HEGEMONY

Hegemony

Hegemony is the idea that the media continuously represents certain groups as more dominant and more powerful than other groups. In western society the group that is most commonly shown to be the more dominant and powerful group are the middle-class white men. This is because middle-class white men dominate media production in the news, film, TV and writing industry.

Pluralism is when there are multiple viewpoints, ideas and ethnicities being shown through diverse and different types of media such as film, music and shows. Western media fail to hold an even distribution of various background in media, in the UK, for example the majority of jobs in the journalist proffesion is held by 94% of the journalists being white, and 55% of journalists being male. which is a clear under-representation of the masses. Therefore meaning that it requires people of separate viewpoints rather than continuous representation of the same ideals.

The uses and gratification model states that people will only consume media that reflects their own viewpoints, this means that it can be difficult to persuade someone who adopts a certain viewpoint (whether that be politically, more radical or docile). This can, if the active vs passive model is reflective of contemporary society, influence people's views and in extreme cases their actions. 

Western society is then shown more media consisting of middle-class white men, and less so of other ethnicities, gender and class. This then created the image that middle-class white men are deemed to be more successful and more powerful than other people. Which then forces western society to be ‘controlled’ by a certain group of people and not represented as in control by the whole population. This can then influence people who consume the media which can reflect in their actions and can affect society as a whole.

The writer believes that hegemony helps us to understand the ‘messy’ relationship between the society we live in now and the media we consume daily. This is because it helps us to think about and understand how we as audiences and consumers of media are influenced by the media we consume, for example seeing something online such as a challenge, then attempting to replicate it ourselves.

In the titles of the posters it says ‘if you’re surprised you don’t see enough black people in major roles’ I was surprised. Not at the concept of an black actor playing the roles, but instead that I didn’t recognise the characters being portrayed in massive mainstream film and tv posters. When I saw that the Harry Potter and Doctor Who characters, programmes I have watched before, I was surprised because I hadn’t seen these characters in the story up to that point, not that they were black.

However it is true that black people, Hispanic people and Asian people don’t get as much representation in media as white people. It wouldn’t solve the problem if established characters such as Harry Potter and The Doctor suddenly changed race after a prolonged series of time as they are established characters and people already have an image in their head, of the character’s age, race, ethnicity, gender, and body proportions.

However The Doctor is an exception to this as it is written into the lore of Doctor Who that The Doctor can change ethnicity, gender and body proportions with each reincarnation. It would be better if the scriptwriters changed their stories to better suite the representation they’re going for.

Whilst representation of different ethnicities, genders, ages and sexualities is good, it shouldn’t be forced, as then it wouldn’t feel natural, and would instead make the film, book, show, etc feel flawed and can be off-putting for a viewer to watch or read.