How does the opening of Skins represent young people through it's use of media devices?

Intro - Skins shows young people as chaotic, emotional beings by reinforcing a common stereotype in the mainstream media.

Middle - Skins rejects this stereotype and creates a "humanised" representation that takes into account many factors and features multiple representations.

End - In conclusion Skins only represents young people in opposition to adult culture.

At fist Skins appears to support the prevailing stereotype of young people that they are unruly and anti-social. The title sequence shows this by featuring simplistic iconography (alcohol, cigarettes) as a quick and easy way of establishing the stereotype from the beginning.

The mise-en-scene of the girl's bedroom also reinforces this stereotype. It features clothes strewn untidily across the floor, and elaborate trinkets and decorations, the personality of that character is physically projected onto the set before she even speaks. The representation we gain from this is that the character (teenage girls) are very fashion-conscious and give value to their appearance. The scene with the other girl in her bathroom is highly sexualised, the camera tracks across her leg and she's referred to only in terms of her appearance, again this reinforces the same representation.

On the other hand the excerpt features many other young people, some of whom differ from the initial stereotype.

In conclusion Skins only defines young people in opposition to adults. The best example of this is with the music at the beginning of the extract. The style of music is deliberately used as an antagonism for the adult. In this youth are represented not with one single stereotype, nor with many different representations, instead each representation is presented with a common stereotype.

Homework 18/11/2010

From Mr. Gray's blog:

How does Al Jazeera REPRESENT the world Islamic communty?

1) How do the look and layout of the Al Jazeera home pages (English and Arabic) compare? - can you think of any explanations for these differences.

The Arabic homepage is very dense. Content is the top priority and the entire thing is neatly organised. There's a marquee on the top of the page which acts as instant rolling news to direct users as quickly as possible away from the index page.

The English homepage is relaxed about it's layout. It has one simple unifying theme and is not organised efficiently so as to shorten the path between the user landing on the index page and their arrival at content. Essentially this is because the English section of Al Jazeera is only really included as an afterthought, a second priority. The audience is different, those arriving on the english Al-Jazeera will be much more likely to search hard for what they want, as they must have gone out of their way to find the english Al Jazeera.

2) Describe the 'interactivity' of the website (explore several pages) - where do the links take you? How does this compare with a similar website such as the BBC Homepage?


I spent fifteen minutes clicking on random links, Google Translate got itself stuck in a loop and I can't speak Arabic, so I have no idea what I'm reading. I've noticed each page usually has two pictures, and these give handy clues as to what the stories are about. For example a stroy with a picture of some people playing football is probably a sport story.

I quite like the cartoons, this one in particular:

I can't read the writing on the cake, but the message is clear: Zionism and American imperialism are united to divide the middle east (I'm guessing the cake represents the middle east). Having looked at other cartoons on the site they all have a strong arabian nationalist theme.

Al Jazeera features a prominent two-way dialogue. Commenting appears to be anonymous and easy, unfortunately threads are not nested, but it's much better than the BBC, whose response sections are relegated to 'Have Your Say', and recent experiments checking twitter hashtags #HIGNFY for Have I got News For You and #BBCQT for BBC Question Time.

3) Now look at a different media source - Watch Al Jazeera TV - How does the production and style of the reporting differ from the BBC TV news?


Unfornately I can't, because the school computers use Internet Explorer and don't have RealPlayer. I have Firefox on my USB drive, but I left it at home. Instead I watched something on the arabic website about ancient plates. I didn't understand anything but 1 minute 30 seconds seemed a bit long for a report that was basically just someone being interviewed about old crockery. Having watched a second report featuring long shots of people walking up a hill I would say that Al Jazeera tends to focus on trivial events so as to distract people from the actual news. Then again Al Jazeera were fantastic during the assault ont he Mavi Marmara, and I can't really judge without fully understanding what's going on.


DISCLAIMER: I'm actually doing this ~2 hours before the lesson, as Patrick has only just told me about it.

Representation of Islam on the internet

Revolution Muslim. Copy the following address into the browser address bar, that way you can't be tracked. http://www.revolutionmuslim.com/

It's a fundamentalist Islamic website which has it's own quite particular representation of Islam.
EDIT 10/11/2010: I remember reading sometime last week that this site has been taken down by blogger. Perhaps the site administrators should have used BayWords instead?

http://www.inspiredbymuhammad.com/
^it's worth pointing out that the second result for this on Google is a thread on Stormfront. And that thread is blocked on the school internet filter because of 'violent language'.

Muslim Council of Britain
http://www.mcb.org.uk/

Possibly related: this weekend I went to the carnival against racism in London. There was music and dancing, George Galloway and a representative of the Muslim Council of Britain gave speeches. There were some good antifascist activists there, though they didn't have any fascists to stand against, so they came off a bit out of place.

Analyse the ways in which the media represents woman

Part 1

I have chosen to focus on the representation of woman in britiain, using contemporary british film as a case study. I will examine wasp, fish tank and red road by Andrea Arnold. I will also touch on the personal styles of Amma Asante and Lynne Ramsay. In my answer I will consider feminist theories of gender.

Discuss how the film Fish Tank represents and explores youth culture in contemporary Britain.

My initial impressions of Fish Tank were that it featured a very pessimistic representation of youth culture. While Mia's lack of respect for authority is admirable, her relationship with her family appeared to be based on a constant stream of insults and abuse.

HTML5 & Ogg video

Last year Ms. Kate mentioned we'd have to display our practical coursework on a custom website, and that the deisgn of the website could form part of the coursework. As before I'm still enthusiastic about open standards and I've tried a few experiments in implementing them. If the IT department doesn't allow us hosting it might be quite difficult, that's something we can come to later.

Motion Capture

I remember at the start of these holidays I said I'd try to do some motion capture to see if we could use it in a coursework piece, I carried out the test two weeks ago with the help of Matty. As expected there were some problems (but this is why we do tests, so that problems can be anticipated for later):