Mass Media: Old and New

A range of PowerPoint Presentations focused on new and old forms of Mass Media, including globalisation and the digital social world.

Researching Media Inequalities: Beyond Bechdel

While the Bechdel Test – does a film contain two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than men? – is a useful way of highlighting broad gender inequalities in the media, it wasn’t designed to capture anything but the most basic forms of gender inequality, particularly and most-notably in Hollywood […]

Media Methods and Representations: The Bechdel Test

The Bechdel Test is a very simple type of content analysis, created by Alison Bechdel in a 1985 episode (“The Rule”) of her comic-strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”, that tests how women – and by extension men – are historically represented in Hollywood films. Aside from throwing-up, so to speak, some interesting and frankly-quite-surprising […]

Revision Mapping Mass Media

While the recently-posted Research Methods Revision Maps have a certain timeless and transcendental quality(?) when it comes to being reasonably up-to-date and applicable to a wide range of sociology specifications, the same probably can’t be said of this batch of Media Revision Maps. They were created for the AQA Spec around about the time my […]

Visual Media: Theories and Representations

As you probably know by the number of blog posts featuring the word “visual“, I’m a sucker for anything that smacks of “visual sociology” (the clue is probably in what I do…) and I recently chanced upon what I think are two very neat “picture-type” pdf resources covering: 1. Media Theories: the material here involves […]

Mass Media | Complete Chapter

Over the past few weeks (months? I lose track) I’ve been assiduously assembling a series of mass media booklets from Notes that have been hanging around taking up space on a hard drive for the past few years. Where I’ve thought it necessary – either because I wanted to include some updated material or because […]

Sociology Revision Booklets: 3. Mass Media

The third in our occasional series covering free revision resources on the web looks at the Mass Media (as you’ve probably guessed from the title). The number of resources is substantially less than previous offerings on Theory and Methods and Beliefs in Society but what they lack in number is more than made-up for by […]

Knowledge Organisers: Media and Methods and Education

Back by popular demand and with a brand-spanking new set of Tables covering media, methods and education. Each Unit is by a different author and the quality is, at times, variable. Media These are pdf files so unless you’ve got a programme that will edit them you’re stuck with the information they have to offer. […]

Media Representations: Part 1 – Traditional Marxism

Continuing the sociology of the media theme that began with moral and amoral panics, this series of posts looks at the idea of media representations from a range of different perspectives. For traditional Marxism, economic power is a key variable; those who own the means of physical production are always the most powerful class and […]

Media Representations: Part 2 – Neo-Marxism

This approach addresses the theoretical weaknesses of traditional Marxism by explaining media representations in terms of ruling class cohesion. The role of the media is not necessarily to divide or scapegoat the lower classes as a way of controlling their behaviour; rather, media representations are a way of creating and maintaining an elite’s sense of […]