increasingly mediated

To What Extent is human identity increasingly mediated?

The question gives you plenty of scope to discusshow the media shapesour identities and how we use the media to construct identities.

First thing to deal with is this idea of identity being ‘mediated’: One definition of ‘mediation’ – ‘a negotiation to resolve differences’ is useful as it introduce the idea of us using negotiated readings of media to help us construct media. So not taking the messagesat face value but understanding them in context and using our own experience.

Then there’s Thomas de Zengotita use of the word for his book Mediated: The Hidden Effects of the Media on You and Your World in which he asserts that almost everything (info, values, news, role models) comes to us through some media (TV, print, web, magazines, films) so will undoubtedly colour/influence our view of life and therefore our own self-definition.

So there's the processthe audiencesmake in terms of understanding media representations and relating the media representations to themselves. Then there's looking at how the media construct representations (making a conscious selection of what to include and how to present it) in order to create identities for individuals or groups of people.

Using these ideas we can look at this question as asking to what extent is our identity constructed by media, to what extent do we use media and to what extent does media reflect identity.

David Gauntlett on Identity: 'The power relationship between the media and the audience involves a 'bit of both' or to be more precise, a lot of both. The media sends out a huge number of messages about identity and acceptable forms of self-expression, gender, sexuality, and lifestyle. At the same time the public have their own even more robust set of diverse feelings on the issues. The media's suggestions may be seductive but can never simply overpower contrary feelings in the audience'.

Judith Butler says: 'There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.' In other words, gender is a performance; it's what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are.

The idea behind this is our identity (specifically here gender identity) is not defined by biology but is actually a performance learned as we grow. As media students we can apply to our study of identity as many of these performances and notions of idenity will be learned from the media.