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Understanding media: The celebrity in the text
Kylie Minogue, George Clooney, Nicole Kidman are all prominent celebrities, but how...
Kylie Minogue, George Clooney, Nicole Kidman are all prominent celebrities, but how has the media created their status and how does what we read in the press influence our opinion? This unit will teach you how to analyse media texts and look at celebrity in a new light.
By the end of this unit you should be able to:
- identify various techniques that can be used to analyse media text;
- give examples of how celebrity activity is represented in the media;
- define specific media terms such as genre and tabloidisation;
- understand the term celebrity in relation to its representation in the media.
- Duration: 12 hours
- Published on: Monday 4th April 2011
- Level: Intermediate
- Posted under: Sociology
Understanding media: The celebrity in the text
Introduction

This unit is concerned with the very things that we, as ordinary people, talk about as a consequence of listening to radio, watching television or reading newspapers and magazines: the programmes and articles that constitute media output. We examine the everyday evidence of celebrity activity – what academic media analysts call ‘texts’. Texts are socially constructed assemblages of items such as spoken or written words, or pictures.
This unit is subject to Creative Commons licence [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] (attribution, non commercial, non derivative) (see Special Restriction in Acknowledgments accessed through ‘Unit navigation’ at the top of the screen). For copyright reasons any third party materials must not be used in isolation from the unit or for any other purpose. Acknowledgements must always accompany use of unit. Any adverts contained in this unit are for the purposes of academic analysis only and do not represent any approval or endorsement by The Open University or OpenLearn.
This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Understanding media (DA204) which is no longer taught by The Open University. If you want to study formally with us, you may wish to explore other courses we offer in this subject area.
Archive content
This is an extract from an Open University course which is no longer available to new students. If you found this interesting you could explore more free Sociology course units or view the range of currently available OU Sociology courses.
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- Creative-Commons: The Open University is proud to release this free course under a Creative Commons licence. However, any third-party materials featured within it are used with permission and are not ours to give away. These materials are not subject to the Creative Commons licence. See terms and conditions. Full details can be found in the Acknowledgements section.
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