2. How does your media product represent social groups?

Overview

First of all our group doesn’t represent a great variety of social groups, being that we are all 17 year old white Caucasian females. We are also of a working class background, and shown as being stereotypical students. However we did want our radio broadcast to represent this image on a whole, because we wanted to capture an audience of 15-29 year old's with would contain varying social groups of religion, age, stereotype, class and gender. Therefore to achieve this we decided that is was important to represent these groups through the content of the broadcast to compensate for the ‘student’ image we represented; also individually we have aimed to represent a mixed register within our speaking and subject matter. For example we have shown more formal news, ‘banning the Burqa’ for which we adopted a formal tone of voice to address the serious issue. Contrasting to this we also had ‘lighter’ news such as ‘Galloway’s 50th Anniversary’ for which we adopted an informal and more colloquial tone.

Gender

In terms of gender we have aimed to represent both groups equally. For example within our broadcast we have a 'Ladies Day' segment as our main story which could stereotypically remain with a mainly female theme. However to prevent this we have also added an interview with a male groundskeeper so that we even out the role of males and females within the story and equally share out interests and subject matter. Here this clip shows our representation of men and women within the ladies day story.

Age

Our audience is fairly young ranging from 15-29 therefore we wanted to captivate them by sticking to a new music style to attract my audience. To give a nightlife feel.

Class

In terms of class we have tried to represent everybody equally. First of all we did this by showing the international news and world issues which will appeal to all classes equally. Also we have tried to represent the local working community, e.g. cadbury's factory in order to keep the interest of the local community as it is a local broadcast. Here is a clip of the representation of working class, and local community.

Race

In terms of race we have chosen news subjects which involve different races and dialects in order to appeal to a very wide audience. For example we have chosen the subject of the banning of the burqa because it allows different views to be shown by different races about this subject. This includes for and against. This in turn shows race as evenly represented and discussed.

Stereotypes

Finally stereotypes can be seen to conform to in some cases within our broadcast, however we haven't approached it in a way to offend, but to relate to the local community through their dialect and situations they would find themselves in. For example the accent of a local 'Galloways' branch manager being a stereotypical Wigan accent. This is shown in the clip below

By Megan Armstrong