Collective Identity Notes

How do the contemporary media represent nations, regions and ethnic/social/collective groups of people in different ways?

To what extent is human identity increasingly 'mediated'?

• International cinema
• TV drama and documentaries
• Child as symbol of collecitve identity specifically when a country or culture is in conflict
• gender
• ethnicity

Ideas for TV case studies

• childhood and adolescence
• World's strictest parents
• Bratcamp
• Appropriate soap operas (Eastenders, Coronation Street)
• Appropriate TV dramas (White girl, Skins)
• Teenage mums
• Panorama: Social services and more...
• Underage and pregnant

Focus on representation of ideology through construction of specific social groups. Investigate the directors politics. Close reference to mise-en-scene.

Investigate directors ideology for British texts, ask yourself what it means to be British, how does the text represent Britishness? British texts tend to focus on social class.

Terraced house - a convention of British social realism.

How do you construct your collective identity?

• family
• peers
• social class
• religion
• ethnicity
• community
• school
• social groups
• clubs
• e-community
• online gaming sites
• music taste
• clothing
• gender
• job
• popular culture

Think about how media communicates idealised images (magazines, tv programmes). Celebrity obsession offers idealised images. Think about who we identify with. An example of explicit collective identity is at football/rugby/cricket matches/olympics.

WHITE GIRL

social class -> demographic D -> region -> northern -> Bradford

British values that keep being pushed

• family
• community
• aspirations
• education
• religion/spirituality
• respect

Focus on the British working class and how the representation of the British working class has changed during the last 50 years

• Saturday Night Sunday Morning - what is important to Arthur Seaton? - work, women, family, pub, friendship
• Films from about 1990 onwards tend to focus on a crisis in male identity/masculinity (The Full Monty) - The closure of the manufacturing industry in the 1980's by the Thatcher government has put 1000's of blue collar workers out of a job. Through a job was how men established their identity, without it their identity is lost.

EASTENDERS - How Britishness is represented

• Queen Vic
• Cafe
• Argi Bargi
• Minute Mart
• Allotments
• Terraced houses
• "Underworld" - factory
• Community -> reminiscent of 1950's community -> everybody knows everybody -> no longer exists -> audience appeal -> nostalgia

White Girl, This is England, Sommerstown -> no community -> face of contemporary Britain -> characturs find their identity through old fashioned values/aspirations/sense of community loyalty. White girl = religion. This is England = social group (skinheads). Sommerstown = friendship.

In British social realist films the stealing of a book is a convention. It indicates the protagonists hinger for knowledge. Note White Girl, Kes, Billy Elliot.