Stereotypes are extremely important in targetting and reaching out to an audience. This is so that the audience can recognise what social grouping the characters, models or actors are representing, or are in. This means that the text attracts certain character groups, targetted by the institution which produce the text, and it also may attract members of another audience, which they would not initially expect to attract.
Sterotypes are generalizations about a group of people whereby we attribute a defined set of characteristics to this group. These classifications can be positive or negative, such as a group of people being classed as friendly or unfriendly.
It is easier to create a sterotypes when there is a visible and consistent aspect that can easily be identified. This is why people of colour, police and women are so easily stereotyped. Police men.women share one obvious identity which is their uniform. But other features such as badges and radios help add to create this stereotype.
We change our stereotypes infrequently. Even in the face of our invalid evidence, we often cling to our obviously-miss-guided principes. When we decide to change a stereotype we do so in one of three ways. The Bookkeeping model, the conversion model and the subtyping model.
Bookkeeping model,
as we learn new antipodal information, we incrementally adjust our current stereotype to adapt to the new information. To make such an incremental change, information must generally be repeated several times.
Conversion model,
we throw away the old sterotype and start from scratch. This is often used when there is a significant disconfirming evidence.
Subtyping model,
we create a new sterotype that is a sub-classification of the exisitng stereotype.
Ways in which institutions attract their audience are the following;
Connotation,
Dinotation,
Mise-en-scene,
Angles,
All these media tools build up stereotypes.
