Quotes & Sayings About Media Representation

One thinks of the failure of representation since 9/11, the proliferation of novels, the media glut, the surfeit of images that somehow slide too easily into a banal repertoire, commodified shock. — Maureen N. McLane

Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated. — Alan Kay

Mainstream media's representation, or its guerrilla decontextualization, of black men's lives in particular can set the stage for erroneous assumptions capable of damaging an individual or a nation. — Aberjhani

I was highly aware, in writing [the book]ROOM, that there are unsavoury aspects to our interest in such cases, and I thought it was rather honester to include discussion of media representation in the novel itself than to cling to the high moral ground by merely avoiding scenes of voyeurism, for instance. — Emma Donoghue

I think we really need a movement to drive how popular culture understands the issues that feminists care about. When I think about the LGBT movement for example, they have had a really intentional strategy to try to change images and representation of LGBT people in the media and the culture. It really moved the dial politically. That's what is needed in the women's movement - a strategy that can drive awareness and culture change. — Ai-jen Poo

By now, a younger generation of women participate in extremely lively debates in which questions of gender, sexuality and representation on screens and across media are approached from perspectives that had not yet been articulated in the 1970s. — Laura Mulvey

You look at science fiction and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated about the other. Look at the number of blue people - 'Avatar,' I'm looking at you. And it is now easier to find people of color in science-fiction literature and media, but the issues of representation are still really, really troubling. — Nalo Hopkinson

The problem with representation in the media has very much to do with the conflicts between groups in the world. If you talk about Iraq, al Qaeda, Darfur, even Taiwan, representation is a part of that problem. — Arthur Dong

The Tea Party is a fitting representation of our era of no-debate, politically correct politics, where each political side has its own media, and opposing views are almost never given a fair hearing. Conservatives listen only to conservatives, and liberals listen only to liberals. People are spared the inconvenience of facts that don't fit their beliefs and the unpleasantness of seriously considering a point of view other than their own. — Juan Williams

We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation. People forget that when they wanted white women to get into the workforce because of the world war, what did they start doing? They started having a lot of commercials, a lot of movies, a lot of things that were redoing the female image, saying, "Hey, you can work for the war, but you can still be feminine." So what we see is that the mass media, film, TV, all of these things, are powerful vehicles for maintaining the kinds of systems of domination we live under, imperialism, racism, sexism etc. Often there's a denial of this and art is presented as politically neutral, as though it is not shaped by a reality of domination.
— Bell Hooks

I am committed to creating a vision of the world that reflects how I believe it is: diverse. It is not an effort to diversify media representation, but rather, it comes out of the world I have grown up in. — Jennifer Phang

I'm such a huge advocate for strong, intelligent representation of women in the media. — Emma Ishta

Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame. — Paul Haggis

The world is a complex place, and the influence of the media in its representation and its power of communication and interpretation is a remarkable amplifier of emotions, and of illusions. — Tariq Ramadan