Mimi White's Ideological Analysis: Born Again Virgin

Ashley Collins

Professor Kaufman

CMN 102

10 November 2015

Ideological Analysis: Born Again Virgin In Mimi White’s scholarly piece titled, “Ideological Analysis and Television” she clearly identifies the reality of TV and she does this by explaining how the media has an effect on people’s mentality. Ideology is a belief system or a worldview of culture which is established by and for specific social groups. Mimi White establishes her own theory by proposing in her piece that the mass culture only succeeds when it responds to real social needs, but it must first fulfill those needs with imaginary terms. The goal of this analysis was to show how “real” life problems are being depicted on television, as well as describe how these “real” life

Through ideology and Marxism it is the basic notion that there are a great amount of people who have power and some who do not, and in this case the idea of power is associated with having control of production. In the terms of production, all media is produced to make money in order for media producers to make money they must sell the largest number of units or have a large number of viewers in order for production to progress. However, unless the media text being distributed is small there is no way to avoid this process. In the terms of “big” and “small” there are two concepts that are developed through Classical Marxism that is “dominant” and “alternative”. The Dominant represents the main stream of texts that are produced, distributed, and exhibited by one or more, multinational conglomerates while The Alternative represents media outlets that exist; however, they must be discovered by the consumer themselves. Meanwhile, the media that gets produced is meant to amend consumer’s thoughts so that they will accept the existing economic, political, and social world. Through this theory consumers develop a false consciousness because “the capitalist mode of production” encourages individuals to accept a political or economic concept that may be of no interest to them, but because the way it is being portrayed to the individuals using media it seems as though it is a positive message. The Dominant plays the biggest role in reinforcing this idea of false consciousness by promoting their worldview to consumers as the “right one” and everyone who attempts to achieve it