About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about types of media as communicative modes, focusing in particular on: (i) types of media, including televised debates, news articles and videogames; (ii) understanding the power of editors in newspapers; (iii) the differing communicative modes between newspapers and television programmes; (iv) Paul Baker and Kat Gupta’s work looking at how transgender identities are represented in the British press; (v) the increased power of media representations to influence individuals’ views when this is the only exposure those individuals are getting to the represented identities; (vi) HIV AIDS adverts in the 1990s which portrayed AIDS as a death sentence for its sufferers, which presented hugely negative connotations around sex.

About the lecturer

Dr Frazer Heritage is a lecturer in linguistics in the Department of Languages, Information and Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University. Dr Heritage’s research interests are in corpus linguistics, sexuality and new media studies. Some of Dr Heritage’s recent publications include ‘Language, gender, and videogames: Using corpora to analyse the representation of gender in video games’ (2021) and ‘Are videogames represented as violent in the press? Hypothesis testing using MD-CADS and corpora from UK newspapers in 2000 and 2020’ (2023).