The exam topic - Media and Collective Identity

• How do the contemporary media represent nations, regions and ethnic / social / collective groups of people in different ways?
• How does contemporary representation compare to previous time periods?
• What are the social implications of different media representations of groups of people?
• To what extent is human identity increasingly ‘mediated’?

One question to be answered from a choice of six topic areas offered by OCR. There will be two questions from each topic area.
The topic areas require understanding of contemporary media texts, industries, audiences and debates. For the purposes of examination a contemporary media text is defined as being a media text that was published or released within five years of the examination date. For example, in June 2012 a contemporary media text would be any media text from the period of 2007 onwards.
Candidates may analyse the representation of and / or the collective identity of one or more group(s) of people. Candidates might explore combinations of any media representation across two media, or two different representations across two media. Some examples are:
National cinema, television representations, magazines and gender, representations of youth and youth culture, post-9/11 representations of Islam, absence / presence of people with disability in two media.