Critical Investigation: Task #2

Academic research and bibliography

As you know, a detailed bibliography is crucial to reach the top grades in your coursework. Refer to our Essential Reading List which contains titles of 45 of the most important books for the Critical Investigation, most of which are either in the school library or media suite. If you haven't used any of these yet, make sure you take advantage of these excellent resources this week.

Those underlined are the twenty most important but, obviously, not all of the texts on this list will be directly relevant for you...you'll need to spend a fair amount of time searching through them (especially the contents and indexes) to find the key quotes and ideas that will impress the examiners.

You must include references to quite a few of these books if you want an A or B so borrow them from the library, look at them in lesson or even buy them over the next fortnight. If the book belongs to the Media department, you will have to do your research in class or in DF06 during a free period - the books can't leave school unfortunately.

Task #2 is to pull this information together in an updated blog posting of all your notes and quotes so far INCLUDING a complete bibliography of your research so far. Make sure you include the following:

• Author-Year-Title-Place-Publisher info;
• Quotes (+ Page References) from the book that can be linked to your study;
• A short explanation of each one explaining how it is relevant to you/your topic.
• Finally, post up on your blog a Complete Bibliography (so far) to include ALL the books you currently have quotes from. It MUST contain at least TEN different academic books or journals as well as all your online and Media Magazine sources.

Most people find formatting a bibliography very difficult the first time - there are quite specific rules that you need to follow and universities are very fussy about how it is presented. Use this 'Guide to writing bibliographies' to help or try this really useful bibliography formatting and creation tool: 'BibMe'.

Deadline: Friday 6 December (13D); Monday 9 December (13E)

Hegemony in the age of New and Digital Media

Starter

I've got some reading to get you started. Firstly, I noticed a reference to hegemony yesterday in an article that could also be linked to our work on feminism - read this article on the Hunger Games and at least 15 comments below.

You might also want to look at this story on the front page of the Guardian website this morning... can we link this to hegemony?

Main task

Read the Media Magazine article ‘Web 2.0: Participation or Hegemony?’ (use the log-in details here) and complete the following tasks:

1) Research the Ian Tomlinson case. What would the traditional, hegemonic view of the police be in a case like this? How did new and digital media create a different story? What does the police officer's subsequent aquittal suggest about the power of new and digital media?

2) Do you agree that new and digital media challenges the traditional, dominant hegemonic views? Why?

3) What does the author argue regarding whether hegemony is being challenged by Web 2.0? 

4) Use the topic you researched (royal family, NHS, immigration etc.) to provide examples of how new and digital media is used to challenge traditional or hegemonic views.

Complete for homework - due Thursday 5 December.

Critical Investigation: Task #1

Before you know it, you'll be needing to write your Critical Investigation essay - which means we need to step up our preparations to make sure we have everything in place. We have designed a series of tasks to help you do this that you will need to complete over the next month. 

Final Deadline
All the preparatory tasks need to be finished before Christmas: Friday 20 December. You will then have the Christmas holidays to write the first draft of your 2,000 word essay.

TASK #1 TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
TASK #1 DEADLINE: FRIDAY 29 NOVEMBER

Carry out close textual analyses of at least TWO chosen scenes/extracts/clips from your PRIMARY text and post them up on your blog. 

The extracts should be able to exemplify some of the key points you wish to make in your Critical Investigation and link with some of the following key areas raised by your text...

Issues and debates 
Representation and stereotyping; Media effects; Reality TV; News Values; Moral Panics; Post 9/11 and the media; Ownership and control; Regulation and censorship; Media technology and the digital revolution – changing technologies in the 21st century; The effect of globalisation on the media.

Theories
Semiotics; Structuralism and post-structuralism; Postmodernism and its critiques; Gender and ethnicity; Marxism and hegemony; Liberal Pluralism; Colonialism and Post-colonialism; Audience theories; Genre theories.

Make sure it is an extract you haven't analysed before and embed the YouTube link in your posting if you can.

Think of each analysis as like a MEST 3 exam analysis but with one text instead of two - so you need to cover MIGRAIN and SHEP and you are advised to watch the extract several times and to make detailed notes before embarking on the write-up, which should be in essay format (NOT in note form). 

Use our Key Concepts Glossary to help you think about terminology to use. You should be including as many of these keywords and ideas as possible in your analysis (where relevant...this won't always be the case). You should also include ideas from the essential Media Keywords A-Z - another fantastic resource you should be reading religiously.

Good luck!

Critical Investigations - more online resources

We have paid for subscriptions to two online sites that you can log in to and add to your Critical Investigation research. They are as follows:

Media Magazine
The online archive of the magazines we have been looking at. Details:

http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/index.html 

Click on the top left box 'Enter Subscribers Site'. Log in details:

Username: mediamagazine10
Password: ly957mp


Mediaedu
Another online resource that contains a large number of case studies and articles on key media issues.

http://media.edusites.co.uk/

Click on the top right box 'Login'

Username: greenford
P/W: greenfordedu



Jump Cut
Jump Cut is an online contemporary Media journal with an archive dating back 40 years. The current issue is available here and the archive can be found here.

It's definitely worth searching for academic articles on your chosen topic. Note, you don't need a log-in for Jump Cut, the material is available for free online.


If you have any problems logging in to the top two sites, let me know.

Good luck!

Mr Halsey

13E cover work - Mr Halsey

Sorry guys, I'm still on paternity leave but I plan to come back in on Thursday so we can pick everything up then.

For today, I want you to make sure you've finished last Thursday's work on hegemony - collecting articles, headlines, links, blogs, comments and more on one of the issues I suggested. The original blog post is here.

If you're still struggling to get your head around hegemony, this page on the excellent Media Know All site will hopefully help. It covers ideology, dominant readings and the hegemonic view of beauty in the western world - read it today.

On Thursday, we'll discuss some of these issues and also watch a brilliant example of hegemony in action - straight from BBC1.

See you then!

13D cover work - Mr Halsey

Sorry guys, I'm still on paternity leave but I plan to come back in on Thursday so I'll see you then.

For now, continue with your Critical Investigation research. Remember all the different sources you can be using:

• Media Magazines
• Academic books
• Journal articles - use Google Scholar
• Newspaper website articles - look at both sides of the political spectrum (e.g. The Guardian and The Telegraph)
• Primary texts - you can be carrying out close textual analysis of key scenes from your primary text

There is also a huge amount of stuff out there on the web waiting for your discovery. One I found recently is Film Studies For Free - a collection of links to free open source journals and articles on anything to do with the film industry. It looks amazing but I haven't had a chance to look into it in detail yet. Try it today if you can.

I look forward to seeing you on Thursday and helping you get your Notes and Quotes document well over that 2,000 word mark.

Good luck!

13D cover work - Critical Investigations

Year 13 - I'm sorry I won't be in but the good news is I am a father! Baby Samuel was born this morning and we're doing OK.

You need to continue your Critical Investigations and get your Notes and Quotes document up to 2,000 words. The deadline for that is next week.

You should have plenty of research to be working through - and don't forget textual analysis of your chosen media text too.

Good luck - we'll continue our tutorials when I return.

13E cover work - Hegemony

Year 13 - I'm sorry I won't be in but the good news is I am a father! Baby Samuel was born this morning and we're doing OK.

Ideally, I would be there to teach you more on hegemony because it's a difficult theory to understand at first. However, if you complete the following task you will be further on the way to getting to grips with Gramsci's ideas...

Your task is to research one aspect of British society and decide what the dominant or hegemonic view is.

This is the ‘normal’ or accepted view that we see across most of the media coverage.

Your job is to research one topic from the choice below and find out what type of media coverage it gets. Is it positive? Critical? Ridiculed? Respectful? Dismissive? Ignored? Celebrated? You need examples from newspaper websites and blogs  - you may find blogs and comments differ from the dominant viewpoint that is found in major newspapers. 

Choose one of the following:

• The Royal Family
• Education
• The police and security services
• The NHS
• Politicians
• The Armed Forces
• Immigration
• Young people/teenagers

Find articles/websites/blogs and make notes on what angle or perspective the source takes on the issue.

Here's an example for what we're looking for - this is for another British obsession, house prices:

House prices

• The dominant or hegemonic view is that high house prices are good.
• Lots of coverage – with high prices almost always presented as a good thing. Mostly positive stories.
• Stories generally presented from perspective of people who already own homes rather than those hoping to buy them – a classic example of the angle favouring the wealthy or ruling class.
• Very little reference to the fact that house prices and risky mortgages contributed to the major economic crash in 2008.
• Little coverage of the impossibility of buying a house for young people.
• However, columns, blogs and comments present different opinions that contradict the dominant or hegemonic view (often written by younger people) - have a look at this example in the Guardian. 

Good luck - we'll pick this up next week and discuss it further as a class.

Tue 12/11/13: 13E Cover Work p1

Stay in the classroom and carry out Critical Investigation academic research using Google Scholar. Include links, page references and quotes and post up at least TEN different relevant quotes on your blog.

Complete for homework, doing additional research using Google Advanced Search, so that your Notes & Quotes document exceeds 2000 words by Monday 18/11/13.

NDM: UsvsTh3m

1. Take the test...
How much are you hated by the Daily Mail?
...and post a screenshot of your result along with a link to the main site on your blog.

2. Read the article...
Daily Mail quiz powers UsvsTh3m towards 3m users
...and explain: Why this website is a good idea for newspapers in the digital age (one paragraph).

3. Skim through the homepage and suggest three ideas on your blog for UsvsTh3m features.

13E Cultivation theory

Write a 300 word blogpost on the opening of Top Boy using your content analysis.

Refer to Gerbner’s cultivation theory and suggest what meanings, ideas and beliefs viewers might form in the opening 10 minutes.

Good luck!

13D - Notes and Quotes

Apologies - I'm out on an AQA GCSE Media course that I have to attend for this year's exam topic.

In this double lesson you need to continue your notes and quotes document/blog post and make sure you have a minimum of 1,000 words by the end of the lesson. A few of us were behind when we looked before half-term so we now need to make sure we are on top of things.

We can meet on Thursday during the lesson to make sure everything is up to date.

Good luck and keep the research going!