american history

Media-Sport Texts

Within cultural and media studies a text is anything that generates meaning through signifying practices. Any form of mediated message or image is a text.

Media texts represent the world in certain ways. Because there are so many different and conflicting ways in which meaning about the world can be constructed, it matters profoundly what and who gets left out, and how things, people, events, relationships are represented (Stuart Hall).

Representation involves the reproduction of reality but is delivered through selective abstraction. Mediated representations are univocal and biased.

Media representations conform to recognizable codes. Codes give stability to media signs and facilitate a consensus of meaning.

For functionalist sociologists the media is a key institution of socialisation. Its codes of representation reflect social consensus. It is the role of the media to represent social reality whilst adhering to certain social values and standards.
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