Explain the role played by the media in the construction of identity."
Media has a significant role in the construction of identity. Identity means the fact of being who or what a person or thing is. The reason why media has such a significant role of how society looks at or constructs identity could be because cultural hegemony. In marxist philosophy cultural hegemony is the domination of culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of a specific society. This includes beliefs, explanations, perceptions and values. To our generation, generation Y and Z who were born after the 80's this isn't necessarily the case. The so called "ruling class" has been taken over by the media and its power to influence people. The media uses cultural hegemony to create a culturally accepted norm that is universal and at the same time it is a dominant ideology. This justifies social, political and economic status and at the same time it influences the construction of identity to a very high extent.
Throughout our course we have looked at the representation and identity of men. We have used various case studies such as Mens health magazine, Deadpool (the movie), and "The Night Manager" which is a British TV drama. This allowed me to have a widen understanding of mens' identity in different platform of media, such as paper format and film, which all have different features, tools and way to create representative values to support the construction of men's identity.
The Mens' health is an international magazine that has been first launched in 1995, and ever since then they have been expanding their business, and with the use of digital technology they have become more digital by involving synnergetic works with mobile phone apps, tablets, desktops, at the same time they create events, news letters etc. The majority of their target audience is 18-44 year old men with over 1 million subscriptions. They talk about a lot of diverse topics however their main categories are, fashion, cars, grooming, fitness, watches, supplements.
This shows an example for cultural hegamony and how media affects the construction oft he identity of men. This is because the magazine talks and creates a lot of norms and ideas how an ideal man should look like, smell like, act like, and dress like. This is also shown through the front pages and magazine covers they use, because we can see muscular models, or film stars that are all successful, and have a great physique. This almost like injects the information into the audience's brain that almost become a fact to them.
This relates to the hypodermic needle theory that states mass media is very powerful and it injects information to a passive audience and therefore changes their beliefs and opinion about a product, service or in this case about the idea of men's identity.
A different however relative theory by George Gerbner is the cultivation theory that states that the media is re-enforcing the already existing opinion of the audience. This means audiences tend to watch or read media platforms that back up their own opinion. For example the men's health magazine states that a real man should have under 10 percent body fat and they should be muscular, the readers read that particular article or section because they already agree with it and it could be a sort of entertainment or find their own identity throughout that media message. This also bring us to the uses of gratification
However there are ways that media does not influence the construction of the identy to such a large extent. This is because ofthe diversity of our generation that still includes generation X, and due to the cultural and educational differences.
The reception theory suggest that the audience is not only passive and take in the information that the mass media sends towards them, but they react to it in a certain way. The three ways to react according to the theory are; opositional that does not agree with the message media sends, negotiated, that has a nautral opinion about the message; and dominant that agrees with it.
"The Night Manager" is a TV drama based on a book by Jogn le Carre published in 1993. It is about an ordinary night manager that gets involved with the law enforcement and becomes a succesful spy. Throughout his transformation we can see how his identity and personality change in a way that it confirms the hegemoical stereotype created by media, such as aggression, physical power, appearance. It is up to the audience to decide how they want tounderstand the message and link it to his status, identity or the job he needs to do. At the same time we can also see the hegamonical stereotypes being represented as we see the contrast between man and women, how physical appearance and behavior is important throughout the TV drama. We can see use of "female Gaze" (Laura Mulvey's ) theory applied to appeal to a men target audience which could be a way media influences the construction of male identity to create an ideal women to be attracted to.
Overall media plays a significant role in the construction of male identity through different platforms of media, using hegemony to influence people's ideology about it, however at the same time as shown through the reception theory there are different non passive audiences as well due to cultural differences that do not agree with a specific way of representing or constructing identity.
