Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture by David Buckingham

Author:David Buckingham [Buckingham, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Approaching ‘ideology’

Several of these difficulties come to the fore when issues of ‘representation’ (or, in terms of the British Film Institute’s model, ‘messages and values’) are more central to the analysis. Judith Williamson’s article ‘How does Girl Number Twenty understand ideology?’ (1981/2) raises a series of questions here that are still very relevant for media educators (see Turnbull, 1998). ‘Girl Number Twenty’ is Sissy Jupe, from Dickens’s novel Hard Times; and Williamson’s specific reference is to the scene where the authoritarian rationalist Mr Gradgrind challenges Sissy to define a horse. Sissy, whose experience of horses has been gained from the circus in which she lives, is unable to satisfy him – in contrast to Billy Bitzer, ‘the colourless boy’, whose dictionary definition of the ‘gramnivorous quadruped’ does the trick. For Williamson, the central question here is that of the relationship between analytical knowledge and personal experience; and her implication is that, like Gradgrind’s obsession with ‘facts’, media teachers’ preoccupation with ideological analysis largely fails to connect with students’ lived experience – and hence also fails to make much difference to them.

Williamson’s concerns arise from her experience of teaching undergraduates, although they raise issues that also apply to much younger students. She describes how studying soap operas and the popular press in her first-year Media and Communications class seemed merely to reinforce students’ beliefs about the ‘ignorance of the masses’; and how one of the male students on her course ‘Representation of women in the media’ engaged in a sustained and effective critique of the ideology of women’s magazines, which seemed merely to confirm the view that women must be stupid to enjoy such things in the first place. Here again, critical discourse appears to serve as a marker of distinction, a means of distancing oneself from the delusions of the mass audience – a process which is defined, at least partly, in terms of gender and social class. Meanwhile, students who might have had more invested in these representations were effectively silenced.

As Williamson argues, analysis alone will not necessarily change students’ attitudes. Unless the discussion of ideology in the media is related to students’ own experiences and identities, it will remain a purely academic exercise: media students will ‘do’ images of women in the media in the same way as English students are required to do medieval poetry, or History students the age of the Tudors. In the process, there is a danger that ideology will be seen as ‘what other people think, and the only explanation for why they believe such “lies” or “propaganda” is because they are stupid’.

Williamson’s article raises several troubling questions, not all of which she resolves (for further discussion, see Buckingham, 1986; Lusted, 1986; Richards, 1990; Turnbull, 1998). Certainly, my own attempts to work through some of these difficulties in the classroom were far from unproblematic. Changing the focus from ‘images of women’ to ‘images of men’, for example, might have undermined some of the complacent positions Williamson’s male students were able to adopt; but

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