OSP assessment: Learner response

 1) Type up your feedback in full (you don't need to write the mark and grade if you want to keep this confidential).

WWW: Excellent to include shirky to challenge the statement in q2,  EBIL Q2 needs more devlopment including the last section and a contradiction.

2) Read the whole mark scheme for this assessment carefully. Identify three specific aspects from Figure 1 (the Google Home advert) that you could have mentioned in your answer (e.g. selection of image, framing and focus, colour, text etc.)

Repetition of the word ‘home’ creates connotations of safety, warmth and comfort
• Use of colour, reinforced by neutral grey of the device, creates feeling of warmth (browns,
oranges, sunlight from left-hand side of image).
• Google represented as unthreatening, safe and a natural part of middle-class family life.

3) Now use the mark scheme to identify three potential points that you could have made in your essay for Question 2 (Hesmondhalgh - validity of theory/narrow range of values and ideologies).

 

• The role of the cultural industries in society and the way media products can influence or
impact on audiences.

• The relationship of recent technological change and media production, distribution and
circulation.
• How media industries target audiences through the content and appeal of media products
and through the ways in which they are marketed, distributed and circulated.

4) Use your exam response, the mark scheme and any other resources you wish to use to write a detailed essay plan for Question 2. Make sure you are planning at least three well-developed paragraphs in addition to an introduction and conclusion.

 The Voice offers an explicit Black British perspective on news stories and issues in London
and the UK. This alone sets it apart from mainstream media and suggests that
Hesmondhalgh’s view that only a narrow range of values and ideologies are available is not
entirely valid. Features such as the first black photographer to shoot the cover picture of
Vogue magazine (December 2018) and campaigns such as the Black Pound campaign
encouraging readers to spend their money with Black businesses (also seen in the suggestion
to ‘Buy Black on Black Friday’) both reflect this agenda.

However, The Voice has been doing this to some extent since its launch in 1982 and it has
arguably become less powerful and influential in recent years. This suggests the digital
revolution Clay Shirky writes about (the “billion new participants in the contemporary media
ecosystem”) has not benefited The Voice in its mission to promote values and ideologies
that remain outside the mainstream. Perhaps this reinforces Hesmondhalgh’s view that the
media is dominated by a narrow range of values and ideologies in that The Voice has failed
to really challenge the hegemonic ideology of the UK.

Hesmondhalgh’s ideas regarding a narrow range of values and ideologies and also his
arguments around commodification and the demand for profit in the cultural industries.
• As a former Disney child star, a more cynical approach to Zendaya’s online presence may
suggest that she constructs her social media and online presence very carefully to create a
persona that is economically successful and appealing to her target audience. If we view
Zendaya’s online presence as primarily a marketing tool for her film and TV work then this
would strongly reinforce Hesmondhalgh’s view that the cultural industries values profit over
principle and therefore only reinforces a narrow range of values and ideologies.

5) Finally, identify three key areas you plan to revise from the OSP unit (CSP aspects or theories) having looked at your feedback from this assessment.

 Hesmonhalgh in depth, Contradiction for 20 markers and Shirky in depth.