Introduction to media content studies

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by Andy Ruddock175 views·Updated Apr 7, 2021
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This video explains how we are going to approach understanding media content. Please watch this to appreciate how week 7 learning activities connect.

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  1. welcome to the first of two weeks that we're going
  2. to spend thinking about media content.
  3. Our goal over the next two weeks is to learn
  4. to understand what media content represents as a form of
  5. evidence concerning the social significance and the social power of
  6. the media.
  7. In this first video from this week, I'm just going
  8. to go over the main steps of the learning process
  9. that we're going to steer through in the course of
  10. the next few videos.
  11. The overall goal of both of these sessions is to
  12. understand why it's important to view media content as what
  13. McQuillan does call a cultural text.
  14. And what McQuillan does essentially mean by a cultural text
  15. is a form of media content that speaks to the
  16. formation of social reality.
  17. We're talking about the way in which media content allows
  18. us to think about how society is put together and
  19. indeed is one of the things that makes us think
  20. about how society works.
  21. So in many respects, what we're talking about is the
  22. way that media content allows us to think about how
  23. media industries actively create social reality.
  24. How is it that media industries encourage us to view
  25. our world in particular ways and indeed to engage in
  26. our world in particular ways through the provision of the
  27. content that they give to us as audiences.
  28. And so that's what we're going to be doing.
  29. We're going to be thinking about how media content can
  30. be thought of as something that encourages us to see
  31. the world in a particular way, or that encourages us
  32. to engage with the world in a particular way.
  33. So how do we think about society in relation to
  34. media content and how, indeed, do we act in society
  35. through the way that we consume media content?
  36. So that's the where we're trying to get at, um,
  37. in terms of understanding what content researches for.
  38. Why should we look at media content?
  39. What kinds of questions do we need to ask about
  40. it? What do we think that that content does and
  41. to understand that we're going to be unpacking those ideas
  42. for a couple of weeks?
  43. But in this first session, what we're going to be
  44. doing is going through a few things.
  45. Firstly, we're going to be going through the principles of
  46. a cultural text approach.
  47. What are the basic ideas behind the notion of the
  48. cultural text.
  49. And the second thing we're going to be doing is
  50. exploring how the concept of discourse helps us to understand
  51. the idea of the cultural text.
  52. So what is discourse?
  53. How does discourse apply to the analysis of media content?
  54. We're going to be thinking about that, and that's going
  55. to be a really important part of understanding what media
  56. content research or textual analysis is for.
  57. The third thing we're going to be doing is considering
  58. quantitative approaches to content analysis, and these are broadly approaches
  59. that try and for want of a better word, count
  60. the details of media content.
  61. Why do we have quantitative approaches to content analysis?
  62. Where do they come from and what do they set
  63. out to do?
  64. So what is the logic of quantitative content analysis, and
  65. how does it relate to the concept of culture?
  66. That's something that we're going to be talking about.
  67. Then we're going to be talking about qualitative approaches to
  68. media research.
  69. So these are approaches, which, instead of looking at, for
  70. example, ideas or images that occur again and again and
  71. again across a range of different media texts.
  72. These were approaches that look in detail at particular kinds
  73. of media content.
  74. It might be a particular TV show, or it might
  75. be a particular media genre, and these were approaches that
  76. really look more at the process of meaning creation.
  77. So we're going to be looking at the logic of
  78. qualitative approaches.
  79. Why do people take qualitative approaches to media to content
  80. research? What sorts of questions do they ask?
  81. And we're going to be exploring that in relation to
  82. the question of gender, which, of course, is one of
  83. the important elements of the cultural text, as it is
  84. described by McQuaid Islanders.
  85. And then we're just going to end up with a
  86. few concluding ideas, some basic principles, some basic ideas that
  87. you need to know about media content analysis, what it
  88. involves, what its goals are, what kind of evidence it
  89. seeks to uncover about the nature of media influence.
  90. So that's what we're going to be doing over the
  91. next few videos here in Week seven