Reading 7 - Audiences: What do people do with the media?

This final week in the lecture and set reading, we looked further at audiences and what they do with media text. Audience will consume the same media however, they all interpret this media different ways, or in other words, they decode the text differently mainly through dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings (Stuart Hall 1973). It is considered that media can directly impact an audience’s behaviour and that they could maybe mirror the media text, however, its no longer reasonable to believe such things as theories such as the “hypodermic needle theory” is outdated. The hypodermic needle theory suggests that viewers absorb content from the media text they view, similar to the way in which a needle works. However, a theorist named Klapper suggests that mass communication does not effect audience directly, instead it “functions through a nexus of mediating factors” (Klapper 1960:8) (Long & Wall (2012) p.304)

It is suggested that audience sometimes choose to consume media text out of function to satisfy desires, “social needs” or use media for “purposeful and rational ends” (Long & Wall (2012) p.305), this is considered as the uses and gratifications theory. Putting this theory into practice, a consumer would consume a video game in order to satisfy their entertainment needs, this is considering the game is not too intellectually challenging and audience would prefer to relax and enjoy the game content. Juxtaposition to a documentary which would satisfy a consumer needs of knowledge and it carries it out in an entertaining fashion.

For my own set reading, I found a piece from Recuero, Amaral, Monteiro (2012) whom researched that twitter has a big fan base which promotes media texts they admire using hashtags. This group of people have created a small group who follow a similar convention to any other subculture groups. This research highlights the importance of active audiences such as this small group on twitter, as they a new stream for media producer to gain more revenue as they help to promote media text therefore raising awareness to that one media text.

 This research and understanding has proved that active audiences are vital to media producers, as stated above. It is said that with no audience comes no media thus intensifying the importance of an active audience as they are the people in which a media producer is aiming to please.

Reference:

P.Long & T.Wall (2012). Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. 

Recuero, Amaral, Monteiro. (2012). 'Fandoms, Trending Topics and Social Capital in Twitter'.  IR 13.0 - Technologies [Electronic]. Association Of Internet Researchers. October, pp.2.

Reading 6 - Conceptualising the audience

This week’s lecture and set reading covered the topic of audience and the concept of audience and the way the media produce their text in relation to the audience and the way in which they react. Audience is a key part to any media organisation or entertainment provider, in fact audience is key to everything. I consider audience to be people consume media text and people in which businesses and media organisations target as a source of viewership and methods to make profit and the most important part, with no audience there would be no media, therefore audiences provide media organisations a reason to produce content.

Paul Long and Tim Wall describe audiences as “synonyms for viewers of TV shows, photographs and films, readers of the press, listeners of radio and podcasts, online media users, video gamers and so on” (Long & Wall (2012) p.276), this is a similar explanation to the one I personally stated above as they consider audiences to be people who view media text across different platforms. Looking into specific mediums in association to the lecture, the medium I am focussing on is New Media and the audience for this area is a wide range of people with social media users and gamers being the main targets. Media organisations in the gaming industry tend to target their audience of gamers with technology through technological development in games and making their games look very realistic and life like through such games as Fifa and Grand Theft Auto who become ever more life like over many years of development. A topic in the set reading that is discussed and is relevant in regards to audience is media effects theory and moral panic, especially in relation to gaming. As cited in the section of the book discussing Media effects, it states that media effects have a “continued theme of exploration is the relationship between depiction of violence and violent behaviour in media audiences” (Long & Wall (2012) p.290).

For my own reading I decided to look into the media effects and the issue surrounding potential violence within audiences that stems from ‘violent games’ and the depiction of violence.  I found a piece from Jih-Hsuan Lin on video games and whether they exert stronger effects on aggression than films. He assessed 102 male college students under three conditions: “video game playing, recorded game play, or movie watching.” (Jih-HsuanLin (2013) p.535) Jih-Hsuan discovered that in his work that there was a linking between video game playing and violence as he found that there was a “video game playing caused a greater increase in aggressive affect, a higher proportion of aggressive cognition, and a greater increase in blood pressure” (Jih-hsuan (2013) p.541).

Reference:

P.Long & T.Wall (2012). Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. 

Jih-Hsuan Lin. (2013). Do video games exert stronger effects on aggression than film? The role of media interactivity and identification on the association of violent content and aggressive outcomes.Computers in Human Behavior.

Reading 5 - Discourse & Power

This week’s lecture and set reading focusses on discourse and power. Throughout the lecture we covered topics based on discourse, discourse analysis and poststructuralism. The lecture and key reading from Paul Long and Tim Wall described discourse as a whole as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault: Long & Wall (2012) p.363). As for discourse analysis, which involves a close examination of text, the visual imagery and the sound and also the written language. It considers both the form of the text and its “social context, its construction, distribution and reception. It aims to understand and elucidate the meanings and social significance of text.” (Smith and Bell (2007) p.78)

The lecture and key reading both discuss Michel Foucault’s idea of discourse as he considers that discourse might be a way of controlling society. As stated above Foucaults theory of discourse is described as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault: Long & Wall (2012). There are a variety of different ways to understand discourse, these two ways are Narrow and Wide. Narrow is described as the written, spoken and visual elements i.e. text and wide is considered to be described as a social practice. Photography’s, art, video, or even games are all visual elements where we can use a visual discourse as all these elements project some meaning to its audience. With every visual element having a meaning behind them, they can be broken down and discuss the meanings behind them, one method of doing this is through Fairclough’s (2004) model (http://eltvoices.in/EVI25/EVI_25_12.pdf p.187).  Faircloughs method contains three levels of analysis, the text itself, the discursive practice and the sociocultural practice surrounding the text. The first element is text and therefore this means that in this framework, one needs to pick a piece of text to discuss. The second piece of the framework discusses the discursive practice, this talks about an analysis of the production, consumption and reproduction of a text, this is concerned by the way in which people interpret a text and possible reproduce this. The final part of the framework is the sociocultural practice, this explores the issue of power surrounding a text. It explores the way in which discourse operates in “various different domains of socity” (http://eltvoices.in/EVI25/EVI_25_12.pdf p.188).

The majority of text have at least one discourse within it and therefore making it valid to almost all subjects. Discourses allows one to further analyse a text however it would not provide us with a definitive answer, more so an observation.

Reference:

Smith, Phillip and Bell, Alan (2007) Unravelling the Web of Discourse Analysis in Devereux, Eoin (.ed) Media Studies Key Issues and Debates. London: Sage

P.Long & T.Wall (2012). Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge. 

http://eltvoices.in/EVI25/EVI_25_12.pdf