I have a question for you which of these two representations of Donald Trump do you think is most accurate well it's actually a flawed question because it implies that there's one correct meaning to Trump and everything associated with what's more interesting is who came up with these representations and why this is the basis for Stuart Hall's representation theory which we look at in this video so let's start off with the absolute basics representation is one of the cornerstones of media studies and it traditionally looks at how the media literally represents reality be it social groups events places anything and it's always sort of measured how accurate these representations are against reality so if we go back to our Trump example we've got the man in reality with his actual meaning and then we have the media's representations which are almost like photocopies and they're gonna have varying degrees of accuracy or Distortion well Stuart Hall challenged this idea of representation completely the problem with this approach as Stuart Hall saw is that implies the original subject has a single fixed meaning against which accuracy can be measured but he points out that this can't be so let's take a look at brexit as an example there are numerous facts associated with brexit when the exit date is who went to certain meetings what certain countries think about brexit but what actually conceptually means doesn't exist in the real world until it has been represented in the media the media literally gives meaning to these events they may decide to give a positive representation of brexit like the Sun does here where is more liberal papers like The Guardian take the exact same events and represent it like this creating different meaning so here Stuart Hall himself explaining that representation isn't an after occurrence it's a constitutive one now we're talking about representation not as an after the event activity it means something and then the presentation might change or distort the meaning we're talking about the fact that it has no fixed meaning no real meaning in the of cents until it has been represented okay so there's a lot to this theory let's call this checkpoint one media representations aren't reflections of things already have meaning they are the meaning makers of things that happen in reality so the next step is to consider who has the ability to make all of this meaning whoever that is it's gonna have a huge amount of power in terms of their ability to influence society obviously in the digital age more than ever that is the mass media now to illustrate the significance of being the contextualizing force in the world let's think about something that you personally have a concept of but haven't experienced in real life Trump is another great example for this have you got very strong feelings about him either way the answer is probably yes how many of you have actually met him it makes you realize that everything that you feel about him is controlled by someone else the media what about other political and social issues what images do you naturally conjure up when I say gay people brexit black people where do you think your understanding of each of these things comes from whole argues that much of society's understanding of the world is based on meanings which have been created by media producers who are in power as they try to fix a particular meaning to a certain thing in the real world now if we take a closer look at the hegemonic organisations of the world and the people who actually make them up what we almost always find is wealthy white straight men as such the representations that we see in the media tend to reflect their ideology on politics on social issues gender race everything the result Hall says is that stereotypes are generated because of the limited representations the hegemonic elites show us so typically we're very used to seeing this kind of representation of African Americans in the media take a look police say this guy is attacked for white people across Manhattan seemingly at random detectives also say he's made anti white remarks in one incident he whacked a 64 year old woman with a wooden stick men are incredibly well this representation of gay men in the media I'm Jared and I'm very gay yeah we noticed do you guys go to Glen Ellyn with this representation of women just Renton Ray so you can blast right through tough messes your home is full of life in each case the hegemonic media organizations offer us a repeatedly limited representation of aspects of the world in order to attempt to fix a preferred or dominant meaning to it in society it sounds ludicrous doesn't it but when these stereotypes are used again and again over years and then decades the lack of diversity and representations can really narrow society's perception of these things the representation becomes naturalized and we stop questioning it in extreme examples like the ones Hall talks about it means that ethnic minorities can become stereotyped as troublemakers in the UK now not everybody is going to just blindly accept the media representations that they're shown by these elite media producers Stuart Hall also came up with reception theory which I'll make a link to at the end of this video which he points out that the audience can reject these ideas if they don't agree with them but the point is with this theory that the media producers are attempting to fix a meaning to something for the majority of society so why would they do this simply to assert dominance to keep those in non elite groups in their place to maintain social supremacy there are endless reasons but it depends on the agenda of those who made a representation and that's the whole point Stuart Hall said the audience should interrogate a text they should look at who made it and why really open it up from the inside and consider what purpose it serves and how it furthers the producers agenda only then can we strive to combat stereotypes that pigeonhole entire social groups and create a sense of otherness or alienation in society so that's all for this one it's one of the big theories that you really need to get your head around and it's such a vast piece of work that he did I've tried to strike a balance between including the things that you need to know and covering in enough detail but if you have any questions you can leave them below as always thank you very very much for watching if you're looking for where to go next the obvious place I would say is to check out this video on reception theory by the same Stewart hall all you might want to check out my growing library of media Theory videos by clicking this playlist right here thanks very much for watching [Music]