Signs and Values of Mainstream Audio-Visual Content Intended for Children and Youth
Signs and Values of Mainstream Audio-Visual Content Intended for Children and Youth

Summary/Abstract: Mainstream audio-visual culture is a firmly established part of our everyday lives, reflected in an uncomplicated approach of recipients to individual products as part of ordinary activities. Mainstream works compete for daily attention of media audiences, relying on the viewers' belief that desires, common to the entire society, can be realized in social reality. They raise the interest of the recipients mainly by means of perceived meanings, signs and values. Regarding the topic of the study, we assume that the story of audio-visual contents intended for children and youth equally reflects a set of several preferred values and signs from which the given content is built and which are part of most globally successful films. The main goal of the study is therefore the reflection of the globalization tendencies of the media industry in the sense of identifying the universal features and preferred values in mainstream images intended for children and youth. For the purpose of achieving this goal, we carry out a discursive analysis of the most commercially successful films of 2021 and one of the most profitable films worldwide within the entire “film history”, Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021, director Jon Watts), based on the analytical categories defined in the methodological part of the study. In this context, it is necessary to define the discussed issue from a theoretical point of view (with an emphasis on the cultural overlap of stories intended for a mass audience) supplemented by a case study (discursive analysis) of representative research material.

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