Ideology In Media Analysis

Demonstrate how ideology works in a media text. Use lifestyle magazines as your key example. Demonstrate how ideologies work in the text to construct the reader and speak to them.
The media plays a major role in informing people about what is happening in the world and shaping the audience’s norms and values through the use of ideology, and generally constructing them as people. According to Stuart Hall; ideology is ‘the frameworks of thinking and calculation about the world’ and by this he means how the audience uses ‘ideas’ to figure out how the world works and what role they have to play in it. Fellow Marxist, Althusser goes on from this idea to write, ‘Ideology…is the medium through which all people experience the world’ and this essay

Some say that the audience of the media is extremely passive, as the hypodermic syringe theory suggests, and they accept anything that they are fed by the producers. In terms of men’s lifestyle magazines, this can be said to be an outdated theory as there is a variety of men’s lifestyle magazines on offer, each having its own niche or angle. For example Men’s Health has a primary focus on sport and fitness whereas GQ tends to focus on money, sex and fashion so not all men share the same personal ideologies. However Althusser using the concept of “interpellation” argues that the audience are “hailed or summoned by the ideologies which recruit us as their “authors”’ and by this he means that the concept of ideology put the audience in a ‘position of recognition’ and the chain of ideology, so without realising the concept wouldn’t work without the said audience. But at the same time some say that there is clearly following of social and fashion trends, hence how metrosexuality became so popular after men’s lifestyle magazines shifted their focus from traditional masculine subjects to more feminine ones. So, magazines must have played a role in this social change but the argument is to what extent and whether the audience chose to follow the trend or were indoctrinated into doing so. David Gauntlett (2002) thinks that the audience are the reader’s identity aren’t given to them but instead they’re constructed and negotiated, so to say that they audience follow everything that the magazine’s tell them to simply isn’t right; it being a build-up of being exposed to the same messages over time that constructs them into being part of the ideology. The readers eventually become the ideology and it is constant cycle of conforming to the beliefs of the dominant