Stereotypes...
Media institutions use stereotypes because the audience will instantly understand them. Stereotypes are basically just a 'visual shortcut'. Because they are repeated so often, we assume that they are normal or 'true'.
Archetypes...
This is the ultimate stereotype. For example, the white stiletto wearing, big busted, brainless blonde bimbo.
Countertype...
This is a representation that challenges traditional associations of groups, people or places.
Representation...
The way in which people, events and ideas are presented to the audience.
To break it down, the media takes something that is already there and represents it to us in the way that they chose.
Representations are created by producers. What they choose to show us is controlled by the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper is any person involved in a media production with the power to make a decision about something the audience are allowed to read, hear or see. E.g a newspaper editor has the final say on what goes into a newspaper.
Moguls...
In the example of the newspaper editors decision, the decision can not be made freely and can be affected by technical issues and also by the kind of person who owns the newspaper. E.g the so-called media moguls, such as Rupert Murdoch
Who, what, why, where...
Who: what is being represented? Who is the preferred audience for this representation?
What: what are they doing? Is their activity presented as typical or atypical? Are they conforming to genre expectations or other conventions?
Why: why are they presented? What purpose do they serve? What are they communicating by their presence? Whats the preferred reading?
Where: where are they? How are they framed? Are they presented as natural or artificial? What surrounds them? What is the foreground and background?
The male gaze...
Cinema apparatus of Hollywood cinema puts the audience in a masculine subject position with the woman on the screen seen as an object of desire. Film and cinematography are structures upon ideas.
Protagonists tended to be men. Mulvey suggests two distinct modes of male gaze: 'voyeuristic (women as whores) and fetishist- woman as unreachable Madonna's' (Narcissistic women watching films see themselves reflected on the screen.)
How we treat people- Richard Dyer
Dyer argues that how we are seen determines how we are treated and how we treat other people is based around how we see them. This comes from our understanding of representation.
He believes that stereotypes come down to power. Those who have power stereotype those who don't.
Myths- Roland Borthes