16
2000
Television: a window open on the world?Millions of
citizens are aware of current events, have opinions and act in politics by
means of their media experience of contemporary issues. Television has become a
means of mediation between a reality too complex to understand altogether and
citizens who are not able to comprehend socially by direct, organized
experience. Television news programmes are the best example of this mediation
function; they act as a kind of representation of current events in which
social performers, institutions and social collectives have a direct access to
the public sphere. This article intends to reflect on the mediation function of
the television news programme in the framework of dominant audio-visual
culture, and offers a case analysis: presentation of feminine and masculine
gender in current television news programme discourse.
Television
and audio-visual culture: a hegemonic representation of reality
Now that we are reaching the end of the twentieth century, we are making efforts to think, or perhaps it would be more adequate to assert, that we are making efforts to rethink, the culture of our time. During the whole century, debate and critique on our culture has been a need for Western thought, faced with a constantly changing reality in which the cultural system has undergone a continuous process of diversification at several levels, in a process of competition and supplantation within the framework of an accelerating series of mutations of the historical context. The cultural system has been an unstable system in which the great problems are still Wide-open with no definite answers, and in which debate has been placed more on the questions than on valuing definitive solutions linked to stable cultural times. In the last few
years, two areas of debate have focused the interest of most analysts:
audio-visual culture and digital technology. If culture has been a privileged
observation point for the contemplation of and debate on our society, the one
we have inherited and the one we are part of, audio-visual culture and
progressive but radical mutation brought about by the technology of the
Information Society have also become privileged observation points from which
we can contemplate the main current cultural performers who, at the same time,
have the leading role in the main questions. Any social group represented by
individual actuants, social groups or institutions has, in these two forms of
culture, an essential challenge to express itself socially and project itself
onto the public sphere.
Audio-visual
culture, as the most solid form of cultural production with the most
wide-spread audience, has become a firstorder cultural system which reflects
the position of these social groups in a widely-shared imagination framework.
Audio-visual culture can he found associated to the culture industry, but it is
part of a more generic visual culture system in which the media are added with
their particular means of expression and, at the same time, adapt and transform
other cultural referents. Audio-visual culture is a necessary referent for
considering our society, as it has given a framework for constructing
representations of social experience by means of all sorts of languages. This framework
for constructing representations is a referent for the production of
imagination frameworks and individual awareness. In audio-visual culture, and
preferentIy by means of communications media, their audiences can see how a
specific cultural industry and its professionals represent them socially, as
they cannot express themselves publicly
without this institutional mediation. It is in this sense that we can assert
that some groups, those social identities and individuals who are excluded from
audio-visual culture, are represented as marginal to or outside cultural
generality, which begins a process of distancing from the public sphere, in the
manner of a process of progressive extinction. In the opposite sense,
dominating the audio-visual sector opens the doors to a prevailing social
hegemony.
Briefly, we can
offer a first posit: audio-visual culture can also be understood as a relevant
form of social mediation characterized by establishing dominant relations,
inasmuch as they are a kind of cultural representation and presence among the
performers acting and relating; socially
This perspective
allows us to catch a glimpse of the current importance of the study on how
social classes, group identities, collectives and institutions are represented
in the media and in audio-visuals, from this perspective, we can achieve a
strategic point of view which will allow us to analyse the relationship
established between audio-visual culture and everything that is socially active
or everything which is to be excluded. The concept of mediation becomes, at
this moment, a central component of cultural reflection.
Television:
mediation between reality and citizens
One of the main areas of development in current communication research is the study of mediation, which the media establish between reality and citizens. Research begins with an overall view of the entirety of current communication research: communication media, and preferently television, have become a central institution (an institutional institution) in the current makeup of the social system, given that they are the only mediation mechanism between citizens who need to know their social ambit and a progressively more complex social reality. Television news programmes have become the most powerful agents of this representation of social reality and the privileged meeting-point between the citizen and the social representation of reality. Television, and
television news programmes, has become the subject of intense and constant
debate focused on discovering what its social influence is , and what is the scope of its intervention
in politics, the representation of reality, the shaping of public opinion, and our current culture. Debate has been focused above all on
the perspective of effects of television on society) and studies on the
reception by television audiences. To understand the social function of
television, it will be necessary to take into account two basic factors in
today’s communications world: people use television according to their needs
and according to their expectations (motivations, ends, attitudes) but, as
users, they are limited to television offer (television models and formats). In
other words, social uses of television, as those of other media, have their
origin in the social system, but establish their limits in the communication
system.
This dialogical
relation between needs and offer leaves place for one of the most
characteristic functions of mass communication, found in the very root of what
people do with television: mediation. By mediation we understand the function
of complementing carried out by media and by which the audience has access to
social knowledge and cultural behaviour it cannot obtain by direct experience,
but which it is forced to dispose of to carry out the multiplicity of everyday
activities. The contemporary citizen does not dispose of free access to
political institutions nor to the mechanisms which form majority opinion for exercising
his condition as such; he must use communication media to have a constant
knowledge of the evolution of political discourse and to promote an active
civic attitude.
This new form of
mediated representation was described for the first time in the 1920s by Walter
Lippmann, American journalist and social psychologist. In his well-known work.
Public Opinion2, he proposed considering journalistic discourse as a
representation of a pseudo-reality placed between reality and the citizen.
Current events, in his words, are made up of 'fictions, but by fictions I do
not mean lies’3. Mediation allows citizens to adapt to the complex
reality of our society, making of the media an instrument which allows 'this
same creature to invent ways of seeing what the eye cannot see, listening to
what our ears cannot hear, thinking of immense and infinitesimal masses,
explaining and separating more subjects than we are able to remember. It
gradually builds inside its head a kind of mental image of the world that is
beyond its reach'.4 From this point of view, the creation of a
pseudo-environment -which we now call mediation- implies representing reality
by means of media formats; and while representing, we come to construct social
reality. Television and the television news programmes are the main model of
this media logic: what is represented does not reflect reality as it is but rather it constructs it in the way
that a professional group and some media choose and treat segments of reality
which reach the public in formats known beforehand by the audience. In the
television news programmes, we must take into account that we are before a
window open on the world, but with specific dimensions; in other words, the
world will remain represented depending on the time, the rhythms, the way of
presenting the genders, as welt as by means of the selection routines by the professional
group who carry them out. From this point of view, McLuhan's phrase 'the medium
is the message' acquires an additional dimension (the channel plus the
television format) which sheds a new light for understanding the function of
mediation.
The
presence of genders in television news
An example of the
function of mediation (1). Brief notes on international research
The study of representation of feminine and masculine gender in the ensemble of research into communication media has given rise to an extended production of analysis and investigation even though it has begun only recently. The 1970s were the leading years of the first studies and their increase has been constant till now. In the first place, we can identify the succession of key dilemmas experienced by, and differentiating, the study of media and gender, with a special emphasis on women and femininity. As to the type of media, they have basically focused on cinema, women's magazines, and popular literature. The social construction and gender culture have also become one of the problems with more lead in television analyses. Very specially, culture studies have taken on the theorising on gender as one of their main priorities, to the point that it has become a main component of their analysis of television reception. At the same time, feminist theories have decisively contributed to continuing progress in conceptualising about gender discrimination. Specifically, in the field of television, we can follow general phases in which, firstly, there is an insistence on the undervaluation of women as they are shown on screen (in the 1970s); secondly, feminine identifications resistent to specific types of ‘women's’ programmes, especially the soaps (in the 1980s); and, finally, the trend towards making a problem of the closed categories which do not allow access of plurality of identities making up femininity, women, and the knowledge to be gained from them (in the 1990s). The study of
feminine and masculine gender has been the focus for analysing the relations
among audiences in the television medium. In this sense, three levels (it
analysis have been established according to the degree of generalisation of
their approach: the first refers to the medium as such and basically takes up
the specificities of personal experiences of appropriation and the interactive
traits belonging to television as a communication medium; in the second place,
there is the research centred on the configuration of television contents in
the framework of gender theory or conventional formulas of recognition and
differentiation (fiction, entertainment, information programmes);and lastly, the
strategy of approach to specific audio-visual products which allows widening
sporadic reception practices, having previously gone into the ways by which
contents are organised, selected, and presented.
Gender identities
are neither unitary nor fixed, but are rather subject to historical, social, or
cultural variation. Consequently, it is necessary to analyse the role of
representation systems in the make up of masculinity or femininity
characteristics as they are experienced by women and men. It is a question of
approaching a reading of the meaning of the versions surrounding gender
codified in the media imagination framework on the ‘new man’ or variants of ‘woman’.
Therefore, we must not underestimate the plurality of masculinities and
femininities.
Some
contributions on the construction of masculinity, even though they are scarce,
make up an interesting counterpoint when defining typically masculine television
contents in programmes ‘for men’. In this framework we could mention as a
paradigmatic example television news programmes, current events programmes or,
in fiction, action, explicit sex, and violence products (Rose, 1986; Nixon,
1997).
In the ensemble
of studies on representation of social collectives in television news, the
presence of genders has become a first-order ambit of study and reflection.
The
representation of women in current affairs programmes and, most especially, in
television news programmes, has been investigated in terms of their appearing
as presenters, reporters, and subjects of the news. First, we must begin with
the division by gender of masculine reality programmes, on the one hand, and feminine fiction programmes, on the
other. One of the reasons which confirms this division is that the news does
not provide women with information that allows them to significantly apply
knowledge close to their everyday experience. This would explain their lack of
interest in such programmes. Morley (1988) shows how women prefer local news,
which they follow much more attentively, because they consider it closer to
them. Jensen (1986) observes that men get legitimation from news programmes
because they are an opportunity to ratify their feelings of belonging to an
established social order. Women, on the other hand, feel excluded from this
dominant social order and mainly avoid following 'serious' current events and
information programmes (Holopainen, 1984;Thoveron, 1987).
Feminist viewpoints
have shown a growing interest in women's relations with current events
journalism and, more globally, with the world of public spheres. Traditionally,
the news and everything surrounding it were considered by feminist critics as
alien to the social and political interests of most women. Even though we can
confirm that current television forms are far from women's style parameters,
during the 1990s a succession of changes has been proposed which we must analyse.
One of the most
innovative ambits has been the incorporation of women in the editorial staff of
television news which has also incorporated a process of intimacy in its
contents5. These apparent changes in a field dominated by men
manifest a struggle among feminist theoreticians for an evaluation of
what women's participation can be in these new tasks. Obviously, television
channels cannot be responsible for the low profiles of women appearing in the
industrial, political, sports, and economic worlds. Perhaps reading the news
for women stresses even more their exclusion as news subjects and their
marginal intervention in the public spheres.
For women,
enjoying the chance to take on an authorized voice as television news
presenters can turn into a secondary way of participating as guests, as a merely
decorative representation within the current events discourse. This greater
visibility of women as reporters and presenters in television news programmes
can also be read as an attempt to incorporate them into the public sphere under already-existing conditions set up
by men, or it can be interpreted, on the other hand, that women should defend
their own values and insist on the differences in relation to men. This dilemma
faces several feminist versions as to whether it is necessary to participate in
a bourgeoise and sexist public sphere or, on the contrary, it is necessary to
re-propose feminine contributions from a more particularist and contextual
philosophy of public life. (Holland, 1987)
Do women have any
possibility of intervening when making up a different way of organising and
broadcasting the news? The detailed study of the process of intimacy in Dutch
television news shows how some of the values of the private sphere have been
transferred to the public sphere of conventional news. However, proof in the
reception ambit is still an unknown. The way women from different social and
cultural context, with different intellectual and political predispositions,
look at television news programmes presenting new trends in their staging can
only be explained if we recognise the growing heterogeneity of ‘woman’ as a
social and cultural category.
Thus, it is
difficult to propose a universal feminist model as a rule for public life. Even
so, continuous re-orientation in the field of public discourse makes the issues
of gender and difference emerges as basic. There is no doubt that the Dutch
communication and social experience is far from being comparable to that of the
Spanish state, for example. However, it is useful to establish the polemic
directions which feminist academic literature, more up-to-date and innovative,
addresses insofar as understanding the woman/television news relation. (Zoonen,
1991; 1994)
Media portraits
do not correspond directly to public perception of gender roles. This
limitation must always be present in any prediction to be taken only from
television contents. This also causes the methodologies used in findings on
television effects in gender stereotyping to be relativised and framed in a
succession of other inducing context factors.
The
presence of gender in television news
An example of the
function of mediation (2).
A case analysis:
the presence of women in four
television news programmes
Representation of women as social actuants in the lead in current affairs reporting has, in television news programmes, the central element in its projection towards public opinion. We will now present some results of the study applied to a sample of four evening news programmes which correspond to two public and two private television channels: Television Española (TVE-1), Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), Antena 3, and Tele 5, analysed during ten working days in two consecutive weeks. A
first form of representation: the presence of proper names
A first form of gender representation in current events discourse is the proper name. Even though it does not carry a determined semantics, it still allows us a first approach to the ensemble of social actuants who are present in television news programmes. In a general way, the television news programme follows a guide-line which is present in the whole of audio-visual culture: reality is represented by means of a process of personalisation of social institutions and collectives and, at the same time, a dramatisation of the forms of discourse. Individual and anonymous actuants not linked to institutions are practically non-existent. In other words, in the television news programme, social actuants in the lead are neither men nor women but rather, and preferently, institutions and diverse elites (scientists, sports stars, doctors). However, if we look at which gender is manifest in these institutions and social elites, we can assert that the great majority of their representatives are men, while the feminine gender remains in a very secondary position. Of the group of women in the lead in current affairs, we can mainly observe a high social status, except for women who are anonymous witnesses of current events occurrences belonging to other social sectors. The proper name
is the component of discourse most present in the news discourse and the most
basic form of contact with the receiver.
This contact function allows the receiver to pay selective attention and
recognise the stars in current affairs in a media discourse which is
characterised by a high rhythm of image and sound. On the other hand, it is the
discourse element which allows obtaining a certain uniformin in reception of a
mass audience as a link between receivers of all kinds subject to a same
format. Dramatisation is the second element which allows establishing an
easy-access to contents in current affairs news.
The presence of proper names, discounting the summary, is relevant in the entirety of news programmes, although they present some significant differences: TVE-1 (765 proper names), TV3 (749), Tele 5 (634) and Antena 3 (516). The primary gender representation established in this First indicator makes up a first representative datum of the general situation: the average presence of women's and men's proper names (once again, we exclude the summary) is 13% for the feminine gender and 87% for the masculine gender.  Only in areas
such as society and culture
do we observe higher indexes of a presence of feminine names, together with, although
in lesser quantity, in the area of local politics and normal political activity
and activities of the executive (the latter with much lower percentages than of
masculine names).
In the same way
as in titles in the written press, summaries have become the prime source of
perception of current events in which the receiver makes contact with current
issues making up the day’s agenda. Maximum attention is produced in the three
or four minutes which introduce the more significant information and the most
strictly representational function. In the summary, inequality in gender
representation increases in regard to the rest of the news. More specifically,
the presence of men's names is much more dominant in public television network
news programmes (91% on TVE-1 and 91% on TV3) than on private television
networks (77,7% on Tele 5 and 83% on Antena 3). Women's presence in summaries
was reduced to a sports reference in the Roland Garros tennis trophy and two
Spanish Government Ministers.
The presence of
proper names in the entire current events discourse is not homogenous in all
theme areas present in television news programmes, in the same way that this
similar distribution is not produced in all television networks in the
analysis. Women's representation is highest in social issues, as well as in
discourse on current events in political parties and culture. This distribution
by theme areas can be seen in Table 3.
Social actuants present in television news: leads in
current events and information sections
The representation of reality is a key indicator, and not in name only. When we speak of current events and public opinion, who are we talking about and what sections will we find them in? The entirety of social actuants present in current events determines how the perception of reality is produced in individuals and institutions and an elite in sport, culture, and society which are represented by means of specific individuals.   Public representation of institutions docs not refer to their organisation, composition, or ways of institutional relations, but rather to specific individuals who are presented as part of a dramatised discourse in the general framework of these institutions. The leaders of social reality which take up most of journalistic discourse are concentrated in certain social actuants who, we can assert, star in current events: sports, government, heads of government or States, representatives of political parties, of the law, of police forces, terrorists, businessmen, and financial institutions. This ensemble takes in 72.48% of discourse on TVE-1; 63.24% on TV3; 70% on Tele 5; and 68% on Antena 3. The presence of
women in the sections which make up the news programmes is also unequal. Thus,
if we take into account the sections, according to the number of news items
presented, time on screen, and order or situation of news items in the whole of
the news programme, and those which make up the nucleus of current events, they
present a low index of representation for women leads, while other sections which
are constant, but of less
prominence (society, science and technology, culture...) have leads with a
higher index of feminine social actuants.
As we can see in
Table 5, contrary to what we see in the principal sections which make up the
television news programmes, the secondary sections present, on the whole, a
much greater proportion of feminine presence (except in sports which, although
they are a secondary section, enjoy a growing importance within the format of
television news and in which the great majority of leads is for masculine
social actuants). The presence of women in some of these sections gives proof
of the more common roles they usually assume in the discourse of current
events. Thus, for example, they often appear as victim leads in the framework
of crime affairs where they are harassed and ill-treated (with an over-stated
frequency due to masculine aggressions).
  Final
conclusions
The well-known phrase which gives television the quality of a window open on the world has no doubt come to be widely continued, for main citizens the television news programme format has become their preferred access to the understanding of their social and historical environment. On screen, we are presented with reality according to the necessities of the television format (minutes, rhythm, image, witnessing, spectacularisation, dramatisation...) and the ways of selection and treatment that a group of professionals (journalists and audio-visual professionals) applies, according to specific routines. The television news programme is currently the most significant instrument of what Lippmann identified, in the 1920s, as the need for inventing instruments that will allow us to listen to, look at, and pay attention to everything we need to know and have an opinion of, but which we cannot do by means of a personalised or organised act. The television news programme is a privileged window which shows us the current panorama and is, therefore, one of the most relevant instruments in current audio-visual culture. But, as we have seen, all the windows are oriented and represent a specific perspective of the surroundings. The case of gender presence in the representation of current events information is one among many of the meaningful examples of this orientation in the representation of society. In a general way,
we can say that television news programmes give a representation of current
events in which neither women nor men are leads, but rather institutions and
some professions which star in current events. We are not faced with a
masculine or a feminine universe, but with an institutional universe and a
professional representation. Sports and sports figures, the exercise of
government power, the law system, the party system, the law-and-order forces
and, to a lesser degree, financial sectors, constitute the institutions which
are hegemonic in the news programme discourse. In a contrary sense, everyday
life, and the citizen in everyday life, are practically absent, except when the
anonymous citizen becomes present as a witness before the screen in any current
events occurrence.
But these institutions
and professions become manifest in the news by means of characters or social
actuants who identify institutions and professions. It is in this element where
we find a gender manifestation with a clear differentiation between a masculine
and a feminine universe. The general average presence of masculine protagonists
in the representation of current events is 78%, while the general average
presence of feminine protagonists in the representation of current events is 22%.
On the two extremes of representation of public affairs by means of the
presence of feminine social actuants, we find 3 scarce representation in the
state, international, current law, economy, and finance sections, while the
more significant presence is placed in society, crime occurrences (basically as
a victim or anonymous witness), medicine, science and health, culture and
environment. The feminine representation is produced in a neutral manner,
without manifest valuation in a positive or negative sense; both genders are
present as a manner of objective and professionalised vision of reality by the
television entities and the journalists carrying out their profession, but
there is also a presupposition of a manner of gender presence rooted in social
reality which is acted on by journalists and television news.
Thus, the
analysis of television news programmes as constructing hegemonic current events
discourse unfolds a succession of implicit meaning and tacit structure from
which there is a reinforcement of a specific hierarchisation of social reality.
Television news programme formats make up a realistic space conventionally
defined by informative recontextualisations.
To be sure, news
programmes build up everyday discourse as a result of professional practice
derived
from applying
some specific journalistic techniques designed for the achievement of prefixed
aims (in a manner of speaking, we could assert that news programmes basically
present 'talking heads' inserted into a flow of intermittent and varied flow of
information). Also, placing it in the genre of information programmes, the news
is a narration with a specific rhythm and tempo, developed in a framework of a
strongly codified and easily-identifiable structure. Be that as it may, news
programmes are a stereotyped and hierarchised construction of current events
and they can be studied in their composition, intentionality, and
representation.
The historical
dimension of the news as a way of knowledge determines a symbolic system with
its own logic by means of which certain aspects of reality are defined
depending on specific regularities within a context of determined legitimacy.
In this sense, text—and contents-— analysis of the message becomes a basic
necessity as, despite its polysemics, it contains its distinctive structure.
There is no doubt that audiences do not merely see what they wish to see
because a news programme is much more than a window open on the world; in fact,
it is configured as an ensemble of significant mechanisms with a great
institutional and discursive power.
Despite this more
formal aspect of news programmes, we must not underrate the aspect of
ambiguousness, change, and constant differentiation in this television genre,
which is apparently very stable. Actually, permanent processes of differentiation
and bringing up to date in television genres assure their reproduction while
adapting to new slants and making their analysis categories more flexible. It
is due to this that generic formulae are not mechanical, but rather subject to
great pressure and transformation because of the social practice of reception
by audience groups which make up the result of a complex process of negotiation
and conflict on what is represented and tries to be significant.
To the open,
multivalent definition of television genres, we must immediately add the plural
construct of gender identities. Ideally, however, the case of the news
programme stresses its proximity to the theory of the public sphere from which
well-informed citizens are disposed to participate in public affairs in the
exercise of their democratic duty (Dahlgren, 1995).
We must recognise
the need to introduce a historical explanation of interpretation activities,
even though it cannot be taken up without a previous essay on a deeper
interpretation of media texts as an object of analysis. Thus, television news programmes as a
communication phenomenon are considered as an intersection of discourse
symptomatic of haste change (and, by extension, of systematic reproductions) in
relation to masculine and feminine structures constructed by means of its
communication format.
These trends
towards constant change and reinforcement are inter-related and can be summed
up as follows:
1. Television news programmes are not a static or innocent formula for constructing information reality. They act as a mirror before which social gender discrimination are reflected corresponding in a greater or lesser degree to the existing situation in society. 2. Current events
discourse configured by news programmes tend to widen the distance between
roles given to anonymous men and women in relation to the prevalent
institutional logic. Within this institutional logic, women's invisibility when
nearing power spheres (politics, economy, law, etc.) is especially acute.
3. It is perfectly possible to rethink
strategies rending towards the transformation of television productions so as to
approach citizens and, most especially, women as a collective which remains
discriminated in the representation and reception of news programmes, far from
their interests and identity expectations. We should also avoid falling into
the usual trap of interpreting this possible feminisation of current events
information as a loss of seriousness derived from the growing substitution of 'hard
news' by other dimensions considered more 'soft', underrated as inferior and
with less social prestige.
4. In fact, the traditional distinction by
gender in the public and private sphere begins by the reproduction of
falsifying dichotomies. It would be necessary to bring up measures to overcome
sexism existing in gender culture, according to which masculine or feminine
acts are privileged, so as to become citizen acts. Certainly, gender positions
can be a starting point for political activity, while defining diverse
interests and activities, but they should in no case be considered an arrival
point. In consequence, the sexist public/private division should be eradicated
while redefining frontiers and centering on the articulation of discourse
spaces capable of understanding citizens as a specific form of identity articulated by means of contextualised practice.
5. Gender
divisions in the work force in media organisations bring up the dilemma of
whether an increase of women journalists can improve or present alternatives in
the ways of feminine representation. This introduction presupposes that
production structures can be modified according to gender, thus affecting the
codification process and, in the end, gender constructs in media texts.
However, it would be necessary to shade this meaning: social and cultural
constructs of femininity and masculinity do not necessarily imply an univocal
interpretation, as audiences actively appropriate the multiplicity of media
meaning, in an unforeseeable manner, according to their individual preferences,
social conditioning, cultural peculiarities, and contingent historical
circumstance. The fact of reinforcing the transcendence of audiences’
interpretation activities does not underrate, but rather reinforces, the
convenience of stimulating intervention strategies in the institutional
production of diverse media contents.
1This article presents some findings achieved in a study titled Woman
and Television. Representation of women in television news, carried out by
three investigators from the Pompeu Fabra University (Jordi Farré, and Enric
Saperas, Journalism and Audio-visual Communication Department, and Vicent
Navarro, Political Science and Sociology) financed by the Catalan Women's
Institute. To carry out our research, we studied a sample of two weeks chosen
at random, and we proceeded to study news programmes presented from Monday to
Friday so as to guarantee format homogeneity proper to working—day prime time
formats. The sample used news programmes from 25-29 May and 1-5 June 1998. We
selected two public channels (TVC-TV3 and TVE-1) and two private channels
(Antena 3 and Tele 5) to set up the sample. The total time studied is 27 hours,
35 minutes.
2. LIPPMANN, Walter
(1992). Public Opinion. New
York: The Free
Press.
3. IDEM. Op. cit., p. I8.
4. IDEM. Op. cit., p. 10.
5. ZoONEN, L., van (1988). 'Rethinking
women and the news', European Journal of Communication, 3, p. 35-53.
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About Author
JORDI FARRÉ
Graduate in Sociology and Sciences of Information and Journalism.
ENRIC SAPERAS
Doctor en Filosofia. Professor de Teoria de la Comunicació al Departament de Periodisme de la UAB. Doctor
en Ci è ncies
de la Comunicaci ó per
la Universitat Aut ò noma
de Barcelona Professor de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Related 16 2000 JORDI BERRIO Design after the disappearance of the great metanarratives 16 2000 ANNA CALVERA 'A Hot Cup of Consomee' Something between an essay and a dissertation on a possible aesthetic acception of the notion of utility proposed by Richard Redgrave about 1850 16 2000 JAUME BARRERA ‘Gaps’: communication strategy in images 16 2000 DANIEL CID MORAGAS The Museum and the city 16 2000 JOSEP M. FORT MIR Nature and artifice: a search for a new balance 22 ECONOMY AND DESIGN, 2006 DAVID KESTER The impact of design on stock market performance David Kester has directed a research programme promoted by the Design Council in order to analyse the effects of investment in design on the evolution of companies in the United Kingdom that are listed on the stock market. It is well known that the United Kingdom's design capacity places it at the forefront of the global experience. But, so that design is applied to companies, confidence must be increased in terms of its potential and precision in the measuring of its contributions. Companies must justify investment made in all their commercial activities and specific repercussions on productivity and profitability must be measured. This study also aims to establish objective global mechanisms to identify those companies that are active and effective design users, as well as compare their overall results with other companies listed on the stock market, thereby extending our understanding of investment and the value of company capitalisation. The study's conclusions state that companies that apply design effectively do better than the rest. There is therefore a direct relation between the effective application of design on the part of companies and an increase in performance in the share price and, consequently, in the increase of profits for shareholders. [...]18 KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION ON THE INTERNET, 2001 Elisava TdD Books 16 2000 EVA PUJADAS CAPDEVILA Renovating the ethical view to take in the television image 16 2000 BLANCA SALA LLOPART Anthropology and Architecture. Appropriation of living space |