Relevant to magazines - PPA top 100 magazine covers + interactive timeline  http://www.ppa.co.uk/PPA100/

Music industry links

http://musicindustrysectionb.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.bpi.co.uk/

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/04/what-impact-has-mobile-had-on-the-music-industry-infographic.html

http://infographic.im/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Music_Evolution_lowres1.jpg

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/musicindustry

Assessment objectives - what you will be assessed on?

AO1 - Demonstrate knowledge & understanding of media concepts, contexts and critical debates, using terminology appropriately and with accurate and coherent written expression.

AO2 - Apply knowledge and understanding to show how meanings are created when analysing media products and evaluating their own practical work.

AO3 - Demonstrate the ability to plan and construct media products using appropriate technical and creative skills.

AO4- Demonstrate the ability to undertake and apply appopriate research.

EXAM in brief

Exam paper covers two areas:

Section A (50 marks) - Answer Qs on an unseen clip from a TV drama, linked to an aspect of representation in the sequence.
Sequence will be from a contemporary one-off drama or series or seral drama programme screened on British TV, including some sourced from other countries.

Section B (50 marks) -  Answer one compulsory question based upon a case study of a specific media industry (film)

MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

maslow's hierarchy of needs

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs motivational model

Abraham Maslow developed the Hierarchy of Needs model in 1940-50s USA, and the Hierarchy of Needs theory remains valid today for understanding human motivation, management training, and personal development. Indeed, Maslow's ideas surrounding the Hierarchy of Needs concerning the responsibility of employers to provide a workplace environment that encourages and enables employees to fulfil their own unique potential (self-actualization) are today more relevant than ever. Abraham Maslow's book Motivation and Personality, published in 1954 (second edition 1970) introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, and Maslow extended his ideas in other work, notably his later book Toward A Psychology Of Being, a significant and relevant commentary, which has been revised in recent times by Richard Lowry, who is in his own right a leading academic in the field of motivational psychology.

Abraham Maslow was born in New York in 1908 and died in 1970, although various publications appear in Maslow's name in later years. Maslow's PhD in psychology in 1934 at the University of Wisconsin formed the basis of his motivational research, initially studying rhesus monkeys. Maslow later moved to New York's Brooklyn College.

The Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs five-stage model below (structure and terminology - not the precise pyramid diagram itself) is clearly and directly attributable to Maslow; later versions of the theory with added motivational stages are not so clearly attributable to Maslow. These extended models have instead been inferred by others from Maslow's work. Specifically Maslow refers to the needs Cognitive, Aesthetic and Transcendence (subsequently shown as distinct needs levels in some interpretations of his theory) as additional aspects of motivation, but not as distinct levels in the Hierarchy of Needs.

Where Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is shown with more than five levels these models have been extended through interpretation of Maslow's work by other people. These augmented models and diagrams are shown as the adapted seven and eight-stage Hierarchy of Needs pyramid diagrams and models below.

There have been very many interpretations of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in the form of pyramid diagrams. The diagrams on this page are my own interpretations and are not offered as Maslow's original work. Interestingly in Maslow's book Motivation and Personality, which first introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, there is not a pyramid to be seen.

Free Hierarchy of Needs diagrams in pdf and doc formats similar to the image below are available from this page.

click to enlarge

(N.B. The word Actualization/Actualisation can be spelt either way. Z is preferred in American English. S is preferred in UK English. Both forms are used in this page to enable keyword searching for either spelling via search engines.)

maslow's hierarchy of needs

Each of us is motivated by needs. Our most basic needs are inborn, having evolved over tens of thousands of years. Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs helps to explain how these needs motivate us all.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs states that we must satisfy each need in turn, starting with the first, which deals with the most obvious needs for survival itself.

Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of influence and personal development.

Conversely, if the things that satisfy our lower order needs are swept away, we are no longer concerned about the maintenance of our higher order needs.

Maslow's original Hierarchy of Needs model was developed between 1943-1954, and first widely published in Motivation and Personality in 1954. At this time the Hierarchy of Needs model comprised five needs. This original version remains for most people the definitive Hierarchy of Needs.

 

USES AND GRATIFICATION

Uses & Gratifications theory

During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass,
audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways.

 

In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:

 

·                  surveillance

·                  correlation

·                  entertainment

·                  cultural transmission

 

Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications):

 

·         Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.

·         Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other
interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life

·         Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning
behaviour and values from texts

·         Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg)
weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

 

 

Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, particularly as new media forms have come along (eg video games, the internet).

 

Q: What would you add?

 

REPRESENTATION

Representation

Understanding representation is all about understanding the choices that are made when it comes to portraying something or someone in a mass media text.

It's impossible to portray every aspect of an individual in a photograph, or even in a feature film, so certain features of their personality and appearance get highlighted, and are often enhanced, when it comes to constructing the representation that the audience will see. When representing a person, media texts often focus on their:

·         Age

·         Gender

·         Race/Ethnicity

·         Financial Status

·         Job

·         Culture/nationality

Signs and symbols are used as a kind of visual shorthand to represent these attributes. When we decode these signs we make assumptions about who the character is (usually by comparing them to similar characters we have encountered before), and this allows us to put them in a category and "read" them in context. For instance, when constructing characters for a TV or movie scene the producers might give an old man white hair and a walking stick, or provide a wealthy lawyer with a three piece suit to wear and a briefcase to carry. Whilst not all old men need a walking stick and not all lawyers carry briefcases, these are easy and quick ways of signifying information about the character.

Who? What? Why? Where?

When you're analysing representation, think about the following questions:

·         Who or what is being represented? Who is the preferred audience for this representation?

·         What are they doing? Is their activity presented as typical, or atypical? Are they conforming to genre expectations or other conventions?

·         Why are they present? What purpose do they serve? What are they communicating by their presence? What's the preferred reading?

·         Where are they? How are they framed? Are they represented as natural or artificial? What surrounds them? What is in the foreground and what is in the background?

 

Once you start to think carefully about different representations, you will find that the same representation means different things to different people. We all decode representations according to our own life experience, where we've lived, how old we are, and what other media texts we are familiar with, as well as a myriad psychological factors. Other elements such as political sympathies and social class can come into play. When producers construct a media representation, they often assume that the audience is one homogenous mass that will all decode the representation in the same way. However, people see even the most basic images in different ways. Look at the two famous optical illusions below. What do you see first?