Using Examples of Your Choice from Contemporary Media to Illustrate Your Ideas Assess the Claim That Middle Class Cultures and Identities Are Represented as Normative.

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Using examples of your choice from contemporary media to illustrate your ideas assess the claim that middle class cultures and identities are represented as normative. Over recent years, class identities have changed due to changes in society and representations of people in the media. In today’s society, there is a clear distinction between upper class and working class. The amount of people who has moved into the middle class has increased. The majority of people in Britain are seen as middle class. Therefore, it could be argued that middle class cultures and identities are seen as normative as most of the society is middle class. The media also represents this through television, film and print media. The media also emphasizes this by representing other classes as negative and a threat to the society. This essay is going to use examples from the media to support the claim that middle class is represented as normative. “The working class have a long history of being represented by excess whilst the middle-class are represented by their distance from it”. (Skeggs, 2004: 99). Here, Skeggs briefly touches on one of the critical reasons why these representations have been constructed and cemented in today’s society. Many television shows involuntary support the claim that middle class cultures are represented as normative. My Family (2000-2011), a British television show broadcasted by the BBC and ran for eleven years is an example of this. The show is based around a typical middle class family, with a married couple and three children, an average sized family. Although they can be described as ‘dysfunctional’, some of the issues they deal with are heightened for entertainment purposes. Therefore, essentially they could also be described as normative by their cultures and identities. For example, the family live in an average house, the family wear respectable

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