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

I constructed my magazine to be aimed at mainly at male teenagers demographic. I wanted to represent the male artist in my magazine as inspiring and iconic figures. This is because I believe that male teenage have high aspirations therefore they need role models. For my main feature story I decided to have a fairly young globally successful artist. So that the readers could picture themselves reaching that success when they read the magazine for escapism which relates to the uses and gratification theory. As they need a way to put their ordinary boring to side for a moment. This relates to Maslow’s growth need which is self-actualization. I used a 31 year old artist who has had a tremendous amount of success. This way the readers are desperate for that life style and they closest they can get to it is reading the magazine.

I wanted to represent my magazine as an influential yet highly entertaining magazine. I achieved this from the language I used. It was not sophisticated as the demographic are not themselves. The colour black represents power and prestige, whereas suggested supremacy as it is a very masculine colour. Which reinforces patriarchal society and dominant ideology that the male gender is the dominant gender. I kept the front page of my magazine very simple as the male teenage demographic are known to lose interest in complicated media text.

Throughout my pages I represented the male as confident, masculine as well as being ‘cool’. This is because Hip hop artists are especially the young males, are generally portrayed in negative way within the media. They are often seen has reckless and irresponsible. I wanted to overcome this stereotype young artists have and still represent them as inspirational beings. I achieved this by making the male model look serious and attractive which represents him in a better light.

Furthermore it is essential for the model in the magazine to look flawless. This is easily accomplished by the use of Photoshop. As the model used is portrayed as a successful figure that the audience aspire to be, he needs to be perfect in every aspect therefore is appearance is vital. The images are hyper-real.  Hyper reality was proposed by a social theorist named Jean Boudrillard.  Hyper-realism is the difficulty to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. Bodrillard argued that this is difficult in a world where a multitude of media can radically alter an original event or experience. Due to this, what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between the two. He argued that there is no such thing as reality anymore. Although the images are extremely edited young males subconsciously want look like the male on the front cover. Also females aspire to be with someone who looks like that even though it is far from a real and accurate representation.