The ‘moving on’ article presents the audience with a variety of different success stories from vendors. It demonstrates their growth and allows them to tell their side of the story and how they have overcome adversity and transformed their lives through their hard work. This subverts our expectations by directly opposing certain stereotypes of homeless people being lazy drug addicts who don’t care about life and who don’t attempt to find a job or to better themselves and subsequently their lives. Considering we are being shown a positive representation of a group who are usually scrutinised, it is something which reinforces the values of the magazine, since their ethos is a ‘hand up not a hand out,’ which demonstrates how they don’t want to pity the homeless, they want them to be equal and to help them in their journey. By achieving this ethos, it lets us know that the magazine is successfully completing its aims.
Within this article, there are a diverse range of people being represented, this is not only in terms of gender (by representing both male and female), but also age groups – showing young and older adults, people with disabilities as well as different ethnicities and nationalities. This reflects the very real issue that anybody could become homeless, but on a more positive not that they will also have the chance to move through the experience.
David Gauntlet’s ideas are relevant here since there are a diverse range of representations of people, meaning that the likelihood of more people identifying with them is higher. Furthermore, his theory of role models could also be discussed here as these people could view the vendors as role models considering they have been able to work their way back up and earn a living from the lowest point in their lives which is inspirational in itself, and since there are a range of different types of people displayed, there is somebody here whom the readers should be able to identify with.
*all pics are blurry when they're too big, sorry its smaller*
David Gauntlett's theory of representation particularly focuses on the idea that people have the ability to construct their own identities. This is especially relevant for a modern audience, since the media has moved away from having a singular, straightforward message, and are offered more diverse representations from which they can 'pick and mix' whichever they like in order to form their own personality. This relates to the Big Issue as their audience can be viewed as 'other' - the underrepresented by mainstream media, but instead a rang of different people. They don't all belong to the same group because all different kinds of people can be their audience.
This is overtly demonstrated here as we are shown an image of somebody who would definitely be overlooked within mainstream media. We can tell this due to the image itself, as well as the copy at the bottom which refers to the 'Daily Mail' in a dig to show how that they aren't represented in the mainstream newspaper.
Furthermore, it shows how the representations we are exposed to within the Big Issue are fluid. They do not conform to gender roles or stereotypes, which links back to the pick and mix of ideas to construct our own identity.
Comments