Notes from 'Think of England'

Martin Parr 1999

• Begins with questions that he will asking
• Voice behind camera brings in performative element
• Immediately introduces the contrast of class - perhaps answering that Englishness is in fact based on class distinctions
• Uses people's answers to questions to raise queries eg british vs english
• Dialectic approach in way it cuts from a man saying there is no hooliganism to a different man opening a woman's coat to reveal her low cut top
• Introduces concept of Britain vs others, namely Germany the only country Britain is really able to say it rightfully invaded
• Goes from pub to posh people having an extra pimms - the same things but in a different manner
• Things like sport returned to as a uniting point for different people
• No names of places given, focusing on the people
• Interviews while they're doing something
• Begins with Southern accent, moves west, but multiple examples of accents being deceiving - not the same as where people are from necessarily
• Shots of flags in different places
• Social mobility
• Different scenes - city, country fete, beach
• Traditions eg Sunday lunch
• Gradually comes to people who define england as opposed to other countries
• Racism 'send them all back' - whiteness as part of englishness, people who were once subjects of the British empire no longer count
• This is followed by a woman saying she likes the fact that immigrants can find a home is England - multiple perspectives existing in country, neither more english than the other
• Where home is and how use nationality to define yourself
• Normal people not authorities
• Weather
• Goes to places where people gather - filming community
• Different ages
• Unity of englishness - north south divide
• capturing moments of life

Anthony Giddens and Identity

Modernity and Self identity:

• everyday questions about clothing, appearance and leisure
• high-impact decisions about relationships, beliefs and occupations
• earlier societies with a social order based firmly in tradition
• post-traditional societies we have to work out our roles for ourselves
• 'What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity - and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour.'
• connections between the most 'micro' aspects of society - individuals' internal sense of self and identity - and the big 'macro' picture of the state, multinational capitalist corporations, and globalisation
• Social change such as in relationships bought about my decline in religion and rise of rationality - changes in how individuals view life
• Institutions typically thought to want people to have stable monogamous family life
• mix of macro elements like law change and micro elements of how people live lives - change stemming from mesh of both
• media also influencing views of things like relationships
• need for 'good stories' would always support an emphasis on change in relationships
• inevitably receive a message that monogamous heterosexual stability is, at best, a rare 'ideal', which few can expect to achieve
• encouraged to reflect on our relationships in magazines and self-help books (explicitly), and in movies, comedy and drama (implicitly)
• Information and research is then 'reappropriated' by ordinary people, often lending support to non-traditional models of living
• Information and ideas from the media do not merely reflect the social world, then, but contribute to its shape, and are central to modern reflexivity

Read more:
http://www.theory.org.uk/giddens4.htm
Gauntlett, David (2002), Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, Routledge, London and New York