Does the Media Control the Construction of Identity?
Exemplar A Grade Essay 40/48 (more on the role of digital media needed)
Before answering this question, the concept of identity needs to be explained – I will be focusing on British National Identity but identities and the media can include self representation (how British you perceive yourself), collective identity in terms of how Britishness can be categorised in homogenous ways, dominant and marginalised representations of British national identity but also audience responses to identity suggesting a shared ideology. A well-known David Gauntlett quotation suggested: “Identity is complicated, everyone’s got one” signposting a less hegemonic approach to identity in favour of more fragmented, individualistic representations.
Schools, for a relatively short period of time have been under instruction from the Department for Education to promote British values – these include democracy, the rule of law, liberty, respect and tolerance. The topic of British National Identity is much discussed and scrutinised, but no better illustrated than from within the media. The Daily Mail is a mid market Tabloid that promotes what is seen to be more traditional British values while satirist Charlie Brooker promotes a more diverse brand. Within political parties there exists a diverse brand of British National Identity while sitcoms like Outnumbered presents audiences with a not untypical, middle class family unit and at the same time Al Murray: Pub Landlord offers deeply ironic representations. As Zygmunt Bauman suggests, this conflict as a reflection of identity is problematic.
British film has been obsessed for many years with representation of British National Identity, in part through representations of social class but as Jill Nelmes argues, it is impossible to talk about British National Identity in film without focus on regional identity – films like Fish Tank (2009) and Selfish Giant (2013) represent east London/Essex and Yorkshire identity from the perspective of the underclass - the oppressed with narrative focus being on difficult children from problematical backgrounds. The problem here for identity is that the specific brand of identity that is being promoted is open to stereotyping and passive consumption by audiences. Identity construction is a combination of both the individual and society and is in a constant process of negotiation. Mia in Fish Tank constructs her own individual identity but in negotiation with societal norms; an audience judges her.
Traditional media represents British National Identity as a more hegemonic construct. The British Royal Family are frequent visitors to the running orders of television news programmes e.g. narratives about Prince William, Kate Middleton and the birth of their second child. This positive representation of a British institution could be argued to be disproportionate and mythical in comparison to the Royal Family’s popularity in polls. Every time the England football team play, whether in a friendly or competitive tournament again the news item is normally high up in the news schedules. Conversely, digital mediasuggests a more fragmented approach to identity with evidence of more complexity and diversity and using the uses and gratifications model as a framework, audiences more actively consume representations of British National Identity. In this regard, David Buckingham would suggest that we have increasingly fragmented identities that can no longer subscribe to a hegemonic representation of British National Identity.
The media undoubtedly mediates identity but notions of control remain in the realm of consumption – passive audiences could watch BBC’s flagship Six O’clock News and think that there is not really much else happening around the world as the running order is carefully selected and constructed to represent the interest of British nationals. An active audience however could question the narrative focus and seek more global news coverage on other channels like CNN of Al Jazeera English. Newspapers as the fourth estate however have come under the fiercest of criticism as institutions that promote, and maintain a British hegemony – in main the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph. While patriotism must clearly be defined from nationalism there is often a lack of objective balance, seeking instead to promote through subjective epistemologies, dominant preferred meanings using Stuart Hall’s framework. Use of words like ‘our’, ‘we’ and ‘us’ help to encode this shared identity.
British National Identity must also reference the increasing fragmentation of the union, in part due to the recent Scottish Union referendum but also increasing calls for devolved power from the National Assembly for Wales. It is the media’s response that is worth studying in attempting to analyse how prevalent institutional control of identity is. Ironically, much media coverage can be found commonly representing British identity in a negative way – teenage pregnancies, obesity and ‘Broken Britain’ (focusing on youth crime and deviancy amplification) as recurring moral panics which itself is an identifiable identity stereotype – negativity and self deprecation.
Heritage and tradition work to counteract this negativity with many media institutions commonly representing the Britain of past with underlying suggestions that things were better ‘back in the day’. ITV and Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey is a critically and commercially successful period drama that lavishly, in high production values represents British cultural heritage while in binary opposition to this approach (favoured by a tradition itself of heritage period drama films) is British social realism – gritty dramas by Directors like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh who offer more realist working class representations of British National Identity. Hegemony and more liberal pluralism exist often in equal measure – the advertising industry for example exploits the representation of British National Identity with John Lewis, Yorkshire Tea and BT adverts aimed at an older, more traditional demographic.
Currently the British government are contemplating using the media for a range of anti British ads targeting potential immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria – images could focus on the poor weather, rude London, triple dip recession and record levels of youth unemployment seeking to put people off coming to the UK. Here the media would be controlling the construction of identity but through added on governmental control. It is certainly in the interests of certain groups to represent British National Identity in certain ways but as Anthony Giddens suggested, this representation is constantly updated as a result of social, political and cultural change. In contrast to this, and despite his earlier quote that identity is complicated, Gauntlett recognises that the media offers possibilities and celebrates diversity but in some quarters, offers one-dimensional narrow interpretations.
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