Richard Dyer - Understanding Representations

Richard Dyer is a representation theorist who studied the representation in media, and looked at how media texts represent themselves within society, and also an audience. He closely studied the ideological and historical significance of film stars, and also looked at the media in general. "How we are seen determines how we are treated, how we treat others is based on how we see them. How we see them comes from representation."

Dyer created a set of questions that are considered when studying representations in general:

• What sense of the world is it making?
• What does it imply? Is it typical of the world or deviant?
• Who is it speaking to? For whom? To whom?
• What does it represent to us and why? How do we respond to the representation?

Representations
Representation enables us to understand a media text. It allows us to be able to categorise the ideology of the text to give us meaning. With out representations texts would be meaningless, without representations text would have no messages. Without it texts would also not be able to translate a narrative to an audience, and without this there is no denotation.