Critical Perspectives: Writing about production
The Ten
Commandments for Reflective Writing
1.
Focus on creative decisions informed by
institutional knowledge.
2.
Focus on creative decisions informed by
theoretical understanding.
3.
Evaluate the process instead of just describing
t
4.
Relate your media to ‘real media’ at the micro
level
5.
Try to deconstruct yourself
6.
Choose clearly relevant micro examples to
relate to macro reflective themes
7.
Avoid binary oppositions
8.
Try to write about your broader media culture
9.
Adopt a metadiscourse
10.
Quote, paraphrase and reference
Critical Perspectives: Themes
For each theme, it is
mandatory to focus on the following three areas within your exam answer:
· Historical: Must show that you understand how relevant
aspects of the contemporary media can be compared to the past.
· Contemporary: Demonstrate up to date, accurate, theoretical
and academic analysis of today’s media.
· Future: Must have some ideas about where the media are going next.
The media is a subject
that is concerned with popular culture
– the media that ordinary people access in large numbers.
Culture: Culture is everything
that is not nature; therefore in other words, humans make culture. It also
describes the various forms of belief, communication, ritual, representation
and ideas that the human race uses to make sense of our existence.
Whole books are created in order to attempt answering the question ‘What Is
Culture?’ Jenks describes the
following four definitions of culture:
1. As a state of mind (an aspiration – the ‘cultured’ person)
2. As a collective pursuit of civilisation (as a part of progress)
3. As artistic and intellectual activity (this is perhaps the most common use
of the term)
4. As a social category – the things that people do, our ways of life (which is
more like where we started – how we are not animals)
The important thing for media students to
remember is that within the course we are mostly interested in ‘popular
culture’, and we do not distinguish between what is and what is not ‘cultural’.
Everything that we study in the media and produce for the media is culture.
Social Groups: Wherever it is possible to give people a label
based on collective characteristics or traits, as opposed to their individual
or biological make-up, we can say they are part of a social group.
Social
Values and Cultural Languages: Depending
on the theme that you study, you might consider the impact of broadband
Internet on how people use media. For example, do people ‘watch television’ in
the traditional sense anymore? Are there any distinct media institutions in the
era of convergence?
The BBC has acted as a pioneer in the digital age, a case study on the iPlayer
as an online development will very soon extend to a consideration of whether or
not this is a good use of the license fee – a cornerstone of public service
broadcasting in a democracy. The Internet makes the global reach of the BBC’s
services possible. This takes us to a consideration of whether media
increasingly shapes our identities in the online age and whether this takes up
to a post-modern state of mind.
