National and regional identity and representation.

National identity is one's connection with their own country, and this identity to their country can be shrown through many ways such as the accent they have, and the potential culture that comes from that nation that they bring with them, the way a nation can be represented can also be used to fuel stereotypes, we get stereotypes of whole nations such as the French being cowards and the Americans being all obese. The Media can represent this sort of identification with countries in many possitive or negative ways. The first episode of Mind your language (1977) is a very good example of poor national representation. In mind your language you see an English teacher teaching their language to a people from a variety of different Nations and cultures. Mind your language plays on many of the stereotypes that can come with the represented nationallities, such as an elder Japanese man who is the head of an electronics company, and two Asian men who argue about their opposing religion, which the show suggests they could start a race war about. We see also that in this episode a joke constantly used is the lack of the foreign speaker's knowledge of English, which is another representation of every other foreign nation, that they don't know anything about english or they could be just stupid. Another example of National identity is commonly found in sports, in the 2009 Rugby World cup Sevens we see a lot of iconography in the first opening sequence, these iconographies are mainly flags that are distinct and associated with specific countries, we are familiar with these common types of representation, but it also shows more abstract things, that we are still familiar with representing specific coutries, such as a lion represents wales. Regional identity is very similar to the idea of national identity in that it is about how people are connected to where they live, but it is more focused on the different regions of a single country, and their closed culture within their own country. Such as In Barcelona using a variation of the spanish language called Catalan. We can see regional representations in specific regions in two examples, one of these examples is the only way is essex, this has somewhat poor representation of the people within the eastern region. As the characters represented are somewhat stupid and do not show a lot of intelligence, the show often shows a lot of negative traits of people such as a lot of the characters being materialistic. Another example of regional representation in the media is Geordie shore, Geordie shore represents people within the Tyneside area of the UK. Like TOWIE Geordie shore has poor representations of the region, and focuses on a stereotype that people of Newcastle are party obsessed and materialisitc.