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Exercises

Exercise 1:

Read Quote 1, Look up the definition of stereotyped and explain in your own words what they mean by "representations of gender remain stereotyped"?

What do the words marginalisation, romanticisation and omission mean. After finding the definition of these words, what do you think Quote 2 is saying about representation of race and culture in Australian media?

Exercise 1 print version

Homework

Introduction

The great thing about the internet, print advertising, the news and popular culture is that, after this course, you will be not only literate in  the traditional sense....you will be multi literate. I mean, you will be able to enjoy using all these different forms of media as you always have, but the difference is that you will be able to make intelligent choices as to how and why the media represents people and situations, what techniques they use and why they use them.

But before we go on, let me just say that the purpose of this course is not to convince you that you should not enjoy all these different forms of media, on the contrary, I hope that you always continue to enjoy this past time. Let us just learn a little more about on of this things we enjoy the most......MEDIA :)

How this website works

Basically follow the instructions on each page and you will be fine. You must start by reading all of this Introduction page and complete the exercises on the left. Each page will have some vocabulary section (below) to help with some strange looking words that might be on that page. Otherwise, any online dictionary will also help, e.g. The Longman Online Dictionary and Dictionary.com

Representation (Exercise 1)

Look at these quotes about race and gender and how they are shown in the media:

Quote 1: Despite some changes in the media portrayal of women and men in the last decade, representations of gender remain stereotyped. Men in lead roles continue to outnumber women across all program genres (Luke 2003, p198).

Quote 2: Media representations of 'race' and culture can be characterised, at best, by marginalisation and romanticisation and, at worst, glaring omission. The portrayal of persons of colour on Australian TV is overwhelmingly of African-Americans.....In contrast, Australian Indigenous and migrant cultures are not part of the everyday televisual landscape in any genre - at least no on commercial TV (Luke 2003, p203).

Please now go to the exercises link on the left before moving onto Stereotyping.

Vocabulary

Texts: This refers to any form of media that we will look at and analyse. Therefore a media text could be a print ad, a TV commercial, a movie, a song, etc.

Genre: A style or category of art, literature, movies, TV, etc

Homework

Activity 1: The following image and questions were taken and adapted from Branston (2002, p94):

1. How can you tell which of the very simply drawn characters above is male and which is female?

2. Which lines on the drawing told you?

3. Try to find other, similar examples in birthday cards, or children's comics and cartoon characters.

4. What does this suggest about the ease with which assumptions of gender differences circulate in our culture?

 


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