Representation

Research and Outline of the representations used in our music video, and an outline of Walter Lippmann's 4 functions of stereotypes.

Representation

The group represented in our video will be Teenagers, one boy and one girl. Our protagonist will be a teenage girl, who is in love with a teenage boy. The teenage girl will be represented as a relatively simple character who is experiencing love for the first time. She will be represented as a young, free spirited girl who is no trouble to anybody else. She will not be represented as violent or abusive, and so will reject the dominant stereotype of teenagers. The girl will also be represented as quite mature for her age, so as not to appear foolish, and to make the product appeal to the target audience, as this audience covers teenagers, but also slightly older people. The Boy will be represented as a nice, friendly boy, who like the girl is not troublesome, violent or abusive. He again, will reject the dominant stereotype of teenagers today. He will also be represented as quite mature for the same reasons as before. The two characters will take on some of the behavioral traits of teenage love, and so to some extent will follow the stereotypes for this on naïve, young and relatively foolish. We will not make our characters complex as there will be no dialect in our music video and it will be short( the length of the song) so there will not be time to explain the characters, and they will have to be portrayed by their costumes and actions.

Walter Lippmann’s Four Functions of stereotypes are:

1, A short cut – easily recognizable people / characters that the audience is already familiar with and so do not need exlaining.

2. An ordering process, an easy way to put people in order of class, socio economic status and other categories, To put people in groups, for example people will expect teenagers with hoods up and dressed like chavs to be part of the villain group.

3. A map of the world. Stereotypes can represent cultures and create one stereotype for a whole nation. For example, the Japanese will be represented by one oriental person eating sushi.

4. An expression of our values and beliefs (as a society) Stereotypes can represent a whole society’s views on different groups of people or countries. For example, an Arab represented as violent represents the dominant ideology of the violent Arab, which is a common media stereotype, even in children’s films like Aladdin.