Stereotypes

In yesterdays lesson of Media Studies we explored two main areas. One was looking at pictures provided by the teacher and thinking of "Connotations" of that picture. "Connotation" is a word of which we learnt the meaning of today; in the context of our lesson it basically means words we associate with that image. Our first image was that of a sunset or sunrise, the main connotations our group thought of were Relaxing and Calm. The next was an image of a rose, the connotations of this that were thought up by the group were that of romance and love. The final image we were shown was an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger dressed in his costume for "Conan the Barbarian", a lot of the connotations from this were about masculinity and strength, but some also came up as gay because of the outfit not fitting into today's modern age.

After that we took a short look at the study of signs; also known as "Semiology". This was done by our teacher showing us about twenty different signs and then asking us to name each, this was made harder by some hidden signs that did not exist. We were then asked how we knew what the signs meant, one way was for a stop sign in which somebody answered that the colour red can symbolise danger. We were then asked to think whether that concept would work in the east in places like China, this wouldn't because of the fact that the colour red is associated with luck in China rather than danger.

The next part of the lesson was spent on exploring stereotypes, we were shown various examples of stereotypes such as Germans cheating with their beach towels and grannies always knitting. We looked at stereotypes in two different ways. The first way was that the class were shown four images and we had to state the stereotype for each, one was; a hoodie, a phone, an MP3 player and some trainers with the stereotype being youths and young kids, another was a flat cap, glasses, a beard and walking stick with the stereotype being old aged man, the final images were a chefs apron, a frying pan, a vacuum and an oven with the stereotype being women. The other way we looked at stereotypes was by been told a stereotype like "Blondes" and then writing connotations that we associate with that stereotype such as dumb.

To end the lesson we took a look at a sample exam in which we are shown a clip of a drama programme a few times and we have to watch and make notes on different things in it, in particular we were asked to focus on the "Mise-en-scene" which looks at the props, costumes, colours and setting of the video clip. We were shown a clip in which the immigration officers raid a hotel and capture an immigrant that couldn't hide in time. The question we were given to this was "How did the video clip represent the immigrants and the police?". We worked on this for the remainder in the lesson and had to get ready to give a presentation for the following lesson.