2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

I wanted the tone of my magazine to although be educating and interesting to also be an escape for my audience, somewhere where they can de-stress. I coded the language within my magazine to come across as sophisticated, therefore my magazine will be taken more seriously and won't be seen as tacky. Ensuring my magazine had a mode of address that was entertaining and high class.

Through my research I found that England was diversely ethnic, and I wanted to appeal to that and represent all ethnic groups in a good light. In my contents page I tried to not take on usual stereotypes attached to certain ethnic cultures but instead represent all girls as sexy, empowering and beautiful (equally). I also decided to use and represent young people in my magazine -representing them as successful and hardworking and not the usual stereatype attached to them of lazy,troublesome and aways drunk- showing that not all people in their late-teens were like that.

Usual stereotypes found in magazines is that of the male gaze and the way in which photoshopping has contributed to the hyperreal perception of these images. Jean Boudrillard was a social theorist who worked on the way advances of media technology have changed representations of reality. He developed a theory which tried to explain the effects these changes had on society and claimed that the human experience has become a simulation of reality rather than reality itself (as seen in the image of Keira Knightley on the right), it started off with modern society replacing all reality and meaning with signs and symbols and then due to the advances of digital technology the creation of a hyperreal world emerged. He termed examples of hyperreal as simulacra, and argued that there is no such thing as reality anymore. Photoshopping helps make this hypperreality possible and as it has been around for so long people are brought up thinking that images found within magazines are an exact replica of the person posing for them, when in reality it is an impossible fantasy which young girls want to be part of and boys want girls to actually look like. This links to the male gaze as it enhances the perception of beauty as well as having the models use poses to reinforce the the submissive role within society. Knowing this I wanted to at first represent natural girls with their natural beauty, without any photoshopping and therefore it would not result in a hyppereality being created within my magazine. However, due to an assignment which my class carried out about the male gaze and its effect it has on girls from an early age without their awareness I found that my magazine would have to approach the male gaze. The assignment consisted of 10 eleven year old girls who were asked to individually rank the cards seen below in order of attractiveness. 1 being the most and 6 being the least. Before the experiment my media class predicted that the models who were more prepared for their pictures were more likely to be ranked as the most beautiful and we were right. Models who were airbrushed and in line with the male gaze were perceived as more beautiful compared to models who weren't. When asked why, the girls said that the card at number one was 'perfect' and had no 'pimples' or 'marks' on her face whereas, the one ranked as sixth looked 'ill'.

 After conducting this research and understanding the huge impact societies ideologies have had on girls at even such a young age, I realised that as my audience would be attracted to images in line with the male gaze which have used photoshopping (creating a hyperreal world), and according to the 'uses and gratifications' theory and 'Maslow's hierarchy of Needs' my audience aspire to be these hyperreal versions of real people therefore are going to be more likely to buy my magazine if  I were to  interpret the male gaze and photoshop my images my images. However, I tried to minimalize the amount of photoshopping that was done and decided that although using the male gaze and hypereality within my images, the content found within my magazine was going to represent women as inspirational, hardworking successful people, and that the images were just going to be used to attract my audience.