Pete's Media Blog

Here are some examples of previous exam questions:

• Analyse the ways in which the media represent any one group of people that you have studied. 
• With reference to any one group of people that you have studied, discuss how their identity has been ‘mediated’. 
• Analyse the ways in which the media represent groups of people. 
• “The media do not construct collective identity; they merely reflect it”. Discuss. 
• “Media representations are complex, not simple and straightforward”. How far do you agree with this statement in relation to any one group of people that you have studied? 
• What is collective identity and how is it mediated?

We should be able to answer these questions from the Specification:

• How do the contemporary media represent nations, regions and ethnic / social / collective groups of people in different ways? 
• How does contemporary representation compare to previous time periods?
• What are the social implications of different media representations of groups of people?
• To what extent is human identity increasingly ‘mediated’?

The kinds of thing you might use as case studies include: national cinema, television representations, magazines and gender, representations of youth and youth culture, representations of different ethnic and cultural groups sexuality, gender, disability.

It is pretty open in terms of what you might have studied, so I would expect answers to draw upon very different case study material. This part of the exam asks you to do three more specific things, whatever topic you answer on:

 1. You MUST refer to at least TWO different media
2. You MUST refer to past, present and future (with the emphasis on the present- contemporary examples from the past five years)
3. refer to critical/theoretical positions

 So for 1. you might compare and contrast examples from film and TV or from newspapers and social media. For 2. the main thing is to ensure you have a majority of material from the past five years. There were a number of answers last year which were dominated by older films, so beware of this! For 3. you need some critics/writers who have developed ideas about representation and identity.

You can't cover everything in this exam, as you only have an hour, so you need to be selective and very systematic in your answer. Have case study examples which really illustrate the kinds of points you want to make.

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