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The Only way is Essex and Sex and the City

The Only Way is Essex

Lauren

• o    ‘Marks long suffering girlfriend on/off girlfriend’- what the website describes her as.  She is defined by her relationship with a man.
• o   His family don’t like her- she tries to cook them a meal to impress her. The mother, Nan and sister think that she should be able to cook dinner for. They think she should know how to cook, clean and know how to be a good wife.  There is still the demand for women to fulfil a traditional role.
• o   Her boyfriend also expects her to fulfil the traditional role.  He says that now she has moved back in, she will have to make sure that all the house is clean. He says that not only is she suppose to be impressing his family but also she needs to impress him as a housewife.  He tells the women to do the washing up whilst he goes out because he doesn’t want to come back to a dirty house.
• o   She is clearly uncomfortable and doesn’t know what she is doing when she is cooking, but is so eager to impress them that she continues to cook the meal.
• o   Things are also all about appearance with her. She is cooking in high heels, fall make up…
• o   She has also had plastic surgery. Pressure on her to look a certain way.

o  

Lydia

• o   She is affectionate towards hers boyfriend- supportive, although she does laugh at him at the diet club.
• o   She goes to a diet club with her boyfriend as she thinks he should lose weight.
• o   ‘No nonsense Essex girl who won’t stand for being messed about by any one’- this is a reference to her relationship with Arg, her boyfriend.
• o   Close to her mum- her mum is in a lot of the same scenes as Lydia
• o   In every scene she is wearing a different outfit. There is great importance put on their appearance. 

Sex and the City

Carrie

• o   There is a focus on relationships again. She is heartbroken over her split from ‘Mr Big’.
• o   There is also a focus on appearance- she isn’t happy with her appearance when she thinks she might meet her ex.
• o   She wears a fur coat and high heels to a baseball game.
• o   She spends all her money on a new dress for her date.
• o   She doesn’t like sport, she is more interested in looking at the men. This is partly constructed through the clothes she is wearing at the game, as she is overdressed, she is sitting with her feet up not really paying any attention to what is going on and says that they are sitting so far back so that she does not get in trouble for smoking. 
• o   She is very confident in herself- she has the confidence enough to ask out ‘the new yankie’. She is breaking the stereotype and being a strong woman, although she partly does it to get back at her ex. 
• o   She is reflective of her relationship- she over analyses her relationship. Stereotypical? The voiceovers where she ponders questions about her relationship and relationships in general show how she is feeling. This is a feature of every single Sex and the City episode.

Miranda

• o   She claims that she would just get over a relationship with someone- the other girls claim that she doesn’t.
• o   She does like sport- she is there for the game not to look at the men, like Carrie and the other two women.
• o   Lawyer- high powered, successful woman. Controlled.
• o   She shows off her new gadget- it has her schedule on it. This shows she is very focused and organised. Stereotypical of a career woman.
• o   She doesn’t want to talk about relationship. She leaves the table abruptly when the three others start talking about their relationships and says that she is upset that all four smart women have to talk about is men. 

• With the two girls from The Only Way is Essex and Carrie there is a similarity in that all three women put an importance on appearance. Whilst they have different styles, they both make an effort with their appearance. The difference is that the women in The Only way is Essex are mocked for the way that they look and are dressed, whilst the women in Sex and the City, particularly Carrie are admired. 

• In Sex and the City the women are the main characters and the men are just in it when they are going out with one of the women, but in The Only Way is Essex, the women are defined by their relationships, which is clear from the way that the website describes them, particularly Lauren. With the exception of two women, all of the women are in relationships.
• In both shows they also spend most of their time talking about their relationships, which Miranda in Sex and the City is frustrated with.
• Miranda is perhaps the character that is different to the other women who I have looked at. She is smart, independent, not in a relationship and does not seemingly put the same emphasis on her appearance (although she is wearing a coat with the Fendi logo on suggesting that she still takes and interest in fashion)
• Whilst she appears strong and confident, at the end of the episode she meets the man who broke her heart and she turns out to be just the same as the other women in this respect. 
• A big difference is that the women in Sex and the City seem to have careers. They are independent women. The women in The Only Way is Essex seem to spend all their time shopping and bitching. Although the women in Sex in the City are seen at lunch and dinner a lot throughout the show, we are aware that they had their own jobs and are not supported by men .e.g. Carrie is a journalist and Miranda is a Lawyer. We do not know what Lauren and Lydia do for a living. 
• The women in Sex and the City, with the exception of Charlotte, do not feel pressure to be a housewives, like they do in The Only Way is Essex, where the women are expected by both men and women to cook and clean for their boyfriends and husbands. 

News coverage of Ian Tomlinson’s death at the G20 summit

• Initially we were told that he died of a heart attack, bought on by natural causes but a week later The Gaurdian obtained footage which had been shot by an American investment fun manager and showed Tomlinson being struck on the leg from behind by a police officers with a baton and then being pushed to the ground by the same officer.
  
• When journalists asked if he had been in contact with police before his death they were told that speculation would only upset family.


• Evening Standard reported that the police had attempted to help him but an eyewitness account said that was not true. It was protestors not police who had tried to help.


• Video shows that the protestors stopped hurling objects at the police when they realised that someone was hurt.


• First video published by The Guardian



• Channel 4 then released another video- had been filming something else and this was in the background.


• Footage shot by freelance journalist Nabella Zahir- showed that there had not been a barrage of objects being thrown at the police whilst they were trying to save him, which the police had claimed.


• The Guardian said that the police mislead journalists. They had told them he had died of natural causes and that his family had not been surprised to hear that he had died of a heart attack.


• Reporters who approached the corners directly were refused comment.


• The morning The Guardian published photographs, his family visted scene and gave personal contact details to the journalist, Paul Lewis, and asked him to stay in contact if he found out any more about his death.


• Guardian handed video to IPCC as evidence.


• Some said that the extensive reporting of the story crossed the line in which people become obsessed with finding photographs and films of his last moment, designed to whip up outrage.


• Guardian criticised for burning their brand name onto the video so that when ever it was watched, their name appeared.


• Boris Johnson called the coverage an ‘orgy of cop bashing’.

Virtual revolution- Episode 2

Virtual revolution: Episode 2

Enemy of the state?

Web seems to have set information free.
Anyone who wants to participate has a least the means to participate.
Powerful tool for the state to control us.
Old centres of power are crumbling
History is littered with unintended circumstances.
Iran put a ban on any media reporting in country- turned to Twitter. 200,000 tweets about Iran posted every hour at it’s heights.
Messages forwarded to a larger audience. Key link from protestors to outside world.
Info placed in the hands of people making it like ‘quick silver- irrepressible and uncontainable’.
Soon you tube was involved- millions witnessed a woman dying because of regime.
Shaking up world politics because it can transmit info globally from the hands of people who have seen it first hand.
Use the power of info to inspire other people and uprising- done this through Twitter.
Twitter didn’t cause the uprising, but they could use it to help them do something about it.
Internet works against central control- that’s why information can be spread. Data can be transported through various roots- this would cause problems or the government for years to come.
Internet links up ¼ of the world
Individual countries like Iran cannot just shut the internet down, even if they wanted to.
In 20^th century, if you had something to say in public you couldn’t.
Not a controlled environment- number of individuals who can do what they want with information.
With computers we are all on a level playing field- one person can take on a government.
Web gives citizens power to root around censorship and access allows them to point out wrong doings.
Younger generations feel left out by politics, in the past they were limited as to where they could express their views but now they can just log on to the internet.
Before communities were only ones they could be physically present in- now you don’t have to be.
　Wikileaks
Anonymous users
Posted a membership list of BMP, classified army documents, contents of Sarah Palin’s private yahoo account to access public records etc…
Over 1.2 billion pages.
No logs
Military grade inscriptions to protect
Under constant attack
Court injunction by bank following wikileaks published claims of tax invasions- first time had been attacked
Got taken offline- just got people more interested. People became interested in the stories of Wikileaks.
Taking them offline didn’t work. There web address just changes slightly. Information is still out there.

What difference has web 2.0 made to the distribution and consumption of news and are bold claims that ‘everything has changed’ an accurate one?

Over time, the way in which we consume news has changed. In the past, we would have relied on receiving our news from papers, the radio, letters, telegrams and even the cinema. The advent of web 1.0 meant we could then read our newspapers online but this has progressed even further with developments in the internet and the evolution into web 2.0. Now, as well as simply consuming our news online through the newspapers websites, we can be the be the ones that spread the news, break the news and even make the news thanks to the help of social networking sights such as Facebook and Twitter.

Social networking has undoubtedly played a key role in the change of the distribution and consumption of news. Site’s such as Twitter and Facebook allow us, as well as well established newspapers such as The Guardian and The Times who have profiles on both of these websites, to draw the attention of our ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ to particular stories that we are personally interested in or feel needs to be heard or in the case of the reputable news providers, any breaking news story or articles in their paper on that day. Twitter’s impact on the way we consume news is evident when we look at the reaction to a story published by the Daily Mail following the death of Stephen Gatley. High profile celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Darren Brown used their profile pages to express contempt for the article and by doing so drew attention to a larger crowd then just Daily Mail readers. Social networking would support the claim that ‘everything has changed’ in one sense because it can be used to spread information at a rate that would have been impossible with the use of more traditional forms of media. This is also true of the instance when Twitter was used by protestors in Iran following the elections. All forms of media were banned from entering the country, but through Twitter, the people who were involved in what was happening in Iran were able to draw attention to the story through the use of Twitter. It was the only form of communicating they had with the rest of the world and at it’s peak 200,000 tweets were being sent in an hour. This meant that anyone, anywhere in the world could know what was happening, not just those directly involved. Whilst this is endurably a good thing, what it also means is that we are in danger of limiting the genre of news that we consume because sites such as Facebook and Twitter are likely to lead us only to the stuff that we are interested in as these are the only web pages that we will open.

This is also the problem we consider that because of 2.0 we now consume our news through apps on mobile phones and i-pads. These apps are likely to be very specialised, for example the Sky Sports News app will only give information on sport and not any other news stories. Whilst apps like this allow us to perhaps find out more specific details about the area that we are reading about, as they only have to concentrate on one area, it still means that we are possibly narrowing the variety of news we consume.

Apps and social networking sites, however, do mean that we are constantly up to date with any developments in news stories. In the past, we would have relied on newspapers to give us information once a day. By the time consumers would have read that article, there may have already been developments in that story and instantly the news is out of date. Web 2.0 means that we can access up to date news stories all the time and in this instance ‘everything has changed’. As consumers we now demand that our news is as up to date as it can possibly be. This was something that many felt was a failure of the iPad, as the stories did not seem to be the latest news stories.

As a result of the evolution of the internet, we are also able to interact with news. On newspaper websites there is the chance for readers to comment on the article they have just read and the use of blogs means that any one can express an opinion on a news story. Before web 2.0, there is no way that the opinion of so many people could have the chance to be heard by so many.

Overall the main difference that web 2.0 seems to have made to our consumption of news is that we are able to access information a lot quicker. In the case of Stephen Gatley’s death, because the news stories had been spread on the social networking site Twitter, there was more then 1,000 complaints by 7 pm of the same day the story was published. Without the internet it is doubtful that there would have been as many complaints in this short a period of time. This seems to be the biggest change that web 2.0 has given the news. Whilst this suggests that ‘everything has changed’ and in this instance for the better, the developments are also somewhat a detriment to the consumption of news. It means that now we only read the stories we want to read, whilst in the past where the only source of consumption would have been on a radio or a TV news bulletin, we would have had to have listened to all of the newsgroups

Is 'Ugly' Betty a sterotype?

Series 1 Episode 1. I am Not Going to Sell Herbalux

• Appearance: Glasses, braces, bad clothes, bad hair etc..
• She is smart- ‘up and comers on the London art seen’ and the situation in Darfor. She is not necessarily
• She is not self confident in herself. The women she is surrounded by in the office all seem so confident. She bumps into draws when she walks in. This can be seen when she is modelling in part 3.
• Whilst not the stereotypical woman who works in magazine, she is the stereotypical outcast.
• She is the complete opposite of the women who work in fashion. She doesn’t gossip. This contrast is shown in the shots with her and the other women in the office. She seems, polite, nice and genuine.
• No one wants to sit with her at launch. The only friend she finds is the other outcast- the woman who works in the fashion closet.
• She is similar to Andy in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’. They both have no interest in clothes, no clue about fashion and want to be serious writers.
• Both seen taking calls from their editors in the middle of the night, doing mundane tasks for their bosses and conflicts between home life and work, because of the amount of time they spend working.
• Geeky kid being laughed at by the ‘cool’ kids- American teen comedy films. ‘Treats me like dirt’ (Part 3). Humiliated when modelling in part 3.
• Weak- doesn’t stand up for herself initially.
• Looks after family. She has no mother.
• Ambitious- she wants to break out of her surroundings and make a better life for herself. Her sister thinks she needs to be more realistic with her aspirations (Part 3).

 

“Representations in the media are often simplistic and reinforce dominant ideologies so that audiences can make sense of them”. To what extent is this true of the social group you have studied?

Throughout different forms of media, there is a number of representations of women. These representations often feed the preconceived stereotypes that we have of women. Magazines, TV dramas and films reinforce dominant ideologies on different types of women, for example the career women and the housewives, and the idea of beauty.

Adverts often reinforce the ideals of beauty and shape the idea of what we as consumers believe beauty is. Adverts in magazines, particularly adverts for beauty products, often reinforce the ideas of what a beautiful woman looks like. Cheryl Cole’s adverts for L’Oreal show a slim woman, with long glossy hair and perfect skin. This representation of women is found across media texts, but in particular in adverts for beauty and hair products, which all seem to reinforce the same ideologies of what it means to be beautiful. For example the same representation that is present in the L’Oreal advert is also presented to us in Anna Firel’s adverts for Pantene and Zooey Deschanel for Rimmel. These Images help reinforce feminist writer Germain Greer’s theory that “every woman knows that regardless f her achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful” because “magazines financed by the beauty industry teach little girls that they need make up and train them to use it, so establishing their lifelong reliance on beauty products”. These representations of women are fairly simplistic as they only offer one model for how they believe women should look or at least want to look. Whilst this simplistic representation of women could help an audience make sense of what our belief a beautiful woman is, it offers very little alternative and encourages women to look all one way and not express individualism.

The character of Bree in ‘Desperate Housewives’ also conforms to a simplistic and well established representation of women. She is a typical housewife, who we believe enjoys cooking and cleaning and this seems to be the only role that she has. She does not have a job. This is a very traditional view of women, and this idea of her being a step ford wife is something that TV dramas are beginning to step away from. This character however shows that this stereotypical woman is still present on our screens. This stereotype perhaps helps us understand the character better as we feel that we already know a lot about her as we have already judged her on what her role is within a family. It does however feed the stereotypical role and notion of what a housewife is like, which supports Stuart Prices assessment that “ideologies of gender promote sexist representations of women”.

In the same programme, the character of Lynette shows a perhaps more contemporary view of what a working mother is. Whilst Bree is a character in a modern drama, many of her characteristics would be seen as being very traditional. Lynette on the other hand is a woman who shows the struggles of being a stay at home mum. She shows that it is hard to be at home constantly with your children and shows a woman, who was once a very successful business woman, struggling to come to terms with the fact she no longer holds the same status in the work place and her feeling that she is losing her identity. This is a far less simplistic view of women, then the one that is presented to us of Bree and may be more difficult for us as an audience to understand because of this. However this is still a woman who represents what is the lives of far more women then the character of Bree does and perhaps women are able to relate to her more so and understand her better because of this.

There is signs of there being more complex characters present in the media, such as Lynette from Desperate Housewives, however more simplistic and conventional representations of women are still present, highlighted by the presence of the ‘step ford wife’ like figure of Bree in the same drama. Adverts also seem to be a clear indication of just how simplistic some of the dominant ideologies pushed on us by the media are, as they only seem to present one ideal of beauty. Whilst there is some alternatives such as the Dove adverts for real women, these are very rare, and often they use this as their selling point rather then the product itself.

The development of the Bond Girls

The girls are often victims who often need to be rescued by Bond, his love interest, play a more direct involvement in the Bond’s assignment and play a important role in the success of the mission.

Honey Ryder in Dr.No (1962)
Bond: Sean Connery
Actress: Ursula Andress

She is the star of arguably the most iconic bond moment. She emerges from the sea in a white bikini singing “Underneath the Mango Tree” holding shells. The moment has been recreated many times since.

In this clip you get a climpse of her feisty nature. Following the death of her father she has learned to fend for herself and at first is reluctant to listen to what Bond tells her to do. She is a strong minded woman and unlike many other Bond girls who followed her, she does not fall for his charms straight away and does not sleep with him until after the mission is complete.

Mary Goodnight in The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)

Bond: Roger Moore

Actress: Britt Ekland

She is an inexperienced field agent working in Hong Kong. She is out of her depth when in the mission that she is on with Bond and end’s up in more trouble then she initially expects to find herself in. This is a negative portrayal of women as it is suggesting she is weak and not as competent at her job as a man, such as Bond is. Her weakness is also shown through the fact she has to be rescued by Bond after she is kidnapped and trapped in the boot of a car.

Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

Bond: Pierce Brosnon

Actress:

She is a completely different Bond girl to Mary Goodnight. She is very much competent at her job and proves to be a match for the men, breaking a female stereotype. She is an equal to Bond as she is a secret agent for the Chinese People’s External security force. Like Bond she too has access to gadgets and even claims that her watch, an Omega Seamaster, which is a watch Bond is famous for wearing, is an improvement on James’.

Despite all this, she still has to be rescued by Bond after she has been captured for trying to destroy an engine control room, reverting back to the classic role for women in a bond film.

Vesper Lynd in Casino Royal (2006)

Bond: Daniel Craig

Actress:

Eva GreenMichelle Yeoh

We initially believe that she works for the Treasury Department but later learn that she is really a double agent working for MVD, showing that she can outsmart Bond and showing her intelligence. At the same time, once we learn about her true identity she seems somewhat detached and ruthless. She also does not initially fall for Bond’s charm and the pair do not get together until later on in the film. She is also the only Bond girl that he seems to genuinely fall in love with, and this is why he is most effected by her death then the demise of any other Bond girl.

To what extent do you think that contemporary representations of a particular social group mirror current social attitudes towards a group?

To what extent do you think that contemporary representations of a particular social group mirror current social attitudes? on Prezi

Eastenders Cot Death Storyline

Eastenders Baby Swap

THE SECRET HISTORY OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

·      ‘Sharing our lives on the internet has become common place’
·      Was very slow to take off.
·      Community Memory- first Social networking. Could search messages and read your own- electronic    bulletin board. Never reached more then a small community.
·      Using it to explore their community.
·      Personal computers in the 1980s.
·      The Well: ‘twitter 20 years before twitter.’- Began with trying to find a replacement engine. 72 hours later they had the engine flown in from America, fitted and the plane flew out of America.
·      The band, Grateful Dead, discovered The Well and started posting from there. Created more interest in the site.
·      Online communities were springing up around the world thanks to more powerful home computers.
·      About a decade ago social networking was starting to take off but the technology around did not support it
·      Trying to make online experience like the offline. Non-anomalous- Friendster
·      Within the first year it grew from a small number to a few million.
·      Friendster barely worked for two yearsà Myspace.
·      The lesson of Friendster is that online you do not know where a competitor is coming from. Your competitor could be someone you don’t even know, something that doesn’t even exist yet.
·      Facebook. Started in a dorm room by Mark Zuckerburg.
·      Built up a following on campus at Havard college and then it spread to other colleges and universities.
·      ½ a billion people worldwide.
·      Facebook has changed social networking from being seen as geeky, to being mainstream.
·      MySpace influenced Bebo.
·      Bebo started by inviting friends and then friends telling their friends. Word of mouth.
·      Bebo was big in schools. The first time that parents and teachers began to worry about social networking.
·      AOL bough Bebo for £850 million.
·      Networking sites were fashionable for a while and then people moved onto something new and ‘cooler’
·      Myspace started to target to people who wanted to go to parties in LA.
·      Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace.
·      News Corp set up an advertising deal with Google.
·      People who were technology experts had not set up Myspace and so there were faults.
·      Allowing people to decorate pages- made Myspace work.
·      People were now interested in social networking and the technology was starting to take place.
·      Social networking set up on interest for people to network on campus. They got about 80-90% of Columbia campus on the network.
·      Before Facebook had lunched at Harvard, they had already planned for it to spread to other colleges.
·      ‘Facebook is the site that would win the network wars’
·      At first it wasn’t about meeting people, photos, videos etc…
·      You could find random information that you didn’t need but on the internet you couldn’t keep in contact with people- They felt this was a more important need.
·      Had to find new ways to attract people whilst not alienating those who already used it.
·      The newsfeed was not well received well at first. Only would really have reconsidered if people had stopped using the site- they didn’t.
·      Zuckerburg is constantly looking to the future- maybe why they have won.
·      He won’t sell the site. Revolutionary spirit- wants the world to be more open and connected.
·      It capitalises on the information provided by all of us.
·      ‘Hollaback Girl’- targeted their marketing. They advertised the songs to girls who said they were cheerleaders on their profile.
·      Their future is dependent on users likes and dislikes.
·      One day instead of their being hundreds of channels me might watch the channel our friends recommend.
·      People don’t necessary feel its more important then any other form of communicating.

Media Consumption

David Gauntlett

• At the centre of how we identify out identity is our sexuality and gender.
The differing images of men and women in the media impacts how we view our own identities.

• Although the internet 1990s as a use for sharing stories, it really took off in 2003 with the invention of social networking sites.

• Studies have shown that young people spend more time on computers and the internet then they do watching traditional media forms such as television.
• Because of the mass of media advertising i.e. billboards, magazines and the internet, it is inevitable that we are influenced by the media that surrounds us. We may judge our appearance by what we see on adverts and in magazines.

• We are beginning to reject traditional ideas of the roles of men and women, with only one in six women and one in five men believing that women should be at home and the men in the workplace.

Henry Jenkins- Convergence Culture

• Pictures of Bert from Sesame Street and Bin Laden ‘crisscrossed’ the world through media, despite starting from high school student, Dino Ignacio’s, bedroom. The site was closed when Ignacio decided that it was no longer “contained and distanced from big media”. Convergence3 media however is when “old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways”.
• In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.
• Convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.
• More information is given on any given topic than anyone can store in their head, there is an added incentive for us talk amongst ourselves about the media we consume. Consumption has become a collective process.
• At the moment we only use our collective power in our recreational life, but soon we will be deploying those skills for more ‘serious’ purposes.
• EDGE-enabled mobile phones with live video streaming facility enabled people to watch movies through their mobile phones.
• Nobody needs them so the issue is how companies make us want them. They had the technology to bring about convergence but hadn’t figured out why anyone would want it.
• ‘Passive old media’ and ‘interactive new media’.
• Have to find the right balance between moving too quickly and moving too slowly.
• New media technologies allows the same content to flow through a number of different channels and assume many different forms at the point of reception.
• New patterns of cross-media ownership make it more desirable for companies to distribute content across those various channels.
• Old media wont die or even fade away but it will be the tools we use to access it that will change. Print did not kill the spoken word, cinema did not kill theatre and television did not kill the radio. Each old media is just forced to co-exist with the emerging media.
• Sooner or later all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms, media companies just need to figure out which box will be supreme.
• Escalation of functions within in one media appliance I.e. mobile phones.
• Convergence is a process not an end point. There will be no single black box controlling the flow of media into our houses.
• Convergence impacts the way we consume media. It involves a way in which media is consumed and produced.
• Convergence also occurs when people take media into their own hands, I.e. making videos at home.
• Convergence is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process.
• If old consumers were assumed to be passive, predictable, isolated and invisible then new consumers are active, drifting, socially connected and noisy.

Joseph Keppler’s Phenomenalistic approach

Joseph Kappler- Phenomenistic Approach on Prezi