Ever heard of I not stupid 2? Yes, we all know it’s a very famous Singaporean movie. If given this movie to a westerner to watch it, they would probably are not able to understand the humour that is inside the movie. This week, we are going to talk about what cinema and television is for.
This Singaporean movie uses a lot of Hokkien dialects that Singaporeans always use and if you do not have a nuanced understanding of the language, you probably would not get the humour or narrative that the movie conveys.
Because Brunei is very near to Singapore, we probably have watched quite a number of Singapore series or movies. The more we watch, the more we are actually familiarized with the culture. The more you familiarize with the rules and conventions of that culture, the more cultural literacy you have. Cultural literacy can be defined as both knowledge of meaning systems and an ability to negotiate those systems within different cultural context. It is virtually impossible to describe and analyse what is happening in a communication context or practice without using the concept of cultural literacy (Shirato and Yell, 2000, p.1).
If you do not understand what they are saying, it is probably because you have little concept of the cultural literacy about their culture.
We all live in a society that is increasingly saturated by different kinds of media. This fact we all cannot deny. We also cannot deny that most of our perception is shaped by watching television. When we watch too much television and cinema, the visual image and narrative slowly changes our perception unconsciously which will also affect our ideology and also our identity.
Television and cinema give us ways of imagining particular groups, identities and situations, and in simple, this is called stereotyping. In media studies, stereotyping has been a key concept. According to the longman dictionary, stereotype is a belief or idea of what a particular type of person or thing is like. Branston and Stafford (2003) state that stereotyping is necessary to make sense of the world as it is just like a mental maps of our worlds to navigate our way through them, and it only ever represent parts of the real world (p.142). This is also a way of preventing us from having culture shock. However, we have actually taken the word for granted and assume that all stereotypes are true. The competition over the meaning of ambiguous events, people and objects in the world has been called the politics of representation (Holquist ,1983; Shapiro ,1987; Mehan and Wills ,1988 and Mehan ,1989). There are many media that has actually narrowed the imagery of particular groups, and even misrepresenting them.
References
Branston, G. & Stafford, R. (2003). The Media Student’s Book: Questoins of representation (p.142). London: Routledge.
Chaiklin, S. & Lave, J. (1996). Understanding Practice: Perspective on activity and context. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=iR_YTUIHoMgC&oi=fnd&pg=PA241&dq=politics+of+representation&ots=fup0CSDop4&sig=qDFn9YZmTTYCcCy-YqPDiq6sgrQ#v=onepage&q=politics%20of%20representation&f=false
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