Ideally, I would be there to teach you more on hegemony because it's a difficult theory to understand at first. However, if you complete the following task you will be further on the way to getting to grips with Gramsci's ideas...
Your task is to research one aspect of British society and decide what the dominant or hegemonic view is.
This is the ‘normal’ or accepted view that we see across most of the media coverage.
Your job is to research one topic from the choice below and find out what type of media coverage it gets. Is it positive? Critical? Ridiculed? Respectful? Dismissive? Ignored? Celebrated? You need examples from newspaper websites and blogs - you may find blogs and comments differ from the dominant viewpoint that is found in major newspapers.
Choose one of the following:
- The Royal Family
- Education
- The police and security services
- The NHS
- Politicians
- The Armed Forces
- Immigration
- Young people/teenagers
Find articles/websites/blogs and make notes on what angle or perspective the source takes on the issue.
Here's an example for what we're looking for - this is for another British obsession, house prices:
House prices
- The dominant or hegemonic view is that high house prices are good.
- Lots of coverage – with high prices almost always presented as a good thing. Mostly positive stories.
- Stories generally presented from perspective of people who already own homes rather than those hoping to buy them – a classic example of the angle favouring the wealthy or ruling class.
- Very little reference to the fact that house prices and risky mortgages contributed to the major economic crash in 2008.
- Little coverage of the impossibility of buying a house for young people.
- However, columns, blogs and comments present different opinions that contradict the dominant or hegemonic view (often written by younger people) - have a look at this example in the Guardian.
Good luck - we'll pick this up next week and discuss it further as a class.
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