Values
The social and cultural context: whose stories count, what audiences assume, and how both drift over time.
- reference
- context-force
The assumptions a media product breathes
Production: the beliefs of the people and institutions making it — whose stories matter, what behaviour is normal, who gets to be complex. Reception: the beliefs audiences bring, which keep changing after the text is locked; the same film transforms as its audience's values do.
What to ask
What did the text's first audience take for granted that we don't — and vice versa? Which meanings have inverted with no frame changing?
Canonical cases
Psychoanalysis in postwar America — Psycho's psychiatrist scene received as authority in 1960, as irony since. The women's picture, 1974 — Alice made and received inside the women's movement, and argued over by it. Both are the Values force doing its slow work.
Sources
Mulvey — itself a values-context document; Criterion — At Home in the World.