Why the music video?
In an age where MTV isn't literally music television anymore, the music video still provides a tidy educational package that is readily available via Internet video outlets like YouTube. 5 The music video provides an interesting hybrid cultural object in that it clearly is a promotional material made my record companies, but it also contains ideological implications. While I could use television advertisements, the length of the music video provides more for analysis. Television shows also present an interesting lens, but there are obvious problems with the variety of texts television generates. For instance, would students focus on a particular show, season, genre, or network? Movies, too, present a difficulty in that their length can make it difficult to develop workable viewing assignments. All in all, music videos are readily accessible, they are available in a variety of genres, and their length provides for in-depth reading.
Unit Overview
The idea of this unit is that students will take analytical approaches information that they already have learned in AP Literature and Composition in order to analyze the ideological values American cultural consumers are taking in on a moment-to-moment basis. The unit overview will be separated into three separate segments:
1. All media are constructed
2. Constructed medium has a blueprint with which it functions
3. Reading and understanding all levels of the blueprint is necessary for the function of the construction
1. All Media Are Constructed
We often make the assumption that people know that popular cultural production items are constructed with a specific voice (rhetorical appeals) and audience in mind (rhetorical situations) and that aspects of mass media (representation, censorship, propaganda, bias through mass media, popular culture, digital media, etc.) inundate us nearly every moment of our waking lives.
2. A Constructed Medium Has a Blueprint in Which it Functions
Like all other examples of texts we are going to review the application of rhetorical appeals, rhetorical situations, and narrative structures. Additionally, we will be using the concept of mise-en-scène to evaluate/read the visual structure of a variety of different media forms.
3. Reading and understanding all levels of the blueprint is necessary for the function of the construction
After familiarizing ourselves with the construction of media and the rules in which it functions we will be questioning visual representations of gender, class, race, sexuality, etc.
Comments: