Media today is very useful to portray the way we live. Representation is 'the process whereby the media construct versions of peoples, places, and events in images or sound transmissions through media texts to an audience'.
All events are mediated by the texts that represent them. It takes forms and various techniques involved which are used to position the audience, so they take a particular view and feeling. ‘Every image is constructed and every opinion and feeling is manipulating’. We increasingly, are living in a ‘mediated’ society, in which that there is a process by the media that represents ideas, issues and events to us as the audience. There are techniques used for representation, particularly one being anchorage. This is ‘the fixing or limiting of a particular set of meanings to an image’. Anchorage gives a preferred reading, one most common example is where the anchorage text is underneath a photograph. The try to frame an image to get the audience thinking in a particular way, determining their feeling.
Media texts are usually known to rather than representing people as individuals, sections of the media use a 'shorthand' in the way in which they group people, known as stereotyping. This gives a negative and devaluing view on the people usually and most often, as it includes whole groups of people in society. Representation is usually to be found within the areas of class, age, gender, and ethnicity. It often shows how these 'identities' are represented as well as constructed.
Documentary film making is an opportunity to seek to document 'real' life. Documentaries such as 3 minute wonder on Channel 4 are commissioned as a series of shots by a director who wants to show primarily documentaries that generally highlight a current issue that is not public yet, or even to make a particular issue known.
It is well known that youth tend to suffer from a rather negative representation in the media. This is seen through looking at documentaries about teens and youth myself, and reading about it too. Teenagers are categorized mostly as from one scale to the other and never in-between, or 'normal' perhaps as would the public would say. Dick Hebdige is a British media theorist most commonly associated with the study of subculture. He wrote a book 'Hiding in the light: Youth surveillance as a display'. In it, he argues that young people fall into two distinct yet mutually dependent areas of representation. These are 'youth-as-trouble', and 'youth-as-fun'. He says that usually the category of 'youth-as-trouble' is presented in documentaries most often. For him, 'youth-as-fun' is presented later, mostly formed within advertisement, etc. Tabloids often sensationalise incidents of teen crime or issues present. Is it done just to keep things interesting for the audience? Of course it is. Often we are seeing someone else’s version of ‘reality’, as the ‘reality’ presented by the text is always going to have been constructed. People need to remember that!
