| Culture, Media and Identities |  |
This Course Guide has been taken from the most recent presentation of the course. It would be useful for reference purposes but please note that there may be updates for the following presentation.
SOCI A318
Culture, Media and Identities
The Course Guide was originally prepared by Stuart Hall for the OUUK and amended by Garland Liu for the OUHK.
SOCI A318 Culture, Media and Identities
SOCI A318 is a year-long, 20-credit higher level course in the Bachelor of Social Sciences programme. It is developed by the Open University, U.K. (hereafter as OUUK) as a broad-based interdisciplinary social science course. The study materials including texts, audio CDs, and video CD are adopted from the OUUK.
| 1 Starting the course |
1.1 The Course Guide
Welcome to SOCI A318 Culture, Media and Identities.
The Course Guide introduces the content, themes and structure of SOCI A318. It describes and sets out the function of the various course materials and summarises the six course books which, with the audio CDs and the Study Guides, carry the main content of the course. It offers basic guidance on academic and study skills, assessment and examination strategy and how to integrate the video and audio components.
At the very beginning of the course, before you start working on anything else, read the Course Guide straight through once. Remember to come back to the Course Guide at any subsequent point when you need basic information.
1.2 Checklist
The teaching components and guidance for study include the items as follows:
Presentation Schedule
Course Guide
The Set Books (Books 1–6):
Book 1:
Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, by Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus (Set Book Book 2:
Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall Book 3: Identity and Difference, edited by Kathryn Woodward Book 4: Cultural Production/Cultures of Production, edited by Paul du Gay Book 5: Consumption and Everyday Life, edited by Hugh Mackay Book 6: Media and Cultural Regulation, edited by Kenneth Thompson
Study Guides (for Books 2–6)
Assignment Booklets (1 & 2)
Audio CDs (AC2253, AC2254, AC2255, AC2293, AC2294, AC2295, AC2296)
Video CD
Media Handbook.
Book 1 is the only set book which you have to buy yourself. It can be ordered from the recommended bookshop: Commercial Press bookstores. All other materials are supplied by the OUHK.
| 2. The course: Culture, Media and Identities |
2.1 Who is SOCI A318 for?
SOCI A318 offers students an opportunity to take an advanced level course in sociology. It introduces students to cultural and media studies, a rapidly developing area of interdisciplinary study in both the social sciences and the humanities. The increasing popularity and importance of cultural and media studies reflect the ‘turn to culture’ in recent years within the social and human sciences, and the growing significance of cultural questions, the mass media and issues around social identities in the late-modern world. It also picks up and develops, in the context of the modern media and a ‘global’ environment, many classical themes from sociology and anthropology, as well as aspects of literary and visual studies, linguistics and psychoanalysis. SOCI A318 is ‘interdisciplinary’ because the study of culture requires a close attention to both textual analysis (the various forms in which cultural meanings are produced and circulated, the use of various ‘languages’ to express and interpret meanings) and social analysis (the social context in which cultural meanings are produced and the consequences of the global expansion of culture, the cultural industries and the media on changing social identities). The course draws on theories, concepts and debates within both the social sciences and the humanities and can therefore form part of a variety of undergraduate course profiles.
SOCI A318 is designed for students who have already acquired the basic academic and study skills required at roughly equivalent to the second year of study in a conventional university system and who are ready for more ‘advanced’ undergraduate study. It is appropriate for all students with an interest in these areas, whatever their academic background. No specialist knowledge in these areas is required, though a familiarity with some basic sociological concepts will be helpful. All students will be expected to engage with a range of themes and debates, to think and write critically about ideas, to develop skills of textual and social analysis relevant to this area of work, and to apply theoretical analysis to a wide range of empirical examples and case studies.
2.2 What is SOCI A318 about?
SOCI A318 explores current theoretical ideas and debates about culture, language and meaning, about the media and the cultural industries, and what impact these have on changing cultural identities in the contemporary world. The course explores what culture is, what we mean by it, how we produce it, what we do with it (and what it does with us). It analyses how we use culture to ‘make sense of the world’ (in both macro, ‘global’ and micro, ‘local’ settings) and how our identities as individuals, groups, communities, nations and peoples are the result of ‘cultural processes’. It examines how cultural meanings are constructed through a variety of ‘languages’ (written, spoken, visual, musical, using the body itself and other instruments as expressive and creative media, as well as the complex electronic languages of the modern mass media and communications revolution). It analyses how these meanings are circulated through a variety of channels or means of expression — i.e. media.
2.3 Three key terms
One useful way of grasping the course is to see how many of the arguments and examples lead to the three key terms in the course title. Culture is a difficult concept to pin down, and defining it is part of what the course is ‘about’. SOCI A318 is constantly returning to it, expanding on the definition, adding new aspects — something you may want to keep track of for yourself in your notes, as your work on the course proceeds. Students sometimes puzzle about the distinction between ‘society’ and ‘culture’. The two clearly closely overlap. In part, it’s a matter of perspective. If you study what two people do as they relate to one another, you may be engaging in social observation and description. But the moment you ask, of the same interaction, what it means, either to us or to the participants, then you have begun to engage in a cultural analysis. Culture is about all those objects which carry or express meaning and all social practices which have meaning for their participants.
Two definitions of culture stand out as of particular relevance to SOCI A318. Firstly, ‘culture’ can refer to what is distinctive about the ‘ways of life’ of a group, community, nation or people: not only what they do but how they do it — their particular customs, habits and mores; how certain meanings and values are embodied and expressed in their way of doing things. We feel we ‘belong’ to (identify with) a culture — a family group, an organization, an ethnic group, a gender, a class, community or nation — when we share certain ways of behaving, when our actions are regulated by certain common norms of conduct. Of course, these ‘shared norms’ differ from one culture to another. Think of the many different ways of bringing up children in different cultures — the different patterns of child-rearing or ‘cultures’ of parenting, as we call it these days. Think, too, of the different ‘cultures’ of the organizations in which we work or with which we have to deal in everyday life.
Secondly, ‘culture’ can refer to the shared meanings, images and codes — the ways in which groups conceptualise, classify and ‘make sense of’ their world, the common codes of expression and interpretation in use, and the many ‘languages’ in which cultural meanings are constructed, expressed and communicated between participants. What comes across in these two definitions is that culture is to be found both in things — in texts, objects and artefacts — as well as in practices — ways of doing things, using objects to express a meaning, communicating with one another through language, our ‘performances’ as cultural actors.
What SOCI A318 aims to do is to help you develop the skills of cultural analysis, whichwill enable you to get at these cultural meanings in many different texts and contexts; and to use a variety of concepts and theories to understand better how they ‘work’. Much of this work requires you to apply concepts and ideas to particular examples. Thus SOCI A318 studies, for example, the ‘cultures’ of consumers, advertisers, musicians and mothers; of families watching television in the home; of body-builders grooming their physiques in the gym; of Serb soldiers sharing a cigarette while on duty; of corporate executives trying to ‘image’ the youth market for their next product; of people celebrating Christmas in Trinidad. What do the ways in which people do these things tell us about their shared cultural meanings? The course also analyses a variety of ‘texts’ which function as symbolic means — media — to express or communicate meaning or to facilitate our ‘making sense’ of what is going on: what individuals and groups say and write, the music they produce or like, the way they narrate their own ‘stories’ in narrative or autobiographical form, how they are imaged on the screen or represented in various media, the clothes they wear, and so on. Each is a way of ‘saying something’ or representing meaning which — once we share the same codes of expression — we can ‘read’ or interpret meaningfully. Each is a way of ‘saying something’ about who we are — our identities.
SOCI A318 is also concerned with the wider, economic, organizational and institutional contexts in which ‘culture’ is produced, circulated and regulated in the modern world. It looks at the economics of culture as well as the ‘cultural economy’. It examines the interface between culture and technology, and the ‘global’ contexts in which these larger cultural processes are embedded. Who produces ‘culture’? How is it used or consumed? What sort of organizations are the new, global, cultural industries? Who finances and organizes culture’s world-wide circulation? Who regulates it? How does culture relate to the distributions of power and knowledge in society? What forces are constraining and facilitating the direction of cultural change?
Culture consists of ‘shared meanings’, but these must be embodied in some way: constructed and produced using some determinate means; expressed, performed and circulated through some channel or medium. Even words — speech, ordinary conversation, story-telling, gossip — require both a material medium (the voice) in which the signs and symbols that are the vehicles of meaning are produced, and a code which allows us to decode or interpret these meanings correctly. The body itself — its postures and expressions, how it is groomed and maintained, adorned and regulated, assimilated to some ‘body-ideal’ of slimness or fitness, used as an expressive instrument — can serve as a medium of cultural meanings. The repertoire of images which addresses us on every side, in our increasingly visual culture, tells us a great deal about what meanings are strongly valued in our culture — and which have acquired negative value. Modern music, however, requires complicated instrumentation, amplification and recording equipment. Satellite television and other advanced information systems require the capacity to transmit electronic impulses world-wide and to bounce ‘information’ off instruments circling the globe. In the late-modern world, the media of culture-making have become technologically highly sophisticated, organizationally complex (generating new ‘organizational cultures’ of their own), expensive to capitalise, profitable beyond our wildest imagining in their operation, and ‘global’ in their reach and uneven impact on different cultures — a powerful motor for cultural change in their own right. No study of culture in today’s world would be complete without the analysis of the cultural industries, for it is they, above all, who have made ‘culture’ a key element in all economic and social processes. And yet the most pervasive cultural ‘medium’ is probably still the voice, used in everyday conversation. SOCI A318 studies all these various media — small and simple, large and complex.
Culture also ‘tells us something’ about the people who express themselves through it, who associate with, take on or identify with the meanings which are being represented. Identities are often associated with particular cultural texts and practices: women with soap opera, men with action films, young, mobile urban ‘nomads’ with Sony Walkmans, the songs of Bob Dylan with ageing hippies, baggy jeans with street-wise black kids, button-down collars and dark blue suits with white, jet-propelled corporate executives. Though rather stereotyped, these ‘typecastings’ of identity nevertheless tell us something about how identities are seen and imaged in our culture. These images enter into our self-images, helping to define the ‘sorts of people’ we may become, and how we see others. Where indeed do identities come from in the first place? Are we born with them — part of our genetic and biological endowment, so to speak ‘outside’ culture? Or is ‘who we are’ formed within culture, in relation to how identities are imaged or imagined? Do we learn from the culture particular ways of ‘being’ or ‘becoming’ certain sorts of people, of identifying ourselves as or with certain identities? Are ‘the English’ or ‘black entertainers’ or the so-called ‘liberated woman’ or the distinction between ‘new’ men and ‘lads’ born or made — biologically destined or culturally constructed out of our ideas and images, from the many ways in which ‘Chineseness’ or ‘entertainment’ or ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are represented in our culture? Without culture, how would we know which of the many different ways of being ‘Chinese’ would count as a true version of ‘Chineseness’, or how to perform the identity of being a ‘new man’ or ‘liberated women’ so that we could become one?
SOCI A318 examines the importance of cultural meanings and representation for the construction of identities; and for what is the inevitable reverse side of identification — namely, the use of cultural signs and symbols to mark our difference from others; what SOCI A318 describes as the exercise of symbolic power or the process of symbolic exclusion which accompanies the construction of any identity — the process of ‘othering’, of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. It also considers the ‘dark side’ of culture — the way in which emphasising what is essential about the things we share, culturally, inevitably cuts us off from, and emphasises our differences from others; the fact that questions of culture, language and meaning are never wholly outside the ‘play’ of power; the evidence that, in cultural matters, what is imagined, the product of unconscious fears, fantasies and projections, can be as powerful and significant in shaping social meaning as what seems to be ‘real’.
2.4 What is the structure of SOCI A318?
The structure of SOCI A318 is simple, one might even say transparent! The main course content is delivered in six ‘core’ course texts (the six course books, containing the Readings related to each chapter): the first book presents a resume of the course in miniature, each of the other five is devoted to one main theme. Each book contains a number of specially written chapters, which cover aspects of the main theme. The other course elements –video and audio — are organized around particular chapters and books, expanding and developing or recapping the key arguments.
Book 1’s purpose is to introduce the course as a whole, in microcosm. It does this by taking the five main elements or ‘moments’ in the cultural process and applying them to a particular cultural artefact — the Sony Walkman personal stereo — in the form of a case study. It puts into circulation certain key terms and outlines some important course-wide concepts and theories. The other five Books then take up each of the five themes or ‘moments’ in turn, isolating them for purposes of depth of study, and doing some detailed work on each, using many examples.
The five main ‘moments’ in the cultural process (which Book 1 identifies, and which are then examined in greater depth in sequence) are:
representation — the use of a variety of languages — verbal and visual — to produce or construct cultural meanings.
identity and difference — how culture is used to construct identities and to mark difference.
cultural production — the processes and organizational cultures through which culture is produced in a modern ‘global’ and technological environment: the cultural industries.
cultural consumption and creation — how new meanings are given to cultural artefacts and activities through the ways in which these things are used, appropriated and ‘consumed’: how cultural meaning is produced by the practices and performances of everyday life.
regulation and cultural change — how culture is regulated; the norms, practices and institutions of cultural and moral regulation and how they are changing; the role of formal (state, governmental) regulation and ‘informal’ regulation; public Vs private moralities; and other key debates in contemporary cultural change.
Each Book (with the exception of Book 1, which is introductory) has its own Study Guide. Each Book has its own teaching audio CDs. There is a Course Video, with sections summarising three key points from each Book — a sort of visual ‘revision guide’ in a sharp, snappy format.
The Media Handbook provides guidance on how to integrate the video and audio materials into your study. Therefore, always consult the relevant part of the Media Handbook first before you go ahead with the audio-visual materials.
There are two Assignment Booklets containing the TMAs as well as advice on how best to approach the assignments. You would have to do six assignments — one per Book — spaced at regular intervals throughout the course (one is double-length and double-weighted). There is a three-hour examination to be sat at the end of the course, and you will be sent a Specimen Examination Paper later in the year which will give you an idea of the kinds of questions that will be asked.
2.5 Integrating the ‘story-line’: the cultural circuit
The overall ‘story-line’ of SOCI A318 is best captured through the idea of ‘cultural circuit’, which is introduced in Book 1 and serves as an integrating device in each subsequent book and the audio-visual material. This device is designed to help you think of culture as a process — something which happens over time, at different institutional sites, each of which contributes an aspect that is essential but different from the others; all of which have to be linked or articulated together — like the different points on an electrical circuit — if the process is to be sustained. Each point or ‘moment’ of the circuit has its own organization and ways of working. No one point prevails or is the determining moment, over all the others. This may suggest that each ‘moment’ operates independently, as an autonomous entity. In fact, the cultural process depends on each moment doing its different work; but each also depends on, and is in a sense present in, the others. Thus there would be no cultural production if there was nobody to use or consume its products (cultural production and consumption are different, but interdependent moments of the cultural process). And both production and consumption depend on and contribute to the production of meaning (representation is as important to production as it is to the construction of identities). We separate them out into different books only for purposes of exposition, depth of analysis and ease of study.
How would this idea of a circuit apply to a particular cultural artefact? Let us take a TV programme for illustration. To become (and to be studied as) a cultural artefact, a TV programme has to be produced, and it has to be consumed. Both are extremely complex operations: the first requires a programme company, technically-equipped staff, cameras and studios, actors, writers and producers, a budget; the second requires a channel of circulation, time for viewing, money to purchase the set, an interest in that kind of programming, power over the family’s viewing agenda and possession of the remote control device! Does this mean that the cultural story of the TV programme begins and ends with production and consumption? Not at all. Remember our two definitions of culture. The programme also has to be in a language which both the producers and the audience can decode, and in a format with which people are familiar or of which they can make sense. It has to carry or express meaning. It isn’t just a roll of film or a set of electronic impulses. It is also a story, with characters and a beginning, middle and end. It has to ‘work’, not only technically, but as a form of symbolic representation. The social world it represents has to ‘make sense’ to its viewers. Certain sorts of people may identify with it — middle-aged women at home, perhaps, or the youth audience or day-time viewers. Other sorts of people won’t — high-brow viewers perhaps, or pensioners or shiftworkers who sleep during the day: an example of identity and difference. People will read it in ways which differ considerably from what its writers or producers imagined, investing it with meanings of their own, taking its meanings into their own lives. And it is subject to regulation. Mothers won’t let their teenaged daughters view it; it’s criticised by the Broadcasting Standards Council for being shown before nine o’clock in the evening; or the National Viewers and Listeners Association says it’s ‘pornographic’ …
What makes a TV programme a cultural artefact is the fact that it has been shaped by and must pass through all the points or ‘moments’ on the cultural circuit. No one ‘moment’ — and certainly not production alone — can account for its cultural character.
In SOCI A318, this basic idea, central to a core argument of the course, is also used as the basis of its structure and organization. Students are introduced to the idea of the ‘cultural circuit‘ as a whole first, in Book 1, using a case-study approach to demonstrate how it works. Book 1 thus serves as a microcosm of the whole course. The course then devotes a single course text to each of the five points of the cultural circuit, to each ‘moment’ of the cultural process, in sequence, treating each in greater depth. Thus:
Book 1 — the ‘cultural circuit’ as a whole, using the Sony Walkman example Book 2 — representation and meaning — the first ‘moment’ in depth Book 3 –– identity and difference — the second ‘moment’… Book 4 — cultural production — the third ‘moment’ …
Book 5 — cultural consumption — the fourth ‘moment’ … Book 6 — regulation — the fifth ‘moment’ … It is important to think of the cultural circuit as a continuous process, one which you can ‘enter’ (start to study, start your analysis) at any point, provided you don’t stop until you’ve covered all the points and completed the ‘circuit’. In practice, that means that a full ‘cultural study’ of a cultural artefact like a TV programme (or a Sony Walkman, the case analysed in Book 1) must deal with its language or form of representation, its meanings; how it is used to mark identity and difference — what cultural identities it is helping to construct; its conditions of production; how it is transformed, and new meanings created, through circulation, consumption, appropriation and ‘use’; how its uses and circulation are regulated, and what norms of regulation this reinforces.
The cultural circuit
So SOCI A318’s structure and organization itself carries a meaning, a message. Its structure is its meaning! If you can remember the idea of the ‘cultural circuit’ you will instantly recall the structure of the course, what its five main thematic areas are, how the six books (and themes) relate to one another and what their function is in the overall ‘story line’.
You will find the cultural circuit discussed at several points in the course, especially in Book 1, in the Introductions to each of the other five Books, in audio CD AC2253 (and referred to in other CDs), and in Study Guide 2.
| 3 Course materials |
3.1 The six course books
We have already identified the six course texts. Each book consists of an Introduction, which outlines the main themes, and a number of chapters written by academics who are specialists in their particular fields. The chapters are to be studied at the rate of one chapter per week. This means that students must allow time in the first week allocated to each book, to read the Introduction, as well as Chapter 1 in that week.
The six book Introductions are absolutely essential reading. They outline the main themes of each book and show how the various chapters link together. They are invaluable for writing TMAs, especially those which pose questions across chapters; and they are essential for revision purposes, to give you a feel of the book’s argument as a whole.
The six books are as follows:
Book 1: Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, by Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus (Set Book) [6 sections equivalent to 2 chapters/weeks] Book 2: Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Sturat Hall [6 chapters/weeks]
Book 3: Identity and Difference, edited by Kathryn Woodward [6 chapters/weeks] Book 4: Cultural Production/Cultures of Production, edited by Paul du Gay [6 chapters/weeks] Book 5: Consumption and Everyday Life, edited by Hugh Mackay [6 chapters/weeks] Book 6: Media and Cultural Regulation, edited by Kenneth Thompson [4 chapters and a Conclusion/5 weeks].
3.2 Readings
Traditionally, readings in OUUK courses have been relegated to ‘supplementary booklets’ or to Course Readers bought by the student, but here they have been integrated with the text to give them more prominence and make them easier to access and use. The set readings associated with each chapter are included in each text, at the end of the relevant chapter. This means that it is easy for you simply to turn to the end of the chapter when invited to do so in the main text, to read the extract and to do whatever activity is associated with the Reading, and then to return to the main text.
Do not on any account skip the Readings. These Readings are not supplementary or optional; they are essential to the argument of each chapter. They have been specially selected and edited so as to become an integral part of the argument of the chapter. Authors have assumed that you will read and grasp the main points of each of the Readings and have written their chapters accordingly. If you leave out the Readings, you will simply lose the thread of the argument, and find that you have missed a vital link in the exposition.
We have tried to make this skill easier for you in two ways. First, though we do summarize the passage in the extract, we often, in the paragraph of the main text immediately following, do comment on the Reading or draw out some points which are of particular importance, and perhaps discuss them before passing on. Look on for this device of exposition. The second thing is that we not only tell you where the main text the Reading contributes most; but we also offer you some points of special importance to bear in mind as you read the passage, so that you are not reading them ‘blind’; and we sometimes build in some Activities around the Readings so that your reading is not ‘passive’ but becomes an exercise in ‘active learning’.
3.3 Activities — ‘active learning’
Spaced at key points through the main texts, you will find a number of Activities. As we suggested above, these are designed to make your reading and learning of the course materials more ‘active’. It is essential, especially in distance-supported learning, not to fall into a passive reading of the teaching text, so that you are simply led on from one thing to another as in a well-constructed novel. You need to positively put yourself into a more engaged, active, learning mode in relation to the text. These are teaching texts, not ‘a good read’, and they play the role of the well-organized lecture course in conventional universities, which are packed with information, and which you cannot afford to miss. Get in the habit of, for example, not passing on to the next paragraph until you have really understood the one you have just read. Don’t glide over a difficult concept if you think the whole argument of the chapter depends upon it. By all means use your pencil or biro to underline points in the text, if you work that way but often all you’ve left is a mark in the margin, not an impression in your mind! You need to make notes on all these chapters so that you have appropriated the argument for yourself in your own words before you can say that you really understand the chapter.
One device designed to get you to stop and reflect is to set you an exercise or Activity to do, which will bring the point home to you. Please do not skip these Activities. Do them. It is essential to do them because, often, they are designed to give you practice in particular skill of analysis which is an important objective of the course. You can only learn how to do cultural or textual or social analysis by doing some for yourself. And only if you practise doing what the Activity invites you to do, will you be able — as many TMAs will invite you to do — to apply these skills to examples of your own. Other Activities, invite you, not to practise a skill but to test out a point made in the text for yourself, by doing a related exercise. If you find — as many students do — that at first these Activities feel like an interruption that is probably because you are still too passive in relation to the text — reading, not studying it: covering the ground but not learning and critically internalising for yourself what it is saying.
Last but not the least, feedback to Activities may not be immediately identifiable to you because relevant discussions are often embedded in the text that follows and sometime under different section headings. So, you would have to tease out the feedback from the discussion that follows the Activity.
3.4 Study Guides
Each book except Book 1 has its own Study Guide. These provide basic summaries of the argument of each chapter, identify key concepts and theories, try to talk through difficult points in the argument, offer advice on how to organize your study time, and provide many hints, ideas and suggestions on how to get the most out of your studies.
Study Guides are absolutely vital for your study of SOCI A318. The fact that the main teaching texts are chapters in published books makes the Study Guides, which contain important supplementary teaching materials and summaries of the texts, all the more essential. The SOCI A318 Study Guides have been written and prepared by a panel of four experienced writers who have been closely involved with the production of the course at every stage, have participated in all the discussions, especially in relation to teaching and learning aspects, and they have contributed to other teaching elements — the Audiocassettes, for example. Those writers who prepared the Study Guides possess in-depth knowledge of how distance learning students study and what problems they encounter, so they have an informed view of what might help students: they need to make the chapters into ‘active learning texts’ to facilitate student learning on SOCI A318. They are able to take a ‘student’s eye’ view of the course, and then to prepare the Study Guides in such a way to address the particular issues as they saw them, from this position.
You should read and use the Study Guides as your friend and counsellor throughout your study of this course. Regard it as a ‘second tutor’, standing at your elbow. Always keep the Study Guide and the main textbook together with you as you study. You should read the summary and introductory materials in the first part of the Study Guide before you start the Book. You should read the summary section and the key questions on each chapter in the second part of the Study Guide before you begin to study the chapter. And you should use the guidance on concepts, the notes on concepts and theories and other activities and hints after you have read the relevant chapter, as a way of checking or testing your degree of understanding of the chapter you have read. Needless to say, these sections on the main chapters in each book are invaluable for answering TMAs and for exam revision.
Our experience has shown that, generally, OU students do much better when they make active use of the Study Guides, and that those who neglect them are missing a great deal of useful help and direction. If you ever get into difficulties, you will find that there is help, guidance and just the support you need — right at hand in the Study Guides. Please make use of the SOCI A318 Study Guides.
3.5 The video and audio CDs
There is a course video, which has been specially prepared as a learning support on SOCI A318. The course video is divided into six short sections, each relating to a course book. Each section summarizes and illustrates with new materials three key points. This is done in a sharp, ‘snappy’ way, in ‘advertising’ or headline style, so that the points are made in a vivid way. You should use the video:
as a general ‘resource’;
at the end of the relevant book, to make sure you have its key ideas fixed firmly in your mind;
as ‘raw materials’ if you need ideas or other examples for your TMAs;
for exam revision purposes
It can, of course, be watched more than once, and can be stopped, started and repeated for note-taking etc. Make sure that you use the video throughout the course, going back to it before and after studying each book.
There are seven hour-long audio CDs, one per book and a final audio CD covering revision and exam strategy. The audio CDs are considered to be part of the audio-visual element of the course, and guidance on them is included in Media Handbook. Audio CDs are the most direct ‘teaching’, apart from the individual chapters. Here is where the teaching staff address the overall thematic integration of each book, highlight and try to unpack difficult ideas, concepts and arguments in a medium which enables them to speak directly, in a ‘teaching voice’, to students.
Each CD approaches this task of direct support for learning on SOCI A318 slightly differently, but there are some common elements. Each provides a summary statement of the story-line of the book. Each involves some of the book authors in a question-and-answer session with tutors in distance education, whose purpose is to clarify ideas and arguments you might find difficult. Most of them, then, contain a more wide-ranging discussion amongst participants who have also been fully involved in writing and producing the course, who are thoroughly familiar with it, and can therefore help direct students through the more unfamiliar material. You will find many of the core issues of SOCI A318 addressed on the audio CDs: for example, the short sections on the ‘cultural circuit’ on the opening side of audio CD AC2253; or the very useful exploration of the concept of ‘representation’ on audio CD AC2254, Side 2.
The audio CDs should be used for study, rather than simply ‘listened to’. Follow the guidance on how and when to use them which you will find at the beginning of each Study Guide. Also, use the summaries and other notes in the Media Handbook. Get into the habit of finding the appropriate section of the audio CD, listening to it at the appropriate time in relation to the main course text, stopping at the end of that section, and not going on until you find a point where it is relevant to what you are studying. For example, it is worth listening to the outline of ‘what is in Book 2’ at the start of audio CD AC2254, Side 1, at the very start of Book 2/Week 3. However, there is no point in listening to the discussion of ‘representation’ on audio CD AC2254, Side 2, until after you have read the basic exposition in Book 2 Introduction and Chapter 1, and understood some of its applications in later Book 2 chapters. Then it makes sense, towards the end of Book 2, to turn on the four authors of Book 2 chapters on Side 2, and hear them in debate with each other. If You don’t get all of it the first time, take advantage of the CD format, and listen to the discussion a second time.
You may note that section 2 of Media Handbook is about the details of Television programmes related to this course. As these programme are no longer available in the current presentation, this secion is redundant and you may simply skip it. The details of the description on the television programme will not be covered in the TMAs and the final examination.
3.6 Assessment: TMAs and the SOCI A318 exam
There are seven TMAs associated with this course. Each is linked to a particular book — one per book. The first TMA covers the very important ideas introduced in Book 1 and it gives you an opportunity to begin to write on this topic and to make first ‘written’ contact with your tutor. The last TMA (TMA 7) is formative in nature and it aims at familiarizing you with the style of questions in the coming examination. These two TMAs are shorter in length and ‘weighted’ less than the other TMAs (02–06). All the other TMAs are of a standard length (approximately 1800 words) and weight, appropriate to third level study, except TMA 05, which is double-length and double-weighted. TMA 05 is not as long or as detailed as a ‘project’ but it offers you an opportunity to write more fully and extensively on a topic, as is appropriate towards the end of a third level course; it may involve some independent use of examples, the collection and analysis of materials or the application of concepts to a context outside the course, with which you are familiar. If you do use examples of your own choice, it is essential to attach them firmly to your TMA and enclose them when you return it to your tutor. There will be fuller guidance on this in your Assignment Booklet 1.
This is a third level course, and the TMAs and exam will be designed to assess and test quite advanced study skills. It is essential at this level of study to make an effort to engage with ideas, concepts and theories. Simple descriptive answers will not get high grades. You should be on the lookout to introduce, rehearse and critically explore the key ideas and debates which are presented and discussed in the course texts. Most TMA questions will have one such ‘theme’ at its centre, even if not directly stated. Work out what it is — and address it. Look carefully at how the assessment task is defined: don’t confuse ‘discuss’ with ‘critically assess’ or ‘compare and contrast’ or ‘evaluate’ — each demands a different approach, different skills. Questions often have more than one element to them: you can’t get good marks for a two-part question if you only answer one part — however brilliantly. On the whole, questions are not being set on obscure corners of the course, to catch you out, or on subordinate themes. The assessment will focus clearly on the central areas and the key themes and questions. Copying the wording of concepts and definitions straight from the text is not helpful. You must struggle to grasp the idea and try to express it in your own words. A great deal of the course depends on the skill of detailed analysis — of text, images and examples. Try to practise these skills in your answers. Don’t just cite the example vaguely: show in concrete detail how meaning is working, how meanings are being constructed, in that particular example. Above all, try to apply what you are learning to situations and examples from cultural life around you which have not been discussed in the course. An argument about ‘race’ may apply to class or gender; a debate about the Sony Walkman may apply to the microwave or the mobile phone; a discussion of a music group may apply to your local fans club. And so on.
If you still feel weak on basic essay-writing skills, The Good Study Guide by Andy Northedge (Open University, ISBN 0 7492 00448, from the Library) is still the best place to start from, though it was originally written as a set book for D103.
The better score out of TMAs 1 & 7 will be taken into account for assessment purpose. All the rest of the assignments (TMAs 2-6) are required for assessment. It is particularly important not to miss TMA 05, since it is double-weighted as an element in your final degree grade.
There will be a final examination paper of three hours, in which you will be required to do three questions from different sections of the course. A Specimen Examination Paper will be provided later in the year. Final grades are awarded on the basis of TMA and Exam grades on the usual 50%/50% basis. There will be extensive advice on revision strategy and preparation for the exam in the final part of Study Guide 6 and on Side 2 of the final audio CD AC2296.
3.7 A media file?
To facilitate learning, you should take a more active part by keeping your own file of cuttings and examples from the media. Images, pieces of text, stories in the newspaper, advertisements, articles that discuss relevant topics, reviews of TV programmes, cuttings about the soap opera stars, financial and political news about the ‘global’ media organizations, complaints about taste, standards and decency to the press, judgements by courts and the broadcasting authorities about regulation and censorship, examples of ‘Chineseness’ / ‘HongKongness’ and other national identities, images of ‘the body’, reports of local consumer and creative activities, representations of racial or gender or class differences … The list is endless. Many of these could be used in answering TMA questions, or simply in sensitising you to looking carefully at how language and images are working in the different media.
| 4 Tutorial strategy and provision |
The personal contact with your own tutor is the most vital link. Over the two semesters, a tutorial is arranged about every three weeks. Three day schools have been scheduled for this presentation to deepen your understanding of the course. Tutorials and day schools are not compulsory, but when you are working in a relatively unfamiliar field like this one, it is worth making a special effort to take advantage of all the group discussion and tutor guidance you can get.
So now you are ready to start studying SOCI A318. Good luck with the course.
