Frrom Culture to Hegemony

This reading recognized how the media has become such a dominant group in our culture by defining some very key terms. Ideology was one of the first key terms addressed. Louis Althusser points out that, “Ideology has little to do with “consciousness.” He goes on the address that ideology evokes a structural hierarchy that imposes views and beliefs via our subconscious. The media, in essence, plays heavily off this concept by inserting messages into advertisements or television shows, that the audience is mostly receiving unconsciously.
The reading then goes into the concept of hegemony, which is when one social group has “total social authority” over another. Looking back, media has constructed many traditional gender norms that ultimately represent the men as the dominant social group over women. Another example would be the white race dominating the black race by placing white people in police roles (in essence the good guy) and black people in roles where crime is involved (the bad guy.) Through the decades, people have been fighting to break these hegemonic trends and have been encouraging media to represent people of different genders, races, ethnicities and sexual orientation in a more equal light.