Audience: Fans and Fandoms (Cosplay)

Conventions were once a ‘nerdy’ event that not many people attended. Today, they are still ‘nerdy’, but as the subject matter of such conventions becomes the center of popular culture, the number of people attending them has increased dramatically. A very large part of these events and many fans’ engagement with popular culture texts in today’s current pop culture landscape, is the art of ‘cosplay’.

Cosplay, which was coined by Nov Takahashi, a contraction of the English-language words ‘costume’ and ‘play’, began in 1939 “at the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York… Forrest J Ackerman and his friend Myrtle R. Jones appeared in the first S[cience] F[iction] costumes among the 185 attendees. … [Ackerman] was dressed as a rugged looking star pilot, and [Jones] was adorned in a gown recreated from the classic 1933 film Things to Come.” Takashi was said to be inspired by “hall and masquerade costuming at the 1984 Los Angeles SF Worldcon.” when coining the phrase, cosplay. While his reports of it in Japanese science fiction magazines “sparked the Japanese cosplay movement.” (costuming.org, 2005)

Many people don’t know where cosplay originated from, and mistakenly believe that it originated in Japan. This is not the case, Japanese fans of manga and anime heard about what was happening at Worldcon in America  in 1984 through Takashi’s reporting, and decided it would be fun to take it up themselves. Takashi did however coin the phrase cosplay.

After the popularity of cosplay in Japan, cosplay began to spread across the world again as anime and manga also gained popularity in western countries, all occurring in the mid-1990’s. This allowed for the reintroduction of cosplay to western countries, hence the re-popularisation of cosplay today.

Here is an example of some cosplay:

– Unknown. “The History of Costuming.” 2005. Available at: http://www.costuming.org/history.html

Audience

Today Brian Morris talked to us about audience.

Audiences are often categorised in different ways. Such as ‘demographics’ (as in age brackets, e.g. 18-25) which concern businesses such as advertisers, commercial broadcasters, production houses, individual houses and program makers, government policy makers, social scientists/psychologists and cultural theorists to name a few. Over the years there have been changing conceptions around audience as broadcasting has changed to narrowcasting and citizens have become consumers. This has caused changes in TV institutions, the technology behind production, distribution and consumption, and audience practices (Morris, 2015).

When TV was first established in Australia, many were concerned about its effect on the individual and it was focused towards the ‘suburban housewife’, the key audience for television when it all began. Now, audiences and the content they like to watch have fractured and splintered into so many different niche areas, with different aesthetic sensibilities, and different needs to be advertised and catered towards.

The broadcast audience is public, that is to say that it is one person (a presenter) to many. Often this presenter, such as Oprah Winfrey or Ellen Degeneres, can create a sort of social glue and a community around their audience creating a virtual public sphere.

In the public sphere, who do media creators address? Many debates have arisen around talk show hosts and their heavily feminised views, as well as their concerns with previously taboo subjects.

Many media-oriented institutions use the idea of mass culture and mass audiences, but as R. Williams put it in ‘Culture and Society’ (1963), “there are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”

– Morris, Brian. Lectorial Week 9. May 5th 2015.

Institutions Group Project Update: Week 2

Today we handed in our bibliographies and worked in our groups to develop concepts for our big final project. Now, while I was absent today because I’m currently sick, I was able to contact my group and brainstorm some ideas.

We have created a website called ‘Institution Revolution: Traditional vs Modern Media’. Each group member will be an individual contributor and post various articles, videos, photos etc. to make an interactive platform.

We also came up with some ideas for possible content, such as an interview with someone in the media, or a part of the RMIT faculty who is involved in journalism. Survey people about issues around our topic and post graphs alongside the results. As well as many others. We hope to come up with many more ideas next lesson, in order to really make a move on this project and start developing our content.