Myths and Ideologies - Reading images

Roland Barthe came up with the theory or concept of Myths and Ideologies. These are to understand and read texts.

Myths:

• This refers to an opinion or belief shared by a group of people, which may be supported by evidence although not necessarily a true fact. Myths are concepts that are believed by many people although not proven to be true, linking with stereotypes. 'dumb blonde' and 'racist policeman' are popular stereotypes used when describing the myth theory, as they are ideas that people have which are not necessarily true but are slightly proven.

Ideologies:

• This refers to the idea of a myth which has been accepted by the mass of people, deemed true or right by almost everyone. This may link with the idea of 'laws' as they have been adopted by society and become a culture of life. There are three types of ideologies, as they can change overtime as society changes. These are emerging (becoming believed, an example being vegetarianism), dominant (built into life, believed by the masses and accepted into society, an example being homosexuality being okay), and residual (fewer people believing it, dying out, an example being white supremacy).

Reading the images

Wayne Rooney in this image is represented in this photograph as passionate about his sport and his country, through his facial expression and his stance. His gender is also represented as strong and superior by his position, and the fact that he is football based brings the stereotype that males are the dominant sex of the sports world. This could also be the connotations of the denotations shown in the image. The primary audience of this image would be football fans, that are male, although there are many barriers that come along with the image, such as the fact that women will be put off of Nike because this image is suggesting that males are superior, and also people who do not support England as a football team may not read the messages intended to reach them.

The signifier of this image is St Brendans, with the blue sky above it, the logo for the college, and the 'catholic college' label in bold writing. These factors signify that St Brendans is a bright and airy place, and could also represent that the sky is the limit at St Brendans. A barrier of this image may be that it states that the college is Catholic, so may put off any students of diverse or different religions from studying here, although then this is balanced when it says 'for the community'. The conventions of this image include a neutral colour scheme, which may suggest that everyone will fit in and its a calming place to be, and the ship logo may suggest that students will sail through their experience at St Brendans, aswell as the logo having religious connotations.

The person in this image is represented in a bad way, as she looks quite rough and is dressed in very informal clothing, although this may show a stereotype in the way she is presented because of the title of the photo 'missunderstood', which changes the mode of address and the connotations completely. The connotations of this image are that she is a missunderstood teenager who wants to be understood and tries portraying that through the album, not the album cover.

Analysing texts / reading images

Representation: 
Mostly the way people and products are presented to us. Also what the particluar objects and things in the image represent. Representation is about what the text suggests to us through the images about an issue or a fact portrayed within it.
Denotation and Connotation:
Denotation is what you can see, whereas connotation is the cultural meaning behind what you can see. Concentration should be on why these connotations are there.
Mode of address:
The way that the text communicates with us, the way it talks to us. Words aswell as pictures are a good thing to look at with this framework.
Conventions:
This points to the way that the text has been constructed, set out, planned or designed. Concentration should be on why it has been set out like this and the genre of the text, eg. Advertisement
Signifier and Signified:
The same as Denotaion and Connotation, Signifier means what you can see in the text (something that had meaning), whereas Signified is the suggested meaning behind the text.
Primary Audience and Barriers: 
Primary audience are the people who the text is aimed at in their specific descriptions, such as gender, age, race etc. Barriers are the little things that stop these people reaching the texts message, such as physical or psychological issues in the text.

Key Culture and Value terms

High/Low culture:
People may believe that some things are 'better' for us, known as high culture. There is an artifical divide.
Popular culture:
That the mass of people do
Mass culture:
Things that the majority of society do
Subculture:
Cultures within a larger culture
Shared culture:
Sharing the same lifestyle. Bonding through culture
Cultural capital:
Things that you have been brought up with in your culture that give you an advantage against others
Youth culture: 
Things that the younger age range will do, what is normal for them. Shared by youths, up to age 25.
Ideology:
An understanding of how things are or should be
Dominant ideology:
Ideology that is pressed on everyone by power. Settings limits on behaviour.
Socialisation:
Process of learning what to believe and how to act. Brought up into different norms.
Cultural transmission:
Passing your cultural ideas onto others, transmitting your ideas.
Norms:
The normal things to do, determined by society
Values:
What people believe are important and worth something

Paragraph arguing popular culture

I has been argued that popular culture is worthless and meaningless, although that point can easily be argued against. Blulmer and Katz's theory of Uses and Gratification suggest 4 ways in which popular culture has a positive effect on society. Firstly, escapism is a way of using popular culture to divert attention from other things, giving rest and healthy balance. Secondly, personal relationships show that people can communicate and share common ideas and factors with each other, forming friendships and relationships. Personal identity suggests that we take aspects of our personalities and culture from what we like in popular culture. Lastly, they say surveillance is a key positive of popular culture as we can gain knowledge and understanding of the world around us. A popular activity within youth culture is to go to the park with friends on a nighttime, and although the common ideology of this is a bad view, it may not be as bad as it seems. Being with friends at night in the park may be a way of escaping current problems, such as stress at home or thoughts that are playing on the youths mind such as college work and relationships. Youths value spending time outside ad it gives them the balance, escapism and relationships that they need. This is a value of popular culture, it has personal value to individuals and may mean a lot to them, meaning it has worth and is worth the study.

Culture and Value

Cutural products: Things we buy and own
Cultural practices: Things we do and live
Social cohesion: Similarity, things we do the same that bond us together. Culture brings social cohesion.

Why is popular culture a bad thing?

• Bad influence (poor role models)
• Not healthy in some cases
• Takes away an individual identity
• Un educational in some aspects
• Limits a persons ability to achieve
• Superficial, not related to the real important issues
• Not intellectually challenging on any level
• Simple version of life
• Worthless, just a trend, soon forgotten
• Distracts people from real issues in life
• Makes people spend money
• All americanised, following another countries culture
• Sexist, portrays women in different ways to relaity (photoshop, magazines, music videos)
• Lives up to the typical teenager stereotype, turns them into 'wreckheads'.

Why is popular culture a good thing?

• Helps people relate to eachother
• Brings social cohesion
• Some movies can make you think intellectually
• Gives ambition to be in movies or have lives like those who are
• Develops things from high culture into todays day and age with technology
• Gives more self-confidence, higher self esteem
• Helps us to achieve our ideal self
• Makes us feel better than others with less within the culture
• Provides balance between relaxing and learning
• Some popular culture can deal with problems and issues, such as helplines after a soap opera.
• Entertainers are violated by choice whilst making a point, Miley Cyrus/P!nk.
• Some culture empowers women and shows their strength, for example p!nks songs.
• Good because its popular
• Drives technology, access to knowledge and information 

Why is high culture good for us? 

• Educational, higher vocabulary and better knowledge involved
• Engaging your brain, intellectually stimulating
• Doesnt represent or influence crime or violence
• Shows development into todays society
• About more issues, has a wider focus
• Timeless
• Makes us morally civilised, teaches us to be more civilised
• Requires huge skill, work of genius
• Aspirational
• Accessible to everyone, TV, museums, CD's 
• Has more meaning and relevance to issues

Why is high culture bad for us?

•  Mostly for the people who have power and money
• Racist/sexist. Mostly composed by white men who were upper class
• Out of touch with the modern world, out of date.

Cultural Value:
Different people may think that different things are more important than others, meaning they think it has more 'Cultural Value' or is more 'Culturally Valuable' than something else. These personal opinions can be determined by these factors:

• It is worth money
• It is popular
• It is new
• It fulfills a need in society
• It is part of tradition
• It is morally civilising
• It produces a reaction
• It is emotionally important to an individual
• It is respected by others
• Its influential
• Its stood the test of time
• It is original 
• It is challenging
• Its produces by talented people
• It is valued by those in power
• It brings social cohesion

More identity theories

Self-concept is a key term that describes how we see ourselves.

Kuhn and McPartland (1954) are two theorists that divided this idea into two parts, which are social roles and personality traits. These theorists stated that as we move from children to adults, we are defined more by our social roles rather than our personality traits. For example, when we are children, we are unique as we are seen for our personalities, such as being happy cheery children, but then as we grow into teenage years we tend to slide more into social roles such as clicks and groups at school and college. As we progressively get older, our self concept develops once again in social roles as we enter workplaces and are fending more for ourselves.
Other theorists have has the same idea, and then added that modern society will emphasize our 'physical attributes', because now a days a persons image is way more important than their personality traits.

Rogers (1961) theory of 'Self-image' shows how we see ourselves, and this is contradicted against his idea of our 'Ideal self', which is what we would aim or like to be. The third concept that this theory is split into is 'Self esteem' which is how we feel about the gap between 'Self image' and 'ideal self'. For example, a persons self image may be quite worthless and useless, although their ideal self may be a confident and happy person who doesnt really care. This would mean that their self esteem is quite low and so they start to hate themselves as they cant physically be the person they wish to be.

Rogers also identifies the idea of identity through concentric circles.

This idea of concentric circles means that as we proceed further out of the core self, we move further than our true identities and tend to put on a mask, a fake identity to hide our true appearance. According to Rogers, the levels of superficiality increase as we move out of the core self to the private and public selves.

Identity and the influences

Identity 

• Cultural practices 
• Talent
• Physicality
• Age
• Family
• Nationality 
• Personality 
• Name
• Fear
• Gender/sex
• Likes
• Religion
• Ambitions 

Influences: 

• media, 
• society, 
• religion, 
• friends/family, 
• education, 
• politics, 
• personal experiences, 
• geographical location.  

These are also known as - Agents of socialization

Key Comms Concepts

Communication- A way to interact with each other. You need a message, a destination and a sender.

Culture- A way of life, someones lifestyle, background etc..

Identity- Who you are.

Values- A measure of importance.

Context- The situation.

Code- How you conduct yourself. The means in which something is communicated.

Representation- Something that stands for something else. Image, how someone's portrayed.

Some identity theories...

Cooleys looking glass theory (1992) suggests that we see ourselves in other peoples eyes and try to fulfil their expectations of us. For example, when we meet people for the first time, we try to act and look the best we can in order to impress them.

Cognitive dissonance is when your positive view of yourself is contradicted by other people. Theorists suggest certain ways in which an individual may cope, which Gergen and Gergen call self-maintenence strategies:

• Belittle the evidence
• Associate others who think like you do
• Turn the negative into positive
• Disbelieve
• Form a low opinion of the other person
• Self-handicap or opt-out.

An example of this is when someone forms an instant judgment of you, and makes their opinion perfectly clear. As a way to cope with this, someone may say that other things/people are worse, say there are many other people like you, make positive points against their judgment, simply ignore and not retaliate to the person, think of the other person as lower than them as they have not been polite, or give up and loose all self esteem.

The Pygmalion Effect or Self-fulfilling Prophecy suggests that we adapt our behaviour to fulfil the expectations of others. For example, non-smokers who hang around with a group that do smoke may alter their behaviour to 'fit in' with the crowd and be seen as an equal.

Brown and Levison suggest the concept of positive face needs, in that we consistenly seek the approval of others in our interactions through a number of different strategies:

• Paying attention
• Seeking agreement (true topics)
• Pretend agreement (white lies, hedging)
• Use humour
• Use appropriate dress terms compliments

For example, we try to make people like us and have a positive judgment on us by using techniques such as jokes and compliments, along with topics that both parties can relate on. We basically try and make the other person feel better about themselves in order to trust us.