Representation is how media texts deal with and present gender, age, ethnicity, national and regional identity, social issues, and events to an audience. Media texts have the power to shape an audience’s knowledge and understanding of these important topics.
This makes them very powerful in terms of influencing ideas and attitudes. In order to analyze media texts to determine how they've represented ideas and issues, it's important to be familiar with some of the key terms.
Mediation
This is the process everything goes through before it reaches an audience. This can be how a film script is written and re-written before it makes it to production, how newspaper or magazine photographs are cropped and captioned, or how real-life events - like a protest or a speech by a politician - are portrayed in a news report.
Stereotypes
These are a simplified representation of a person, groups of people, or a place, through basic or obvious characteristics - which are often exaggerated.
For example, Vicky Pollard from Little Britain is a stereotypical example of a working-class teenage girl. They can be used to describe characters quickly, relying on existing audience recognition. Stereotypes are dangerous as they can lead audiences to generalize about people or places.
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