1. Sam Gallacher-Bright
Evaluation Question 2 – How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The fact that the strapline and insert advertise winning tickets to a festival and the line
ups to festivals would suggest that my magazine conforms to Branston and Stafford’s
theory on stereotypes (2010) which states that media involves categorisation and an
evaluation of the group being stereotyped, as it seems that my magazine should be
read by a particular social group that like to go to festivals and excludes people who
don’t.
Also the artists I have featured in my magazine are of same genre and look a
certain way, for example Jake Bugg has an individual, unique look to other people,
but for people in a particular social group who are Jake Bugg fans and maybe like
to dress like him would think it’s completely normal, these are the people who
would pick up my magazine and read it. Also the model I used for my photo shoot
and my feature is the stereotypical person you would expect to find in my target
audience, she’s a female student, aged 17, loves socialising with friends and going
to festivals, this is reason why I used her as my target audience can make an
emotional connection with her and can see themselves in her which relates to the Uses and Gratifications theory by
Blumler and Kats (1974) which suggests that people use media to satisfy a need, and in this case a particular social
group such as female students, ‘hippies’ and the stereotypical ‘indie’ girl would use the magazine for their personal
identity as they can relate to the model used in my feature.
The language I used in my feature also represents the typical
female student as the language doesn’t communicate at a high
intelligence level and doesn’t use too many big words, for example
‘God knows where I’d be without it, probably in a dumpster
somewhere’, this is because the stereotypical female student likes
to read how she would communicate and wouldn’t stereotypically
use long winded words and would struggle to understand if it was
written using high intelligence words.
Due to the fact I have used a guitar as a prop in one of my photos
for the photo shoot, this represents the stereotypical ‘rocker’ as
this particular social group love rock music and play rock music,
which I find a guitar to be very symbolic of.