Theory (Extended)

Theorist	Year	Concepts	Your explanation
Giroux	1997	Youth as empty category	The youths are blamed by others. In Attack the Block, even though the youths were the heroes at the end, they were blamed and arrested; the police assumed that they were in the wrong. They didn't create their own identity, the media do and fill in their category with fear and violence.
Acland	1995	Ideology of protection; deviant youth and reproduction of social order	Media representations of youths out of control allow the state to enforce laws and control over them.
Gramsci	1971 (1929-1935)	Cultural hegemony	Social Class struggle, how they are dominating their culture and society. The youths in the films Attack the Block, Harry Brown and Eden Lake are going against the middle class. They have a class of their own and are rebelling against them.
Cohen	1972	Moral panic	The media and the ruling class creates a ‘moral panic’ which is where the public fear what the media is representing. For example, these contemporary films, like Harry Brown and Eden Lake, would make the public very aware of the danger they face with these youths. The media go to extreme lengths to portray youths negatively. They are exaggerated mostly, to make public even more fearful of it. This keeps a cultural hegemony.
McRobbie	2004	Symbolic Violence	Not even recognised as violence, such as racism and gender bias. In the media and in the 3 films we watched it is dominated by men. Males are seen in a very negative light, even in Eden Lake Steve isn't seen as being macho because he can't stand up to a bunch of youths.
Gerbner	1986	Cultivation Theory	He examined the long term effects that TV had on American audiences. This could relate to British audiences, when they watch the films like Harry Brown etc. they may get a shock and become very scared and change their behaviour towards youths that they see in Britain.
	1920s	Hypodermic Theory/Magic Bullet (Audience effects theory)	This theory suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data; so we can ultimately be easily manipulated (similar model to that of propaganda). It does not recognise that as customers we have more control over how the media influences us.
		Copy Cat (audience effects theory)	Refers to how the media influence and affects the audience’s behaviour and how they think. It relates to something publicized in the media that creates a lot of attention, causing other people to imitate in order to gain the same level attention. The well-known example of this is copycat murders, suicides and other violent acts that come with no other motive other than attention, caused by seeing the same acts in the media; be it film, TV or books.
Stuart Hall	1980	Encoding – Decoding theory (Audience reception theory)	Stuart Hall suggests that the audience does not simply passively accept a text. There are, in his views, 3 ways in which audiences can read or decode and understand a text: 1.    Preffered reading/dominant Hegemonic – when an audience interprets the message as it was meant to be understood, they are operating in the dominant code. The producers and the audience are in harmony. 2.    Negotiating reading – not all audiences may understand what media producers take for granted. There may be some acknowledgement of differences in understanding. Audiences will understand the over-riding dominant ideologies within the text but they may not agree with all the views/ideas; audiences will make their own ground rules to get to the agreed dominant ideology (they will take a different path). 3.    Oppositional reading/counter-hegemonic – when an audience understands the context of the media text but they will decode the text in a completely different way; opposing the encoded text.