Representations: The role of selection, construction and anchorage in creating representations 1.5

You will need to be familiar with the following media studies terms:

Selection: The idea that producers and audiences are both selective, eg: editors select the news from that day's events and audiences select what to watch and remember.

Construction: The idea that a media text is not a window on the world but is  a product of individuals in organisations making decisions over the selection of content. In other words;

we see what they want us to see.

Anchorage: a way of ‘tying down meaning’, without anchorage meaning could be polysemic – open to various interpretations, eg a caption anchors meaning to a photo, music anchors mood in a media text.

The Construction and Mediation of Representations

A news photograph for example may appear to be presenting us with a factual image but it has been through a process of construction:

• the photographer has selected his/her position, lens, angle,

exposure and framing before taking the picture

• the picture editor will decide if the image needs to be cropped, enhanced or in any way altered before inclusion into the paper

• an editor will choose which, of the many available photographs of the image, will be the one chosen for inclusion in the newspaper and, importantly at this stage, the images

which do not meet the needs of the text will be rejected

Even then, further mediation takes place:

• Will the photograph be large or small? •     Will the photograph be     on the front page or, less visible, on page 8?

Placement choices like this, along with cropping and framing, act to focus the attention of the reader in a certain way.

• What headline and text will be used to accompany the

         photograph?

•    Will the photograph have a caption?

•    Will it be positioned close to another photograph?

Anchorage is basically used in media to attach meaning to something through either the matching of words to images or the juxtaposition of two images which construct a meaning.

For example in advertising, an image alone is polysemic open to a range of interpretations. To clarify what the image means and so to make the image relevant to the purpose of the advert, text can be added. Thus the image serves as the 'hook' while the text anchors meaning. This can be said also for photographs attached to newspaper articles. The same photograph takes on different connotations with different accompanying texts.

Task 1: 
Open this image in Photoshop and using anchorage, give two captions that would represent the picture in different ways.

Selection

Whatever ends up on the screen or in the paper, much more will have been left out. Any news story has been selected from hundreds of others which the producers have decided were less interesting for you, any picture has been chosen from an enormous number of alternatives.

Omission is knowing about something but just refusing to focus on it or bring light to the facts.

In 2005, the New York Times knew about the Bush Administration using Telecom companies (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) to spy on Americans. The story was held back for over a year as the Times received pressure from Bush White House to kill the story. The Times didn't kill the story completely but they did wait until after the November 2006 elections before they actually reported on Bush Administration breaking the law

Mediation

Every time we encounter a media text, we are not seeing reality, but someone’s version of it. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is something that is easily forgotten when we get caught up in enjoying a text. 
If you see a picture of a celebrity kissing her boyfriend, you may find it unsurprising that the picture has been altered and does not show the reality of the situation, but in fact we should bear this in mind whatever we encounter in the media. 
The media place us at one remove from reality: they take something that is real, a person or an event and they change its form to produce whatever text we end up with. 
This is called mediation. You should be looking for this with any media text.

What the BBC classified as ‘riots’ in London become ‘protests’ in Beitounya