These ‘readings’ were commissioned in July 2008. The author had previously taken GCE Communication Studies and was, at the time of writing, at the end of his first year of university where he is studying Media and Communication.
The writing style is therefore not that of an AS student and many of the references (theoretical or otherwise) he makes would not necessarily be expected from a student studying the AS course. Teachers are therefore advised to concentrate on the address, subject matter and presentation rather than the references to authors in support of the propositions or the relative sophistication of the writing.
Portfolio 1
Investigation Chosen Topic: Site A – Looking good, feeling fit Title: Size Zero: Fashion statement or disease
Exploration Chosen Topic: Site B – ‘Don’t forget the songs that saved your life’ Title: Music in the Postmodern Age
Size Zero: Fashion statement or disease?
I investigated the recent ‘size zero’ phenomenon, looking at how body-image relates to self- identity and self-esteem. I did this by questioning a thin friend of mine and looking at media coverage of fashion models, and applying communication theory to them. These are my findings.
I am a 16 year old girl, and am therefore confronted with issues of body image every day. In magazines and newspapers, on the internet, on the TV, in films and music... it’s hard to escape. Whether I want to be or not, I am a receiver of body-image-fixated messages. And right now all of the messages are about being thin.
My best friend, Amy, is a lot thinner than me. I interviewed her about her opinions on ‘size zero’ and the results were interesting. She said that when she sees a thin supermodel or pop star, she only thinks about how good they look and how much she’d like to be in their shoes. The act of ‘gatekeeping’ is taking place. Out of all the possible connotations and denotations that skinny pop star holds, Amy filters only the positive (beautiful, sexy) and rejects the negative (unhealthy, obsessed). She does this subconsciously.
Self-esteem is also a big factor in issues of body image. Coopersmith defined self-esteem as ‘a personal judgement of worthiness’, but really our self-esteem relies as much upon our perceptions of others as of ourselves. Dimbleby and Burton outlined four factors involved in the development of a sense of self: the reactions of others (Cooley’s ‘Looking-Glass Theory’), our comparisons with others, our identifications with others, and the roles we play. We constantly compare our self-perceptions with our perceptions of others, and with our ‘ideal self’. But in such a size-obsessed media environment, the standards we judge ourselves by are moving ever further away. According to the BBC, a size zero figure is that of an eight-year-old. And this, we are told by the media, is the model to strive towards!
My investigation of Amy’s size issues also touched on Gergen and Gergen’s ‘Self Maintenance Strategies’. They said we protect ourselves through mixing with people inferior to ourselves, disbelieving other people’s criticisms and doing our best to shape others’ perceptions of us, among other things. Amy does all of these; few of her friends are as thin as her (which makes her feel better about her body), she doesn’t pay attention to people who say she’s too thin and she dresses in the latest, most fashionable clothes to make herself look good.
I finally looked at whether gender plays a part in ‘size zero’. Feminists say that women are often ‘objectified’ by men and the ‘male gaze’. But I found that men are concerned with body image too – a boy in my form is a self-confessed anorexic. Although the pressure on men to look good isn’t as strong as on women, it is still present in some form or another. Many of us have low self-esteem based on perceptions of the media, our peers and ourselves. And I think it’s this insecurity that is at the heart of the size zero problem.
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Music in the postmodern age
I admit it; I’m a huge fan of electro music. What sounds like repetitive noise to some people is music to my ears. I think it’s really expressionist and groups like CSS and Simian Mobile Disco keep taking the genre in new directions. But my all-time favourites have to be Daft Punk. I love how they can sample something old and make it into something new. So I decided to explore Electro’s other postmodern qualities and ask what these traits say about us as a society. This is what I found...
What some might call ‘Fusion’ or Cultural meltdown, I’d call sampling. This is when an artist or DJ will take the best bits of an existing song, alter them, loop them and layer them to make something new. For Daft Punk, the samples can come from anywhere; from experimental Funk to gospel to even Barry Manilow. This results in a seamless combination of genres, new and old. In fact, when it’s done right, it becomes hard to tell what’s sampled and what’s original material. I find that really exciting, but many other people find it worrying. In her online article “Daft Punk, Daft Plagiarists?”, Liz McLean Knight says sampling is “a bit of a let down... ugh, it’s like... [Daft Punk] don’t have that technical and musical ability, they are just pretending they do.” She admits that “we’re in the age of mash-ups”, but she’s not too keen on the way artists are recycling old material. But, if you ask me, musicians have been ‘borrowing’ each others’ riffs and lyrics for years. And, as Kyran commented after Liz’s article, Daft Punk “actually improved most of the tracks they sampled.” I think AJ, who left another comment after the article, hits the nail on the head when he says “I get a bit cranky when a bunch of Year Zero musical purists get on a legless high horse about sampling... This anti-sampling attitude is essentially rockist. It’s like those ‘No Synthesizers!’ stickers that dinosaur bands would put on their albums in the 70s.”
What AJ’s talking about is cultural change and the way some people hate it, and other people love it. It’s like the High and Popular culture debate all over again. You’ve got established Rock bands still hammering away at their guitars and drum kits – elitist and essentially neo-high-culture. And suddenly these neo-pop-culture upstarts begin sampling and remixing and stealing bits of old songs to make new ones. No wonder the “dinosaur bands” were angry. These Electro upstarts are musicians for the postmodern age, and bricolage and intertextuality are what they deal in.
At the same time, Electro doesn’t hide its dirty tracks. Electro is self-reflexive. The loops are clearly sampled; the synthesisers aren’t trying to sound like ‘real’ instruments. Even the lyrics to their song Technologic are self reflexive – “Write it, cut it, paste it, save it / Load it, check it, quick – rewrite it / Surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it / Cross it, crack it, switch – update it.” – full of references to cutting and pasting (the tools of plagiarism!), parodying exactly the sort of work Daft Punk does, while also suggesting that we all do these sorts of things every day, making us not that different to computers ourselves.
Even Daft Punk’s look is self-reflexive – when they’re in public, they wear “complicated helmets capable of various LED effects and metallic finger gloves” (Wikipedia), suggesting that they’re just as robotic and mechanical as their music. As a funny aside, they parody Sci- Fi classics like The Fly and even Frankenstein with their account of the helmets’ origins:
“We did not choose to become robots. There was an accident in our studio. We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 a.m. on September 9, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots.” (Wikipedia)
We’re not expected to believe them. We all know it’s rubbish, and because Daft Punk is postmodern, we don’t mind. It’s all a bit of fun.
Electro music plays with simulation and hyperreality, a culture that is ‘more real than real’. Daft Punk, with its edited voices, crisper-than-crisp sound, and seemingly-infinite variations on a theme, is the epitome of the hyperreal. They construct a sound that seems perfect, that has lost all of the transience of human speech or roughness of live instruments, something mechanical and engineered. Even their robot helmets are hyperreal – androids doing the job of humans, the impossible goal of Science Fiction, is brought to life in all its shiny gold and chrome glory, LEDs a-flashing.
The Postmodernist Jean-Francois Lyotard said that “We live in a cultural Disneyland where everything is parody and nothing is more or less valuable.” That statement holds true for music in the postmodern age. Music is stripped down to its most basic function – entertainment – and we realise that it’s all just for fun, nothing serious, nothing concrete. And what does that say about us, the consumers of that culture? That we are happy to be fooled by rehashed samples pretending to be original, as long as we’re entertained?
Not quite. To me, it looks like we’re learning to take ourselves less seriously. Just like Adam Ant in his highwayman jacket and glammed-up facepaint, Electro is reminding us that this is Disneyland, and any distinctions between old and new, high and popular, are irrelevant. And then it goes one step further, telling us that we’re pretty irrelevant too. With its reliance on technology and glorification of machine-like repetition, Electro music decentres us all. Man is no longer at the centre of the universe, technology is. Someone could plug Daft Punk into a solar-powered CD player and it’d outlast us all. And that’s why we love it – suddenly we’re dealing with something just that little bit alien and inhuman, and that excites us.
References:
BBC music review, “Daft Punk, Human After All”, 14 March 2005 Daft Punk on Wikipedia “Daft Punk, Daft Plagiarists?”, createddigitalmusic.com, 31 August 2007 and responses to this. Teaching notes: ‘Culture: a Postmodernist perspective’ Daft Punk website at www.daftpunk.com Daft Punk, Technologic,from the album Human After All (2005)
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Some general guidance
The two readings are assessed using AO1, AO2 and AO4. The specification informs us that these reward the following:
AO1: the ability to communicate in the register of communication and culture AO3: the ability to apply knowledge AO4: the ability to work with relevant resources drawn from a range of sources.
AO1 and AO3 carry equal weighting across the two readings. AO4 is rewarded for the exploration only. The maximum mark for Section A is 40. It is recommended that the two readings are assessed together using what the specification calls “The Principle of Best Fit” in assigning marks to AO1 out of 12 and AO3 out of 20. AO4 can then be assessed separately, awarding a mark for the exploration out of a possible score of 8 marks.
This approach has been used to assess the following readings. Commentaries accompanying the work discuss how the marks have been assigned.
Finally, it is important to remember the eight key concepts which underpin both COMM1 and COMM2. These are:
• Communication
• Culture
• Context
• Representation
• Value
• Identity
• Power
• Code
You are also reminded that these key concepts continue through the A2 units along with an additional five key concepts which are cited on page 5 of the specification.
Portfolio 1
Investigation title: Size Zero: fashion statement or disease
Exploration: Music in the Postmodern Age
There is evidence of a strong personal voice in the investigation which is exemplified by the prevalence of the personal pronoun. The specification clearly states that the focus of the first reading must be on personal identity and this is clearly achieved here. The clear opening sets up the investigation which is informed by work on image and intrapersonal communication. Whilst not overly complex, the candidate writes clearly and fluently and is able to use a technical code. Already we can begin to see where we can reward both Assessment Objectives 1 and 3.
There is good use of personal experience in the third paragraph to develop an argument which is presented clearly and supported by application of theory (AO3). This is continued in the fourth paragraph which provides an example of how useful links can be forged with theory and everyday life. The final paragraph moves the argument on and at the same time provides a conclusion to this investigation which overall, is clearly organised and purposeful.
The exploration is well chosen and provides evidence of clear progression in both the student’s ability to work with more complex material and in written expression. The engaging opening paragraph immediately sets out the aim and scope of the work. The second paragraph continues in this vein, demonstrating critical thinking and a sophisticated handling of secondary sources which helps us to begin to formulate a mark for AO4. The student provides a range of material to develop argument and the sources are well integrated and in some instances, challenged. There is a genuine sense of secondary readings being used in order to explore and develop an argument which is continually informed by an understanding of a relationship between music and its cultural context.
Awarding marks across the two readings
The first reading was judged to fit clearly in L3 whilst the stronger exploration demonstrates the standard expected at the top end of L4. In terms of AO1 and AO3 both readings carry the same weighting which results in a best fit of L4-. Alternatively, or to check this, we could mark them separately and then aggregate the marks. So the investigation being a solid L3= would be awarded marks of 8 (AO1) and 13 (AO3). The exploration, being L4+ would then be awarded 12 (AO1) and 20 (AO3). Remember that AO4 is awarded for the exploration only. Final marks awarded to the pair of readings are as follows:
AO1: 10 AO3: 16 AO4: 8 Total: 34/40
Coursework Marking
AO1 out of 12/ AO3 out of 20/ AO4 out of 8
