The essay intends to provide clear and descriptive information based on social representation, culture and reflections in the audiences daily activities. The WritePass Journal

The essay intends to provide clear and descriptive information based on social representation, culture and reflections in the audiences daily activities. Introduction The essay intends to provide clear and descriptive information based on social representation, culture and reflections in the audiences daily activities. Introduction The content of the essay intends to provide clear and descriptive information based on social representation, culture and reflections in the audiences daily activities. The content focuses on argument that states as follows: are media texts socially constructed and not necessarily ‘true’ reflections of reality. Generally, we (the audience) live lives which are which are already paved, the media or the media texts that the audiences consume determine what the audiences do daily, what they eat, dress, drive, influences their profession, in short the media texts declares the lifestyles of the audiences. In argument to the above underlined statement, one has to provide certain descriptions that will unpack the argument further; there are several meanings of representation, culture and reflection. In general terms, or briefly, representation refers to the production of meaning through language. That is not the only meaning to representation, the other meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary are as follows: â€Å"To represent is to depict, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal or imagination; to place a likeliness of it before us in our mind or in the senses.† The second description is: â€Å"To represent also means to symbolize, stand for, to be a specimen of, or to substitute for; as in the sentence, ‘In Christianity, the cross represents the suffering and crucifixion of Christ.’ The following description should be of culture and what it entails, ‘culture refers to the widely distributed forms of popular music, publishing art, design and literature, or the activities of leisure-time and entertainment, which make up the everyday lives of the majority of ‘ordinary people’ (Hall, 1997). From these descriptions one can tell that representation connects meaning and language to culture, to elaborate further, one common sense usage of the term is as follows: ‘Representation means using language to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other people’ (du Gay, Hall et al. 1997). ‘Representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture, representation does involve the use of signs and images which stand for or represent things’ (du Gay, Hall et al. 1997). The above information on representation does to some extent argue that media texts are socially constructed and are not necessarily ‘true’ reflections of reality. Generally, ‘reality is what most people assume exists independently of any concept or representation’ (Grossberg, 1998). According to Grossberg (1998), ‘news is a reality and nothing else.’ Reality is a product of cultural codes, that is, our social environment presents us with a collection of material facts which we can accurately perceive. Again, â€Å"reality is always represented; representation involves the construction of reality. Reality requires interpretations and all texts, however ‘realistic’ they may seem to be, are constructed representations rather than simply transparent ‘reflections’, recordings, transcriptions or reproductions of a pre existing reality† (Alvarado et al. 1987: 153). Representation contains of three theories, they are the reflective approach that states: â€Å"meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, idea or event in the real world, and language functions like a mirror, to reflect the true meaning as it already exists in the world† (Hall, 1997). ‘A two dimensional visual image of a rose is a sign-it should not be confused with the real plant with thorns and blooms growing in the garden’ (Hall, 1997). One cannot speak or think or draw with an actual rose. And if someone says that there is no such word as ‘rose’ for a plant in her culture, the actual plant in the garden cannot resolve the failure of communication between two people. The second approach is the intentional approach, this approach states that: â€Å"It is the speaker, the author, who imposes his or her unique meaning to the world through language. Words mean what the author intends they should mean† (Hall, 1997). And the third approach is that of the constructionist approach, and it is as follows: â€Å"Nothing or no one can fix meaning in a language, things do not mean, we construct meaning using representational systems, concepts and signs† (Hall, 1997). For argumentation’s sake, take the example of the President of the African National Congress Youth League, Julius Malema. Now Julius Malema is represented as this black, stupid, idiotic, uneducated, trouble causing person from the rural of Limpopo who was lucky enough to squeeze himself into politics and is now successful. Yes the ANC Youth League president can sometimes act foolish in front of the nation, he can be disobedient and disrespect the State President Mr. Jacob Zuma, he can cause chaos, but he is human too and bound to do good things too. He is probably a good child to his parents and probably supportive to his family and maybe he does give back to his community back in Limpopo and he even supported Caster Semenya when she was deprived her gold medal due to allegations of her being hermaphrodite, now what do media texts say about this? If media texts were of ‘true’ reflection, the world would know the good and bad things that Julius Malema does, but bec ause what the audiences see are representations, this is why the texts only produce cynical things about Julius Malema because media texts are socially constructed, and mostly with lies because they sell. Prior to Julius Malema’s unfair representations, are representations of the South African President, Mr. Jacob Zuma. One believes that the cartoon images presented by Zapiro are true reflections of the President, this is said because as the president, Mr. Jacob Zuma confirmed the laws and they protect him more so, he can get away with everything and still be represented as a good person. Now there have been many instances regarding the President, that of having sex with some young girl or should one say (the rape he committed) which he was never prosecuted for due to the belief that he did not do it but it is the young girl who fully agreed and the involvement of arms deal with Schabir Shaik who is now scot-free from prison because he was\still is the President’s friend. The President was not prosecuted for these allegations just because he is the President and that what would people say, how would his fellow peers (other Presidents) think of him and nations say when th ey hear that the South African President was prosecuted for raping a young girl, that he was involved in an illegal arms deal and that he has been awarded the order of the bath?   After committing all these acts, he still gets good representations whereas some people committed only a few acts but receive cynical representations. A focus on images also allows us to connect our discussion with postmodernist writers who play off the two meanings of the word. Images are, on the one hand, reproductions, but they have a second meaning as well: a mental picture of something not real or present. Baudrillard (1988) argues that dramatic changes in the technology of reproduction have led to the implosion of representation and reality. Increasingly, the former becomes dominant as simulacra are substituted for a reality that has no foundation in experience. Conscious design to persuade is largely irrelevant for our purposes. We assume that a wide variety of media messages can act as teachers of values, ideologies. And beliefs and that they can provide images for interpreting the world whether or not the designers are conscious of this intent. An advertisement; for example, may be intended merely to sell cigarettes to women, but incidentally it may encode a message about gender relations and what it means to be a woman. I n talking about those who decode such messages, we use the term reader rather than audience. As Fiske (1987) suggests, the latter term implies that television reaches a homogeneous mass of people who are all essentially identical, who receive the same messages, meanings, and ideologies from the same programs and who are essentially passive. By readers, we mean those who read or decode sights and sounds as well as printed text. Reading media imagery is an active process in which context, social location, and prior experience can lead to quite different decodings. Furthermore, it is frequently interactive, taking place in conversation with other readers who may see different meanings. If all we have learned is that reality construction takes place in a commercialized space that promotes a generalized feel good about capitalism, this does not take us very far. It leaves open a bewildering array of messages that are produced in many voices and many modes and that can be read in many different ways. Whatever we can learn from reality construction by examining the production process, it leaves a great deal open and undetermined. The media images produced by the process can be treated as texts that take many forms-visual imagery, sound, and language. The difficulties of tracking the messages in these texts are compounded by the problem of layers of meaning. Some part of the meaning is naturalized-that is, it comes to us in the form of taken-for-granted assumptions (Fiske, 1987). One cannot take texts at face value since they contain subtexts; a whole set of texts may have an even more invisible metamessage. Many different disciplines take on this daunting task of decoding media texts. Typically, researchers carve out some particular domain of discourse on which to focus their attention-for example, race, class, or gender relations, or policy domains such as health, housing, energy, and the like. The research is some form of text or discourse analysis with different disciplines emphasizing different techniques. No short review could hope to do justice to the thousands of insightful analyses of media imagery. We confine our attention to three issues with particular relevance for political consciousness: (a) issues raised by the concept of hegemony, (b) framing and frame transformation, and (c) the fragmentation effect (Fiske, 1987). In short, one can conclude by saying that the argument holds true to the fact that what we are being presented with by the media texts is complete representation of past and present events of the world. The media texts only serve to inform us what the journalist or the proprietor wants us to know and nothing more. Only the powerful control what readers should know and what they should not. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudrillard, J. (1988). Selected Writings,(ed). Mark Poster. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press. Fiske, J. 1987. Television Culture. London New York: Routledge Gamson, W. (1992). Media discourse as a symbolic contest: The bomb in political cartoons. Soc. Forum Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. (Ed. Q. Hoare, G. N. Smith).New York: Int. Publications. Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage Publications: Open University.