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.