Medijska reprezentacija grupnih identiteta
Media Representation of Identities

Summary/Abstract: Media representation of identities has been both theoretically and socially relevant topic since 1960s when two important changes occurred. First, the shift in the social sciences and the humanities known as ‘the cultural turn’ pointed out ‘meaning’ as the central category for the understanding of human behavior, therefore all signifying practices, among them the representation of identities,became the subject of an intensive examination. Second, the human rights movements strongly emphasized the importance of symbolic power and started actions in order to change politics of the representation of marginalized groups. During the last four decades the huge attention has been paid to media and the significant amount of research was conducted with the aim to find out how media represent identities. This paper offers the categorization of the most frequent media strategies which are organized depending on whether they are prevailing practice in mass or minority media. The strategies of polarization, symbolic annihilation, accusation, media conformity and normalization are the most common in the mainstream mass media. Minority media, on the other hand, the most often use strategies of integration and commercialization. All analyzed strategies can be found in the internet content, but the internet also created new communication practices that changed media landscape and in order to understand those changes some interesting questions need to be answered. This article pays attention on the questions referring to identity representation, such as debates about a democratic potential of the internet, the characteristics of the online identity formation and the impact it has on the overall understanding of identity.

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