Ideology

Ideology, simply put, is the overall feel and tone of a piece of media, in order to keep things on a constant level

Ideologies can be very different across different cultures, like an American and English drama or soap opera, while there will be similarities, will contain some very clear differences and to other cultures such as the Spanish or Chinese may be completely and totally different to them.

Hegemony is an Ideology which has been a dominant Ideology and is widely accepted, for instance that police are good people or that war is bad. However, these do not necessarily dominate our society as a whole, since stories against police and supporting war are relatively common.

Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds essentially introduces guide lines and intersection points to the framing of a picture being taken, as shown by the river tree picture used below; the rule of third is used to direct the viewer’s eye as humans naturally will look at certain structures; this works by having 3 boxes up and down the image and using them as a placement guide. This is mainly done to avoid unnatural placement of the subject, especially in terms of when photographing people in this manner, as a person standing stock still in the exact middle of the frame will often look very unrealistic.

 

Male Gaze

Male Gaze Theory

The Male Gaze theory is the idea of putting the viewers into the males eyes while the camera may linger on and essentially objectify on attractive woman. The Male Gaze theory is often seen as an unequal balance of either power or simply status due to the rarity of the counter idea of a Female Gaze.

Feminist views are very opposed to the concept of Male Gaze as it seems to encourage an unequal view of power and status to women. Male Gaze as a term first emerged in the 1970s though the concept has existed for much longer into film history than that and can be traced as far back to films such as Casablanca (1942) and in some cases earlier than that, though it was of course more reserved than our general concept of it in the modern age.

A prime example of the Male Gaze theory, in what many feminists consider an offensive use of women in media, as shown on this picture from The Spirit (2007) which got a lot of criticism for it's objectifying women, is for women to be shown either nude or simply in alluring postures for no reason other than to appeal to the male audience, which they feel makes women more objects than actual people.

For my research I will be using both qualitative and quantitative research.
Quantitative is useful when you want a quick, simple answer.
Qualitative is more in-detail and higher quality but is more time-consuming.

My name is Michael Rushton and I am taking the AS Media Course. I have made this blog to record my progress and work on my coursework project from now to April 2012.
My task will require me to make a front cover, two page spread and contents page for my music magazine, after research into other already existent music magazines.
However, first I will be making a front page and contents page for a school/college magazine as my preliminary task.