Media Messages - Music Video, Magazines and Advertising

Theoretical framework

Learners will develop their understanding of the media through the consistent application of the four areas of the theoretical framework:

• media language: how the media through their forms, codes, conventions and techniques communicate meanings
• media representations how the media portray events, issues, individuals and social groups
• media industries: how the media industries' processes of production, distribution and circulation affect media forms and platforms
• media audiences: how media forms target, reach and address audiences, how audiences interpret and respond to them and how members of audiences become producers themselves.

Learners should have also developed the skills to:

• analyse critically and compare how media products, including products outside the commercial mainstream, construct and communicate meanings through the interaction of media language and audience response use key theories of media studies and specialist subject-specific terminology appropriately
• use and critically reflect upon a range of complex theories of media studies and use specialist subject-specific terminology appropriately
• debate key questions relating to the social, cultural, political and economic role of the media through sustained discursive writing.

Media messages (Component 01) offers learners the opportunity to:

• consider the relationship between offline and online media products by completing two linked in-depth studies into contemporary newspapers, and their online counterparts, including social and participatory media.
• develop knowledge and understanding of academic ideas and arguments in relation to the two in-depth studies.
• develop knowledge and understanding of media contexts, media language and representations through the study of advertising and marketing, magazines, and music video.