because people ignore the role of the reader and the position of the text within any number of other discourses. It is better not to have any sense of a hierarchy of value but rather to suggest that value is something created by the reader or audience. It is this which makes media and pop culture texts so valuable, because as I have noted here before, they tell us as much about people as they do about themselves.

Media Matters Report

2006-06-12T00:13:00.000-07:00

Some teachers were asking me recently where they could get their hands on the big QCA report into Media Studies which came out last year, entitled Media Matters. Lots of people were involved in putting it together (including me) and while it is a bit flawed in places - which is more to do with the QCA format for reports rather than the intention of the authors, I should hasten to add - it does provide a good snapshot of Media Education right now and makes some interesting recommendations. You can find it on-line at

http://orderline.qca.org.uk/gempdf/1847212999.pdf

Happy hunting!

The International Landscape of TV Drama

2006-06-08T00:59:00.000-07:00

With TV Drama being introduced as one of the new topics for the OCR Critical Research Paper (2734), I thought it might be useful to discuss some basic ideas about this most interesting of topics. I would want to group these ideas into three areas. Firstly, defintions of the genre and what we might include in our research; secondly, why TV Drama is so important commercially, to broadcasters; and thirdly, why British TV Drama seems to be in decline while its American counterpart is flourishing.

TV Drama is a really broad strand of television. It probably covers everything from a daytime soap like Doctors to the most cultish kinds of TV as characterised by Lost or the X-Files. In between are some programmes with huge viewing figures (Coronation Street, obviously, but also Life on Mars and Bleak House) and it is these programmes which perhaps make for the most interesting study, especially when we begin to consider how broadcasters use them to draw in audiences. Soap Operas (Eastenders Coronation Street, Hollyoaks etc) are clearly an important commercial asset for most broadcasters. With their big audiences, low running costs and open narratives they are the easiest type of TV Drama for people to identify with. Alongside these we have what are sometimes called serial dramas - shows that have continuing storylines and may have very long runs without a break. Traditionally, stuff like Holby City, The Bill and Casualty was included in this category, but there's a good argument to be made that these programmes are now really not very different to soap operas at all: they are on almost all year round and the storylines tend to focus much more on the personal lives of the characters rather than the situation in which they find themselves. Finally there are what are often termed series; fixed term (which could be anything between 1 and 30 episodes) with a
distinct beginning and end that use particular narrative techniques in order to tell a story. While serials do have a finite life, they may well carry on some themes and narratives into new stories or even into new, spin-off series (e.g the multiple versions of CSI and Law and Order).
When members of the public think about TV Drama it is often this last breed they think about. A lot of people in the public at large think that TV Drama should not be something run-of-the-mill or everyday, but should stand out as being exceptional and particualrly dramatic. Producers often use the term "high concept" to describe this exceptionality.

Thinking about this idea should also point us in the direction of an understanding of why TV Drama is so important to broadcasters. A Drama series is hugely expensive compared to a soap opera, but, if you get it right, it can be worth much more than just big viewing figures. Drama series' have great potential to produce ongoing revenue through sales to other countries and channels as well as things like DVD sales. Perhaps more importantly though, "proper" TV Drama brings prestige to institutions that attempt to make it . Traditionally, this usually meant the BBC, though latterly American broacasters (particularly HBO) have become adept at making high-concept, high-cost TV Dramas, as we shall see below. Take for example the BBC's recent production of Bleak House. A heavyweight Victorian novel, a stellar cast and a budget that wouldn't have looked out of place on a good size Hollywood movie - all ingredients that still pretty much guarantee a big hit, albeit with some adaptations to the normal format of period drama and some liberal stylistic borrowings from soap opera and American TV. Viewing figures for Bleak House averaged between 6 and 7 million, which was pretty good for any show in the 8-10pm slot and this figure was pretty much replicated by Tony Jordan's Life on Mars. Such a figure would represent about 25-30% of the audience share in an average week ; something that suggests that the genre is still pretty strong at a time when more than two-thirds of the population of Britain have access to more than thirty TV channels.

And yet, and yet...there is a feeling abroad generally that British TV Drama is not what it was. Life on Mars, Bleak House, Spooks, Hustle, Clocking Off and Blackpool have all drawn reasonable viewing figures. but for some people, they simply do not seem to have the visceral power to move audiences in the way that examples from what is now termed the "Golden Age of TV Drama" (from 1966 to 1996), seemed to do. This period commences with Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home - a drama about a young homeless girl - and ends with Our Friends in the North ; an epic, sprawling, flawed masterpiece about the lives of four friends from Newcastle spanning 30 years. In between were such gems as The Boys from the Blackstuff, GBH, Edge of Darkness, Brimstone and Treacle and The Singing Detective all of which are often cited as examples of how good British Drama was. Modern TV Dramas are often seen as sacrificing substance for style - Hustle, Spooks and Life on Mars all have a very slick, cinematic look about them. This argument is played out regularly in the British press, usually when a good piece of TV Drama is first broadcast, but I'm not sure I really see it as an argument at all. British TV Drama has always been strong; during the 1980's for every masterpiece there was a concomitant turkey. Life on Mars and Spooks might well have the look of a video game about them in places but they also address issues that are prescient in the 21st century in an accessible way; parenthood, crime, race, religion, identity. Despite what The Sun and The Daily Mail might have you believe, these are the things that concern people and TV Drama is still seeking to explore them.

One thing is certain though, British TV Drama is no longer the big beast that it was. In America, HBO has made a name for producing high concept Drama series which harness intelligent, perceptive writing to expensive production values. The resulting products are drama series (usually between 12 and 22 episodes in length) which are breathtaking in their scale and scope; so much so in fact they become a series of movies both in the way they are written and the way they are filmed. The big budgets and big name actors allow for characters and narratives to be developed and extended; making use of the advantages of soap opera but without any of the static, humdrum poorly acted nonsense. Take for example, The Sopranos, soon to return for its final series. A typical episode of HBO's mafiosi Drama is likely to make reference to Shakespeare, Freud, Bruce Springsteen, Green Day, psychoanalysis, postmodernism,how to make Italian pastries, the Bible, The Torah and Sicilian ballads from the 19th Century. Thematically the show is staggering, covering more politcal, social, cultural and emotional issues than Jimmy McGovern has managed in most of his career. (This isn't a ctiticism of Jimmy McGovern by the way, but more a testament to how good The Sopranos is. And it isn't the only one. Six Feet Under, Deadwood, The West Wing (at last! a show that dealt properly with the sheer bloody awkwardness of actually "doing politics" !) and even CSI in its darker moments all show an intelligence, wit and understanding that is more than a match for the best of British Drama.

While this makes for an interesting investigation and discussion, one thing is clear; we have a chance to watch more TV Drama than we have ever had before. The battle for ratings, the arrival of the Americans and the influence of Hollywood mean that the viewer is spoilt for choice.

© Steve Connolly 2006

What's in a game?

2006-03-26T08:22:00.000-08:00

Game (noun)
An activity providing entertainment or amusement; a pastime: party games; word games.

One day last week, I was talking to some teachers (who, I should say from the outset, weren't media teachers) in an environment in which we all, unusually, had a significant amount of time on our hands with nothing to do but sit and wait. As is often the way, the small talk eventually turned to sport and as people were discussing football, I was asked if I followed a team.I was honest, saying that I had, at one time, been a season ticket holder at Wimbledon FC. This of course caused much mirth, with the person asking the question saying that if that was the case, I had clearly never followed football in the first place. I joined in the laughter, but on reflection,I was made to feel uneasy, because, in a way he was absolutely right and started me thinking not just about football, but about all games and they way they have changed in our culture.

I don't think I ever watched Wimbledon for the football. Sure, I saw some great games and some great players, but it wasn't really that at all that drew me to it. My wife's family had been life-long supporters and the season ticket was the cheapest in the league, and while they were part of the reason, they weren't the most significant factors. What really pulled me in was the opportunity to be part of some kind of community. WFC was a club run and supported by people (and significantly, with a lot of players) who came from its local community . I used to see the people that I stood next to at the game in the local pub and in the supermarket. Two of the first team squad had been to the school I taught at and half a dozen more to the one down the road. In spite of (or perhaps because of)the fact that the club had gone from Southern League to Premiership in a relatively short space of time, it retained its local-ness.

Here's the thing: football, along with all sorts of other games and sports, is undergoing a reversal in that it is moving from a position in which it encouraged social cohesion to a situation in which it actually encourages social fragmentation. I'm not being nostalgic for an age of flat caps and whippets which I never knew and probably never existed, but I would want to contend that sports and the idea of games are moving from a position in which they emphasise the group to one in which they emphasise the supremacy of the individual. I've written elsewhere on the site about how the modern game of football re-invents communities (in pubs and round Sky TV sets), but this too is really about fragmenting people into smaller and smaller groups. Modern media technologies such as Sky + and TV On Demand mean that watching sport, even on TV tends to be a more solitary experience - provided you can afford the means to watch it. This trend for individualism is present in the game from top to bottom, from the galacticos of Real Madrid and their obscene salaries to the kid who doesn't want to play in the school team because the teacher refuses to let him swear at his fellow students and referees. "So what?", I hear you say.Well, the more individual that any phenomenon or activity becomes (or the more exposed it is to the forces of the free market) the more people are excluded from it as an activity. The number of people who "support" Chelsea is far greater than the number of people who can see them each week, and so it ever was. But one wonders now how many people are excluded from Stamford Bridge not only because of Chelsea's popularity, but also because they simply cannot afford it. Thus the individual salary of the fan, and what they can afford to spend on Chelsea becomes much more important than who they are and where they live.

This isn't just about football though. All games and sports now show a tendency to become isolating rather than socializing. Take the difference between board games and video games. A board game relies upon people sitting down and facing each other and communicating with your fellow players. Video games work better if you play on your own. (And don't start with me on netplay - that's even more isolating as the fact that you are on your own means that its actually easier to not worry about whoever it is that you're kicking the bejesus out of in Tekken 17 or whatever it is that you're playing). Media Theorist David Buckingham comments in his book "After the Death of Childhood" that in countries like Korea, young people have already turned away from face-to-face socialisation in favour of only meeting in cyberspace or via netplay.

This idea is further reinforced by the fact that in British culture currently, when people do choose to participate in sport, they choose solitary individual activities (yoga, martial arts and even pilates - if you don't believe me, check out the stats. at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/sport/story/0,,1461614,00.html) rather than team sports. I would want to say that part of the reason for this trend is the way that the media has made team sport something that people put on a pedestal. The ridiculous amount of coverage and money devoted to the Premiership, to Super League, to rugby union and now, once again, cricket means that people worship it rather than aspiring to it, seeing it as being beyond their reach, as something that celebrities do and that they can't. Paradoxically though, the way the media cover sport also means that those who do play are even more competitive and even more aggressive in their will to win. The schoolboy footballer who's parents complain when he gets sent off for swearing at a referee will often resort to the defence that he saw a premiership player do the same thing. What we are left with then is two groups of people; the first who wont participate in sport because they feel they will never be any good at sports that it seems to be socially unacceptable not to watch; and the second who are so insanely competitive that every park kickabout becomes a game at Old Trafford. This then is fragmented nature of modern games - we are no longer united by them, but merely divided.

Of course it isn't just the media that causes fragmentation - there are lots of other things which mean that people wont or can't participate in team sports, such as a lack of work/life balance, extended families etc. - but the way that the media ensures that sport is played and paid for means that the "I" becomes the king both in professional and amateur sport and in games in general. This is bad, because as a former colleague of mine was always fond of saying, "there's no I in TEAM".

Over to you Ashley! Old fashioned libel and new-fashioned technology

2006-03-08T01:09:00.000-08:00

Ashley Cole’s announcement that he intends to sue the News of the World and The Sun for alleging that he took part in homosexual activities is an demonstrates a new angle on a very old offence. Cole is claiming that the papers have libelled him; namely, publishing statements about him which he considers falsely damaging to his reputation. The first properly reported case of libel was heard at the court of James I, and so Cole has a good deal in common with the great and the good of the last 400 years who have taken umbrage at the things written about them in handbills, scandal sheets and red top tabloids. The twist in this case however is the fact that, the allegations are built on statements that have been made on the Internet in chatrooms and emails. Neither newspaper has named Cole at all, but has claimed that a “leading Premiership footballer” was involved in various homosexual activities. These claims were accompanied by manipulated pictures (faces blocked out etc.) which of course people found the originals of and posted on the internet., and subsequently surfers everywhere have connected with the original story.

Libel laws are one of the few checks on a national press that enjoys more freedoms than any other in the world. They are meant to be a way that the individual who feels he or she has been wronged by a newspaper can gain recompense from them in the form of financial damages. The fact that they are retroactive is one of the main problems with them – they only work after the statement has been published and one could argue that at this point, the damage has already been done. Their advantage is that (in British law at least) they are very user-friendly. If you issue a writ for libel, the onus is on the newspaper to demonstrate, in court, that what they originally wrote was true. You as the plaintiff or complainant, do not have to prove anything. This aspect of the law is really the only example of it being on the side of the newspaper rather than the individual. There is no privacy law in Britain (though you can claim violation of privacy as a breach of Human Rights) and the only way you can stop a newspaper from printing a story is to get a High Court Injunction against it – something that doesn’t always work any way, as the case of footballer Gary Flitcroft demonstrates. Libel laws are meant to help the individual gain parity with the press, which usually holds all the power over the individual.

So what’s different about Ashley Cole. Well, it would seem that the role of the internet really does cloud the issue. The Sun and The News of the World, in not naming him are pointing towards the fact that internet rumours are just that – unsubstantiated, but suspicious enough to do some serious damage to his career. The case also highlights the fact that the internet is clearly a different medium to newspapers. Even though it involves writing words, the temporary, fleeting, deletable nature of the Internet means that it clearly does not have the permanence of print. One suspects that the newspapers defence would be that “we’re just reporting what it says on the internet guv” and in not naming Cole specifically, the are simply winding up the rumour mill a bit more. This in turn comes back to the idea that libel is about damage to a persons reputation and one has to ask whether or not the whole legal process migh end up causing more damage in the long run.

New Media Technologies Blog

2006-01-17T08:19:00.000-08:00

This is a very quick post to let people know that I have put a link below which will connect you to the Robert Smyth School's new media technologies blog. This is a great site run by an OCR colleague of mine, Gavin Luhrs. It's particularly good if you want to keep up with the latest developments in media institutions and technology - and so could be very useful for students doing OCR's Audience and Institution paper. Click below, under "Links" to check it out...

Hard to Beat: Hard-Fi and the Representation of Social Class in Popular Music

2006-01-10T01:46:00.001-08:00

I work in North-West London and sometimes I find myself just sitting in my office and looking at the planes taking off and landing at Heathrow. I mention this because at the end of one day last week I was doing exactly that while listening to some music and suddenly, the following line came out of the speakers:
"Looking out my bedroom window/See the planes take off from Heathrow"
I shouldn't have been surprised of course. The line was from a song called "move on Now" by Hard-Fi, a band of young men who grew up around Staines and West Drayton and whose days and nights were lived out under the Terminal 4 flight path. Listening to the album a bit more closely, I found that the whole thing is a tapestry of observations about working class (or should that be lower-middle-class?) West London. It set me off thinking about the fact that as Media teachers and students, we often forget that popular music is full of all kinds of representations that we often just ignore, either because we are too busy looking at a pop artist's visual image, or because we think that representations of class are simply confined to things like newspapers and soap opera. The Hard- Fi album though, musically and lyrically, is part of the creation of a band identity which firmly emphasises their roots in the council estates and industrial parks that cluster round the North side of the M4 in a fug of grey smoke and petrol fumes. Musically the sound is an interesting mix of punk, dub, electronica and rock 'n' roll (there's a genre study in there somewhere!) all of which have their origins in working class youth culture. Lyrically Hard-Fi's world is one where Cash Machines always have "insufficient funds", where people are always looking forward to Friday night and where everyone is "Tied Up too tight" and trying to break free from the constraints of have no money and no real future.
They aren't the first to do this kind of thing of course. Mike Skinner of The Streets has mined similar material with a good deal of intelligence and humour, wearing his interest in working class culture like a badge. (It's interesting to note that Skinner himself actually grew up in quite a middle class home - his dad sold hospital equipment, but his move from London to Birmingham and back again meant that he was exposed to all sorts of people). Historically, singing about class was the province of left-wing singer songwriters like Billy Bragg or the agit-pop of punks from The Clash to Chumbawumba. Perhaps the band that Hard-Fi most resemble then, is The Who. Daltrey, Townsend and Entwhistle were grammar school boys who came from working class, West London backgrounds and sang, initally at least, about their lives. "Better do Better" is Hard-Fi's "Substitute"; " Hard to Beat" their "I Can't Explain". I'm not for a second saying that Hard-Fi are musically the same as The Who, or that they reach the matchless heights of "Tommy " and "Quadrophenia", but more that they are cut from the same cloth in terms of their attitude and class background.
There are two things that people researching the representation of social class in pop music need to think about: Firstly, Hard-Fi are the full package in terms of social class. Not only do they look and sound like working class musicians (which is basically what gives acts like Oasis their mass appeal) but they sing about being working class. These self-proclaimed "Stars of CCTV" know what a lot of people's lives (and livers!) are like. When thinking about how class is represented in popular music, one should not only look at them but what they produce and how they are marketed. It would be interesting to know the working class pop stars influenced them, and to look into the future and see who (if anybody) they influence.
Secondly, there are some interesting things to think about here regarding audience. When I started thinking about this, I wondered how many of my students, living a stones throw away from where this band grew up and first began to ply their trade, had listened to the album and how many of them might have seen their own lives reflected in it. The fact is though is that this album isn't just selling to working class audiences; it is selling to middle-class audiences who know (or think they know) what working-class life is like and perhaps those people who are middle-class but see themselves as working class. Ironically, there is a kind of romanticization going on here: Hard-Fi, who are clearly from a working/lower middle class background, end up creating a world, through their music and lyrics, that middle-class audiences can safely inhabit without actually having to put up with working class life. Richard Archer and his bandmates probably never intended this, but what we are left with is an example of how social class is never clear cut, either for the producers or consumers of media and popular culture texts.

© Steve Connolly 2006

Rock 'n' Roll Research: finding out about music and culture

2005-11-17T04:34:00.000-08:00

I thought really seriously about calling this article "I suppose a rock's out of the question?" but decided that really would be showing both my age and my personal musical inclination. It does however, highlight two significant problems for students who are researching popular music (or indeed any media form of which they are fan, such as film or comics). Firstly, how do we detach ourselves from something that we are a fan of - such as popular music - so that we can write about it objectively? And secondly, if we want to find out about music how do we get people who are fans to talk sensible about it?

If we are trying to find out about popular music from a media studies point of view (and not just that of an interested fan) we really need to take a key concepts approach to it. If you are conducting primary research into people's relationship with music, you might start by asking them about their experience of it as a member of an AUDIENCE. For me, music has shaped a good deal of my social experience; who I spent time with, where I spent my leisure time, how I dressed and even where I went to study. If you wanted to find out about my experiences in real detail, you might ask me to give you an oral history (my reminiscences of a particular time or experience), but certainly, to really get what I felt about music, you would at least want to interview me at some length, probably using an unstructured or semi-structured interview format. To illustrate this, imagine that you wanted to know about my experiences of concert going in relation to a study of the audiences for indie bands during the 1990's. You might ask me a question about the type of people who I saw in the audience when I watched bands like the Happy Mondays, The Charlatans and Radiohead. Say you initially set this question in the form of a written questionnaire. On the day you give me the questionnaire, I feel ill, too busy or just can't be bothered. So in answer to the question "what kind of people did you see attending indie gigs in the 1990's?" I just write "people like me". This is a response, but not a particularly useful one. If on the other hand, you were interviewing me and I give the above response, you can follow it up with a question like "How would you describe you and people like you?" or "What do you mean by that?" in order to draw out a longer more valuable qualitative response. Herein lies both the beauty and the problem of investigating a topic like pop music culture: Culture involves people and people often can't adequately be described in one-word responses. If you are prepared to make the effort though, asking questions face to face will reveal a great deal more thana questionnaire will.

We might also find a great deal out by looking at the FORMS and CONVENTIONS of pop music texts and the way they REPRESENT the artists that made them and the genres they come from. Clearly looking at things like videos will tell you a good deal about not only the band, but also about why the audience is drawn to that particular artist or genre. Looking at things like R'n'B videos it is clear to see that sex, power and material wealth are all significant motifs. Beyond this though, there are lots of other visual texts related to pop music that we can analyse. Front covers are very revealing in that they often tell the audience what to expect from both the artist and the genre (For a more detailed explanation of this, see my article on The Darkness and Postmodernism in Media Magazine 9). If you are investigating something like how music influences the way people dress, then one thing you should definitely do is analyse things like band t-shirts. Take a look, for example at my Monsters of Rock t-shirt and what it tells you about genre and audience.

I picked this t-shirt out because, primarily it is a memento of my night out at the Monsters of Rock tour in 2002. The gig was headlined by Alice Cooper and his name appears in a kind of flame coloured, metallic font, with sharp edges in the middle of the shirt. Just think for a moment about what writing the name of the artist in that way actually means. The flame colour has connotations of something explosive, while the knife like writing implies something dangerous and sinister. Alice Cooper's stage show at times creates the impression of danger and the sinister; at one point, he appears to cut his own head off with a guillotine. The t-shirt is at this point telling the audience what to expect from the Alice Cooper stage show. Similarly, the grinning cadaver standing behind the band names is, in a way standing in for the artist. A lot of Alice Cooper's songs and stage show are about death, (Poison, Be My Frankenstein etc) and this indexical signifier is telling us this. The cadaver isn't Alice (well not yet anyway!) himself, but it is evidence of what his stage show will be like. We can take it as read that at some level the fans attending this gig are drawn to the explosive dangerous and morbid elements of the show. Add to this the fact that the shirt is mainly black and you really know what interests the fans...
Now take a look at the words "Monsters of Rock" at the top of the shirt. Here the font is like rock. This is deliberate and not just a play on words, as both rock (e.g. granite) and rock music are meant to be hard, heavy and impenetrable. The letters tell you literally and visually, what kind of music to expect. At some level here the audience is being expected to know that rock music gets its name from rock for a reason, and analysing things like t-shirts and band logos will often allow you to get to the heart of the assumptions that popular music makes about its audience.

In order to research something like pop music then, we need to remember two things. Firstly, any kind of cultural activity, be it music, sport or film is a human phenomenon and human beings are complex creatures requiring complex research. Secondly, an eye for detail will often allow you find out about people's relationships with pop in a way that might surprise you...

© Steve Connolly 2005

The End of the Affairs...

2005-09-08T02:08:00.000-07:00

With Channel 5 announcing that they are to axe their “flagship” soap opera Family Affairs, it is worth looking at the way that the soap opera landscape has changed over the last five years or so and taking note of some of the institutional and audience issues that have caused these changes.
For Family Affairs, the going was always going to be tough, particularly when it is important to understand that Soap opera is generally declining in popularity, but people might have suspected that it was in its death throes when the show made such a fanfare of recruiting Jack Ryder –an entertainment non-entity outside the tired pages of Heat magazine who hadn’t worked properly in acting for two years. Family Affairs had never drawn an audience of more than two million viewers and averaged barely half that. Not even the influence of Brian Park (nicknamed the “axeman” in TV circles) , who was employed earlier on in the shows life to try and revitalise it, could change the course of its long death march to the soap graveyard.

The fact is though, that most of the other soap operas should probably be looking over their shoulders nervously at the fate of FA. Eastenders for example has suffered dreadfully since the days of attracting 30 million viewers by having Den ‘n’ Ange throw plates at each other. While Coronation Street, and particularly Emmerdale have quite buoyant viewing figures, it’s clear that they aren’t the weapon in ITV’s armoury that they once were. So why is this? How is it that a programme that barely 20 years ago attracted such a huge audience can struggle today to sometimes draw even 10 million viewers. There are a number of reasons, some of which are to do with Media Institutions, and some of which are to do audiences.

Reality vs. Realism

The thing is, audiences tastes have changed. Once upon a time, the soap opera was the place where audiences got their daily dose of reality (outside the news) – a place where we were allowed to peek into the private world of characters arguing round the breakfast table. Nowadays, when you can watch people on Big Brother not only arguing round the Breakfast table, but also engaging in all kinds of other morally dubious activity, the day-to-day drudge of soap characters can seem a little tame, particularly to younger viewers who are not hardened, “I ‘ve-been-watching-for- twenty –years-and –I’m-not-stopping –now” fans. Soap Opera was intended to be a little voyeuristic, but now this has been superseded by more extreme forms of voyeurism, e.g. Celebrity Love Island. Peoples desire to look into other peoples lives is exploited by the reality TV genre and as a consequence, they have turned away from soap opera.
One might argue that soap operas have tried to respond to this challenge by making their storylines more sensational and attention-grabbing, but this hasn’t really work. Eastenders, with its mockney gangsters and ‘ard men looks like an attempt at a bad imitation of a Guy Ritchie film and as a consequence its ratings have plummeted. This may be one reason why Coronation Street’s audience has been fairly stable – it tends to concentrate on the everyday and the mundane, and keeps its powder dry by only building up to big storylines every so often. Shelley’s problematic wedding day for example, is mixed in with storylines about a runaway pig, and Norris wanting to rename Rita’s shop.

Audiences, Advertising and Revenue
For the people who make soaps, the main problem then is viewing figures. For the makers of Eastenders (the BBC) they have to keep up with Coronation Street because they have to justify spending a vast amount of licence payers money on it and broadcasting it four or five times a week. Over at ITV, the number of viewers for Coronation Street and Emmerdale dictates how much they can charge for advertising space within the programme; the greater the number of viewers, the more money they can get. The thing is, that as the internet and mobile communications grow, it is becoming clear that TV advertising is not as influential as it once was, and so advertisers may be less reluctant to spend money on it.
Connected to this is the fact that as we all get more channels, less of us are watching any one channel. This is called audience fragmentation and means that as a whole audiences for the terrestrial channels are falling as people turn over to watch channels that are more tailored for their particular need. Consequently, the viewer no longer has to choose between Eastenders and Coronation Street, but any of 200 programmes that are on at the same time.
In all this, it is interesting to look at Emmerdale. The folk on the farm have enjoyed bigger audiences of late, overtaking Eastenders for the number two slot in the soap charts (Coronation Street looks unlikely to lose its crown for the foreseeable). The question is, how have they managed to keep their heads when all around are losing theirs? Well, there seem to be three main reasons; firstly, broadcasting six nights a week at the notoriously hard to fill 7pm slot means that the show will probably pick up quite a few people who are just watching because there is nothing else on (The only real competition here is The Simpsons on Sky One – not available to terrestrial or Freeview audiences.). Secondly, the decision to pack the cast with young, attractive promiscuous bodies (e.g. The Sugden Brothers) is a calculated attempt to attract a younger audience that seems to have paid off. Finally, there has been a clear attempt to homogenise the cast. The fact that the show is less rural and northern than it used to be ( more ethnic minorities and lesbian and gay characters) has made it more accessible to a wider audience. Curiously, these are all things that Eastenders has tried to do in the past as well, but unsuccessfully, and it is not clear why they work for Emmerdale but not in the square.

So then, the future for soap seems a little uncertain. No one quite knows what will happen to this staple of the British TV diet. Almost certainly though, the soap opera is a useful barometer of how the public uses TV and its tastes and preferences and when it is clear that our relationship with the soap opera has changed, our whole relationship with TV probably will have as well.

© Steve Connolly 2005

Marx and the Media

2005-07-05T01:35:00.000-07:00

A lot of students (and sometimes parents and even teachers) ask me why we have to spend time, particularly at A-Level, studying theory which appears , at first glance to have nothing to do with the media. In the course of Year 13 especially, teachers make raids on Sociology, Politics and Psychology, hoping to draw students to the ideas of some of their "big hitters" such as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. But why? Marx and Freud lived more than a century ago, so why are we still paying attention to them? And more importantly, what have they got to do with the media, when they weren't around in an age when the mass media was as significant as it is now?
The answer to these questions lies in our approach to study. Ideas like Marxism and Psychoanalysis are perspectives, or ways of looking at the world and culture we inhabit. They are not definitive truths, or the only way of looking at something, but an idea about, or view of how we work, play , behave or even (in Freud's case) sleep! In Media Studies, what we are interested in is whether or not these perspectives can help us understand how media texts work and perhaps what kinds of meanings or messages lie behind media texts. In fact we need these kind of ideas to help us think more deeply about what we are watching, reading or listening to. If we don't theorize about the media, and try to wrestle with how it works and what it does- what are we left with? Nothing, it seems to me, except a dialogue about what we like and dislike; which is fine, but we don't need to do that in school, we can do it in the pub or round the dinner table.
So how can we use these kinds of perspectives in our study of the Media. Well, take Marxism for example. Marx thought that the working classes were exploited by capitalism - a system in which they made things for which they never saw anything but the most meagre reward. Because the workers were exploited in this way by the capitalists (who employed them and owned the factories they worked in) and the middle classes, or bourgeoise, who supported the capitalists, the workers became alienated.Marx believed that the only way that the working classes could free themselves from this opression was to start revolutions, overthrowing the ruling capitalists, and govern themselves using the political ideology of communism. Communism was a political system in which everything was owned in common and everybody received what they needed (though not what they necessarily wanted) in terms of work, food, housing and leisure. All this stuff that Marx believed in actually happened as well - most notably in Russia in the early 20th century, though the idealism of the revolution was soon replaced by corruption, exploitation and misery.
But what has this got to do with Media? Well, Marxists are not only interested in how the working classes can achieve freedom from the oppression of the capitalists, but also how ideas about class, work and capital are manifested in society. As a consequence they have paid a good deal of attention to things like films and TV as being places in which ideas about Capitalism and class are brought forth and discussed. Marxists can make readings of films from their own perspectives, often seeing the most unlikely subject matter as representing ideas about class opression and capitalism. Take for example, the film Pretty Woman.

A Marxist Reading of Pretty Woman

Pretty Woman, on the surface seems to be a modern day fairy tale. A version of the Cinderella story in which Vivian, the down at heel prostitute, is rescued from her urban hell by prince-charming-in-disguise Edward. However, a Marxist might see the film in terms of what it tells us about class and money in modern America. Almost from the very first line of the film ("It's all about the money", spoken by a party conjuror carrying out a disappearing coin trick) we are aware that the only way for Vivian to escape from her life of prosititution is to be rescued by a man with enough money to fulfil her dream of being the princess at the top of the tower. Vivian and her flatmate Kit are both working (class) girls, whose apartment is in a shabby and dangerous part of L.A.. The audience is constantly asked to contrast this environment with the kind of shops, hotels and parties that Edward frequents, along with the transformation that Vivian makes as she stops dressing like a $100 a night hooker and starts dressing like a socialite.
The money theme is always present in the film; Edward makes a metaphorical comparison between himself and Vivian, saying "We both screw people for money". A Marxist would say that this is the problem with the film. In capitalism, working class people are only given two options. They can either (literally) screw people, by selling themselves and their labour for a price or they can (metaphorically) screw people by becoming a capitalist themselves and exploiting those who would sell themselves and their labour. Vivian is only offered two choices - to either carry on as a prostitute or to become Edwards lover and in effect, a capitalist herself. This situation within the film illustrates a typical Marxist's comment on the world - capitalism limits peoples choices, forcing them into situations where they must either do a job that they do not want to do, or force other people into things they don't want to .

These critical perspectives then present us with an alternative way of seeing the world and especially, the media texts that we study in class. They are not the only way of seeing a film or TV programme or musical phenomenon, but they should allow us to think differently about them - to try and extend our understanding of them and perhaps to explain how they work and why they are the way they are.

© Steve Connolly 2005

Mobiles and MP3 players: The Pod of Convergence

2005-06-09T15:20:00.000-07:00

When we do our standard introduction to Media course, my colleagues and I often start by saying that the subject is about the Mass Media - or media that allow you to communicate with large numbers of people at a time. The thing is that recently, we've all become interested in a load of devices which are really about personal or interpersonal communication. Or perhaps, more accurately that bring mass communication to a personal level.

Take for example, the mobile phone. Telephones were traditionally a device which allowed you just to speak to one other person; so , as a technology that worked just on an interpersonal level we tended not to talk about phones as an example of mass media. However the mobile phone is a device which does much more than allow you to speak to your Auntie Dot in Bridlington. With my 3G phone at the ready, I can not only call my family, but receive picture messages and video clips from them and even engage in a video call with them if I feel so inclined. I can stream video news, surf the mobile internet (WAP) and play back my MP3s or listen to the in-built radio. Even text messaging (or SMS to call it by its correct name) can be used as a mass media, with the "send to many" function allowing you to have all sorts of people view your text messages. This idea works in reverse as well though, as it also means that advertisers can bombard you with spam texts and junk emails. This will be even more evident when from later on this year, the BBC, Sky and ITV start to provide content that allows mobile phone users to stream live TV.

The mobile phone is now a personal device that brings the mass media to your pocket, and this is why were interested in it in the classroom. It is also a great example of what is called convergence. Convergence is what happens when several different media are integrated into a single device. As well as the mobile phone, we might see digital TV as a convergent technology, as it integrates TV, the internet and radio into a single set top box.

Other personal devices have a similar potential. The iPod (or any other MP3 player - and lets be frank there are a lot better on the market) is not only an MP3 player, but also a mass storage device which allows you to carry around all sorts of digital files, as well as allowing you to play games and (via Podcast) develop your own radio station. The iPod demonstrates another aspect of modern media technology, which is a reliance on hard disk memory rather than tapes or CDs. As technologies move on more and more devices are becoming convergent because having a hard disk to store things on means that it is much easier for devices to have multiple uses. The iPod can be personal stereo, personal games console and personal filing cabinet if you so wish it to be, because digital files all have a common storage medium, namely the hard disk, and a common means of transfer; usually a USB or Firewire cable.

So then, it pays for us to be concerned not only with what we watch read and listen to, but also the technological means by which we do so. The march of convergence probably means that in 25 years time we will get all our media from two boxes; one with a big screen at home and one with a small screen that we carry around with us. This is great news - not least for me, as I am the one who has to hoover behind the mass of wires generated by the three boxes that currently sit under my TV at home....

© Steve Connolly 2005

Gangsters Part 2

2005-04-12T13:32:00.000-07:00

This stuff follows on directly from the previous work:

Much is made in the gangster genre of the role of the Italian, or more specifically the Sicilian, tradition. In "Goodfellas", Henry explains why he and Jimmy can't be "made men" or "wiseguys" - because they are both half-Irish, rather than pure Italian. This is because the mob need to be able to trace a made man's roots, presumably so that his family can be punished if he does anything wrong. The Italian or Sicilian tradition can be summarized in terms of a code of honour and loyalty. The people who are "made men" can be relied upon to "never open their mouths or rat on their friends" to paraphrase Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas. This distinction is further emphasized by Lefty in Donnie Brasco 1f 1 say'he's a friend of mine'then I'm talking about a connected guy. If I say 'he's a friend of ours', then I'm talking about a made guy---.
The treatment of women is also significant, mainly because they are treated so poorly. The portrayal of the "gangster's moll" as a passive victim who is in thrall to the evil charms of the mobster runs all the way through the genre. There is a lot to connect the character of Holiday (in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye) with that of Karen (in Goodfellas) they are both inextricably linked to the men, deeply in love with them and often badly wronged by them. They are often seen as no more than ornaments, physical manifestations of a gangster's status, who are punished if they attempt to do any more. The difference for Karen is that as one of the narrators of Goodfellas she gets to tell her side of the story, in her we find out what motivates the female in the gangster movie. Actually, it is many of the things that motivates the men - money, status, power, clothes - along with the powerful aphrodisiac combination of sex and violence. Interestingly enough Donnie Brasco's wife unknowingly becomes more like a gangster's moll as her husband goes deeper and deeper undercover.

The Iconography of the Gangster Movie - "Buy some proper pants, this aint a rodeo" Lefty Ruggerio, Donnie Brasco

Like many genres the key paradigms of the gangster movie are transport, clothing and weapons. It is also an urban genre (as opposed to say, the Western, which is rural). Cars are terrifically important as a symbol of status - indeed when we first see Lefty in Donnie Brasco he is arguing about cars and Henry's first job in Goodfellas is to park wiseguy's cars. For gangsters, there is also a specific way of dressing, as Henry's mother comments when he buys his first suit. (also see Lefty's comment about Donny's jeans, above). Weapons must be usually guns - unless of course you have to chop up a body! (see Goodfellas and Donnie Brasco)
Another important signifier is food. The Godfather starts with a wedding feast, and one of the key events in Michael Corleone's initiation into the mob is the cookery lesson he is given by Clemenza. In Goodfellas we find out about cooking in prison in some detail, and later in the film Henry explains the meal he cooks for his brother. In Donnie Brasco Lefty's girlfriend Annette, says that she "can't cook fancy" like Lefty can. The significance of food is linked to ideas about Italian tradition, community (eating together is a bonding experience) and status (the best food is Italian and to feed people is to show them respect.)

Audience Appeal : 'to me being a gangster was better than being president of the United States" (Henry Hill: Goodfellas)
The appeal of the gangster genre lies in its presentation of the individual (usually male) achieving the good life through criminal means, and then dying or achieving some kind of redemption. This portrayal of the "bad guy" as a charming but violent individual is something which appeals to many people as a means of vicariously living out fantasies about being bad. Normal law-abiding citizens get a great deal of pleasure from seeing the gangster break the law without ever daring to do so themselves. This makes the genre morally problematic of course, but does provide a clue to the fact that audiences often identify with both individuals fighting against a system, AND families who stick together, both of which are presented by the gangster film.
The gangster movie is an old genre, but as is hinted at by the marketing of "Goodfellas" tradition lies at its centre. As with all genres the gangster movie relies upon the audiences familiarity with its structures, but also relies upon the film to provide some kind of twist to the genre. Thus the trailer for Goodfellas talks about "a new generation from an old tradition". A way to provide this twist might be for the makers of these genres to resort to hybridization - the practice of crossing two genres or blurring the boundaries between them; thus we have the comedy-gangster film, like Mickey Blue Eyes or Analyze This. One might also argue that this kind of self-parody is the last refuge of a genre that is dying, notwithstanding the comments made about Road To Perdition above.
There is good evidence to suggest that gangster movies are marketed largely at men. Witness for example the matey bonding suggested by the Goodfellas trailer, and the heavy use of black (a masculine colour) in the poster campaigns for these films. Indeed one might argue that there are some deeply homoerotic scenes in both Goodfelia's and Donnie Brasco - for example when Lefty, outside his sons hospital room, admits that he loves Donnie. Also the physicality of the relationships between all the men in these films is noticeable - lots of embracing, kissing and face-touching. It's interesting to note that Paul Vitti (the character Robert De Niro plays in Analyze This!) is concerned that his visit to the psychiatrist will turn him into a homosexual (" Remember doc ... I go fag, you die"). There is undoubtedly a tension here, in that these are films made by men, about men for men and that this must involve some kind of attraction on some level.

© Steve Connolly 2005

Some more stuff on Gangsters -Part 1

2005-03-25T02:22:00.000-08:00

This stuff (and the subsequent article which will go up in a few days) is aimed to help Year 13 students doing their exam on genre, but it also might be of use to anyone teaching or studying genre in general.

American Gangster Films - a summary

Historical Origins - "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster"(Henry Hill, Goodfellas)

The first American Gangster films appeared in the 1920's and thirties and are often seen now as a type of social realist film reflecting the gritty realities of the Great Depression and an increasingly industrial America. The two key actors in these films were James Cagney (Angels With Dirty Faces, White Heat, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye) and Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar). The obsession with this pre-war period in American history never really went away, right up until the 1970's with films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Sting still being concerned with the fate of individuals who chose to break the law through organized crime in economically deprived thirties America.

In 1971, Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Mario Puzo's book The Godfather, placed the emphasis firmly on the Mafia as the main subject matter for the mob movie. The Godfather and its subsequent sequels, foregrounded some themes which had always been present in the genre and combined them with topical ideas about immigrant culture and reflected real-life stories of Mafiosi who had come to prominence during the 1960's. The Godfather trilogy also began the practice of using Italian American actors to play Italian American roles, giving Al Pacino his first starring role and latterly utilizing the method acting talents of Robert De Niro.

After The Godfather, US gangster movies tend to focus on the Mafia, with key examples being Goodfellas(1990) and Donnie Brasco (1996), and it is interesting that both these films take real life gangster stories for their subject matter. Indeed the idea of "the mob" is so entrenched in American popular culture that some recent examples of the genre have tended toward self-parody for comic effect; a trend that begins with My Cousin Vinny and moves on to analyze This/That and Mickey Blue Eyes. Most interesting of all though is the return that Sam Mendes' film Road to Perdition makes to depression-era America. Here Mendes seems to combine the narrative of the individual gangster (as in Casino, Donnie Brasco or Goodfellas) with the kind of morality tale which James Cagney used to feature in.

Thematic Concerns - "I believe in America" (Bonasuera the Undertaker, The Godfather)

Francis Ford Coppola has commented that he believes that the gangster film is a metaphor for America. The notion of the American Dream is certainly an important one in the genre for a number of reasons. Firstly, the gangster film usually focuses on the rise to power and wealth of the individual within the wider community of "the mob". Indeed the narrative structure of several films (e.g. Goodfellas, Casino) allows these individuals to tell their story directly to the audience, either through voice over or straight to camera. Secondly as America in its current form is really only 300 years old, its history is a history of immigrant populations arriving on its shores. The fact that many of the characters view themselves as immigrants emphasises this. Thirdly one of the ideas that drives American culture is the notion of self-determination within a free-market economy. This is the idea that an individual can achieve whatever they want to achieve if they put their mind to it. This is especially true of making money. The gangsters many role is to achieve money and power, and America is the one place that this is allowed to happen.

Other thematic concerns centre around the ideas of family, community and loyalty. These are important ideas for the characters in a gangster movie, and as such , they present us with a moral paradox; the gangster has his own morality code which is very strict about looking after wives, mothers and children, but doesn't stretch to letting your business partner off the hook when he has said something to irritate you.

© Steve Connolly 2005

Goodfellas and the problem of popular culture

2005-02-27T15:02:00.000-08:00

I was teaching genre to some Year 13 students this week, and was amazed to find that none of them had ever seen "Goodfellas" before. This film has been part of my life as a film fan and a teacher for such a long time, that I had never stopped to think that there would be a point at which it would stop being viewed by teenagers as a "rite-of-passage" film, and would become an "old film". Thinking about it though, this illustrates a problem that both teachers and students of Media (and particularly film) might have when approaching their subject. When a teacher tells you that a film is important (or for that matter, any other authority figure, such as a film critic or journalist) why should you pay attention to them? The short answer of course is likely to be that if its on the exam, then you should pay attention, but beyond this, what gives a teacher the right to say that film x "is great" while film "y" isn't? I'm fairly sure that it often seems to students that the stuff we watch in class is just the stuff the teacher likes and that when we happen to watch something that is a hit with students, it is merely a happy accident. And here's the crux of the problem for Media Studies - is it about the popular culture that you the student inhabits everyday? Or is it about an idea of what popular culture should be like, as transmitted by the teacher?
"Goodfellas" makes an interesting case in point. Here is a film that, in the fifteen years since it has made, has come to occupy something of a privileged position in film history. It has become something of a "Canonical" text -i.e. something that must be watched. But this is a problem - popular culture is generally meant to be temporary, disposable. To be enjoyed sure, but revered, like Jane Austen?...Perhaps not. The problem with having a canon (and this is where all those English Lit. teachers get it profoundly wrong) is that really, it's no more than one of those lists of "100 best books" that people argue about in the pub. Bad English Literature teaching will simply emphasize why the teacher likes the book and not how the book came to be.
Media Studies and students can overcome these problems by focusing on the important questions about a text: not only what it means, but also who made it, how it represents people and places and most importantly what the pleasure is in the text for the audience. This last one is persistently ignored by people who teach about books in secondary schools, and sadly some of the people teaching film and TV.
So,I'm against the idea of a canon. Why then do, I teach "Goodfellas" to a group of students who haven't seen it and probably will never need it? For all sorts of reasons: Firstly, in the study of genre, it marks the high-point of the mob movie cycle. It is the gangster film taken to its logical ending; we have moved from Cagney's gangsters, who are two dimensional and simply part of a narrative which is heading towards its inevitable conclusion, to De Niro, Sorvino and Liotta and a narrative which is built around them and their personalities, without any kind of real narrative motor other than Henry's life. Secondly, it is a lesson in efficient film-making. I would always highlight to students that here is a director who knows how to use voice-overs, freeze frames and panning to their fullest effect. Thirdly, its representation of violence, while shocking , is also fascinating. This is also useful for students, whose own films tend to be populated by random punch-ups and kickings which eventually become incredibly dull (believe me, as a moderator I have to watch hundreds of them ever year). What you have in Goodfellas is violence used to different ends. It illustrates the inadequacies of the characters; Tommy shooting Spider because he can't get what he wants. It is used for humour: when Jimmy strangles Morrie with the telephone cord. And it is used to manipulate the audience into feeling things they don't want to feel; our horrible sadness and fear when we realise that Tommy isn't going to be "made", but killed instead. Finally, what we have in "Goodfellas" is a film which influences a whole host of films that students will be familiar with, from "Trainspotting" to "Snatch", illustrating an important idea in the Media, namely that most of the best ideas are stolen from somewhere else.
What we have then, is a film that is worth watching, because it is in itself a manual for all sorts of other activities, from having a better understanding of genre to making your own film. However, just because the teacher chose to study it, doesn't mean that its the only text that can do these things. The media studies teacher should seek to encourage students to bring in texts that they have found themselves and discover whether or not they can fulfill the same role. Popular culture is interesting stuff, but what makes it interesting in the classroom is not what the teacher says about it, but what it can tell you about the world in which you live. A bit like Science really. In fact, go and tell a Scientist that. It'll really wind 'em up....

© Steve Connolly 2005

Manchester United, TV and the "game that ate itself" - A lesson in Media Ownership

2005-02-17T03:44:00.000-08:00

With Malcolm Glazer trying to buy a hefty stake in Manchester United, there is bound to be some discussion of television's role in the so-called "beautiful game" (have you seen Ian Dowie..?) in Media Studies classes. It is quite difficult to explain but there is a complex relationship between football, television and Manchester United in particular.
Football is a product to be sold, like anything else on TV. When there were only three TV channels, rights to show games were negotiated on a sort of "gentleman's agreement" basis, in which the channels both showed highlights of different games and no one ever showed live games (except for cup finals) because they believed in the notion that most of the football supporting public would actually prefer to go to the game rather than sit on their backsides and watch it on a TV screen.
When Murdoch entered the frame with BSkyb in the early 1990's - legitimised by the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which allowed for the de-regulation of the TV market in Britain- he found a way of guaranteeing both the top clubs and himself a vast amount of money. That way was called the Premiership. The top eighteen clubs banded together and sold off the TV rights to the games that they played by effectively creating an entirely artificial auction. The BBC and ITV had no hope of competing with BSkyb, who were backed by by the billion-dollar businesses of News Corporation. Consequently, the Premiership was born and Sky had rights to it. Now pay attention, here comes the important bit. While Sky did pay out millions of pounds to Premiership and other league clubs for the rights to games they made millions more on the back of the deal which encouraged subscribers to buy Sky satellite dishes and subscribe to packages of hundreds of TV channels. What this meant for the clubs was that the Premiership clubs became very rich as well (or rather some of them did - the ones that used the extra money to buy extra players to get in the Champions League and thus get even more TV rights money) and while they gave (and still give) some handouts to the clubs in the lower leagues, generally as in most of Britain, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. In fact that the only thing that stopped at least a dozen clubs from going out of business was the advent of the supporters trusts (step forward and take a bow Luton, Exeter City and Notts County amongst others) which allowed the fans to buy the club they supported.
The thing is, that for Murdoch and News Corporation, this wasn't enough. They got a bit worried when ITV digital started bidding big money for the rights to show football (as it turned out they needn't have bothered as it was clear that ITV digital subscribers really didn't want to watch Halifax Town vs Rochdale live from the Shay on a Sunday afternoon) and so to ensure that they got what they wanted, they started buying stakes in football clubs, including Manchester United. This would allow them to have even greater control over the process of bidding for rights because then, not only would they have they means of distributing the product (Sky TV) but also the product itself (a football club). They ended up owning 10% of Man Utd, and were only stopped from owning more by the people at the Monopolies and Merger's Commission who thought that this was one act of Murdoch-bootlicking too many. Eventually, they sold this holding in the club to Magnier and MacManus' Cubic Expression, because (I am fairly convinced) they were sure that they would in turn sell it to Malcolm Glazer. Glazer owning Manchester United would be no different to News Corporation owning Manchester United because it would be largely about trying to sell the Manchester United brand to the Americans and the Japanese, which is what both parties want. If Glazer buys Manchester United then you can guarantee that the Premiership season will be made shorter in order to accommodate Manchester United's lengthening summer tours of the states. This then is the way that football, like most other sports will be going - it already happens in America and it will happen here, and it is all because of TV. Thus you have the "game that ate itself" as The Observer calls it. An appropriate metaphor bearing in mind that much of this seems to be about greed.
There are three connected points to these facts which I make as a kind of cultural commentary from someone who has lost all interest in football other than it's status as a media text:
1) Wayne Rooney's move from Everton to Manchester United had to be prefigured by an apology from The Sun newspaper. The Sun is a News Corporation title and in order to get the co-operation of Everton and the people of Liverpool it had to eat humble pie publicly. This would facilitate good relations between the Premiership and BSkyb (another News Corporation company). It only took fifteen odd years...
2) Manchester United fans who complain that Abramovich and co. have only achieved success at Chelsea by buying a team only have themselves to blame. When Ferguson first got his hands on Murdoch's money the first hing he did was to bring in a whole load of big name foreign players (Cantona, Schmeichel etc.) and build a team that would shatter the dominance of Liverpool - objectively the team that had been the most successful British club of the previous 15 years. Abramovich is just doing the same, except his money comes from oil (and other activities?) and not the media.
3) Football, Sky and Manchester United are inextricably linked with that other important British cultural discourse, drinking. The practice of going to a pub to watch a football match is only about ten years old, but a closer look at it tells us so much about how the media has changed our social habits. Now, going to the pub is as often as big an event as going to a match itself. Drinkers meet their friends there, they have encounters with opposition fans and they can sing and chant, much as they would at a game. This is what has led to the fracturing of football as a game built on communities. It is quite possible to be a Manchester United fan and live in Woking because this person is, through the "football-in-pub" experience, able to be as much of a fan as the person who goes to Old Trafford. You can see this in one of two ways; it is either a democratisation of the game or as a watering down of the things that made football a great experience.Indeed, one might suggest that were Malcolm Glazer to move Manchester United to Miami, most fans would not now mind as long as the game is shown in their local. It seems no coincidence then that in the same Queen's speech that the government outlined it's plans for 24-hour drinking, they also outlined plans to allow overseas broadcasters to run terrestrial TV channels (step forward News Corporation). The cynical old Marxist in me would suggest that both football and beer are products designed to keep the nations mind off the damage the current government is doing to the environment, the poor and transport in this country.But that is the only strong opinion in an article dominated largely by sad facts...

© Steve Connolly 2005

Newspapers in general and The Guardian...a move a droit?

2005-02-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

I work with quite a lot of overseas teachers who ask me to explain the state of the British press to them. In America and Australia, newspapers tend to be localised (focused on cities) rather than national, and soem people find it quite hard to understand how the British newspaper market supports so many papers. The most topical answer to this of course is that it doesn't, what with newspaper sales falling . Anyway, one such recent conversation led me to give the "Yes Minister" explanation of the British Press, which as a young media teacher I swiftly adapted and pressed into my own service. With apologies to the original author then, here follows my version of the explanation:
THE TIMES is read by the people who run the country
THE FT is read by the people who own the country
THE GUARDIAN is read by the people who think they should run the country
THE TELEGRAPH is read by the people who ran the country 30 years ago
THE DAILY MAIL is read by the wives of the people who run the country
THE EXPRESS is read by the people who think the country isn't what it used to be
THE INDEPENDENT is read by the people who are too busy getting on with it to worry about who runs the country
THE MIRROR is read by the people who work for the country
THE STAR is read by the people who think that TV is the country
THE METRO is read by the people who don't mind who runs the country as long as the tube runs on time and the people who read THE SUN don't care who runs the country as long as she looks good...
I first started to use this explanation as way into telling students about the political lanscape of the country and the British when I realised that they didn't know the difference between political left and right. Along with it I always used to use a diagram which looked a bit like the one below, developed by my colleague Dr. Huw Bucknell:

LEFT /CENTRE /RIGHT
LABOUR/ LIB DEM/ TORIES
SOCIALISM/ LIBERALISM /CONSERVATISM
THE COLLECTIVE /THE CENTRE /THE INDIVIDUAL
MIRROR, GUARDIAN /THE INDEPENDENT /THE SUN, THE TIMES

Of course, these days, as some of my students have pointed out there's a good case for not having any paper or political party to the left of centre. New Labour is really a party of the centre on a good day and well to the right of it for the other 3oo days of the year. I grudgingly agreed with them, but always thought that the good old Guardian was the last bastion of lefty journalism and always would be - full of the "Dave Sparts" that Private Eye often likes to have a laugh at. However, a chat with a fellow reader pointed at a sneaking suspicion that even the Grauniad is drifting a bit too. Not in any major way, but just enough to get traditional readers going and promote a bit of intellectual fisticuffs between them and the audience that the Guardian (and every other broadsheet) aspires to, namely single professional twentysomethings who spent their entire childhoods as Thatcher's children. The Promotion of columnists like the decidedly hawkish David Aaronovitch seem to suggest this, and there seems to be a desire to be the paper of the establishment as The Times and The Telegraph implode over the size of their pages.
What this shows Media students , anyway is that newspapers are always in a state of shift, not only in terms of their political allegiance , but also in terms of their readership (witness The Sun under David Yelland, which became much more touchy-feely and almost middle class). The fact is that as a student of the Media you constantly have to look beyond the front page at the content of the paper and particularly to the editorial/comment pages. As a teacher a good exercise to get students to do is to get them to collect editorial pages from a range of newspapers and spread them out across a left-right spectrum, OR to take a particular topic, like the War in Iraq and spread them out from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. This should give them a sense of where any one paper sits (politically speaking at any one time).
Any one else got any thoughts on this?
If so...rant on brothers and sisters, at your leisure
Steve C.

Upcoming articles

2005-02-12T06:18:00.000-08:00

Mmmm...hello. All a bit new to this blogging lark. Just like to draw students and teachers attention to the next issue of Media Magazine (10), which has lots of excellent articles that are useful for students and teachers, including one by yours truly on "Outfoxed" the documentary which well and truly puts the boot into Fox news and the Murdoch empire in general. Also in the mag is a really good article about Media Ownership by my former colleague Laureen Todd, who I thought would like a plug as well. I'd really like it if anyone wanted to read the article and ask any further questions on it, or any of the other stuff I've written for the Magazine. I've also got some research going on at the moment trying to find out about how people learn to make film. Check out my page at the Centre for the Study of Children Youth and the Media to find out more. Finally if any one wants to discuss/ask anything about Media Studies and Media Education or the world of rock 'n' roll just post your comments here.
back soon
Steve C.