Institutions. What are they?

We can see institutions in a number of ways. For example, the police drama The Wire is comprised of institutions such as police, gangs, unions, city council and journalism. But there is also a well known institution that is used all around the world. That is the institution of marriage. Or ‘marri-arge’ to quote Little Britain. It is:

• governed by rules and expectations – faithful, values, loyalty
• Framed by a legal document and regulation
• Religion – another institution enmeshed with it.
• Widely accepted and practiced
• Cultural norms and rules
• Ceremony/rituals/symbols – rings
• Witnessing
• Government intervening, eclipsing the church’s role.
• Symbology – blue dress, white dress, tossing of bouquet
• Performed in cultural narratives – romantic love, kinship – family starts, extended with relatives and reproducing
• Wedding Industry – Commercial industry – photography, reception centres.

Apart from this relationship contract, there are the more obvious examples like Media Institutions.  These can include:

• ABC
• The News
• Journalism
• Newscorp
• Cinema
• Broadcast TV
• Community Radio
• PBS, RRR

Then there’s the Contemporary Institutions like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Newscorp, and other social networking sites.

REFLECTIONS

It was interesting to note that schools were noted as institutions by Michel Foucault, so this idea that institutions are about social control is a salient point. Do people act better or worse once the context is removed? It can be, as much as control, the glue that keeps people together eg. work friends.
Institutions also carry status like the BBC or Guardian or a low status like The Herald Sun or The Courier. Institutions give a legitimacy/illegitimacy and authority/no authority depending on how they are perceived by people outside and inside them. For example, Harvard University as opposed to going to Footscray University. One carries more academic status than the other.

AUDIENCE

In this lecture, Brian Morris outlines different types of audience: Television Audiences – from broadcast to Post Broadcast,  Active Audience theories,  Thinking about Taste Cultures, Fans and Fandom and New Media audience.

A way of looking at media changed in the eighties thanks to semiotics, representations of women, particularly the Madonna phenomena and the reflexiveness of the viewer back and narrative. This is shown in a scene in Simple Men, Hal Hartley (1991) where the main character discuss Madonna, objectification of women and whether it has been reclaimed by women.

‘I CAN’T STAND THE QUIET!’ Martin Donovan, Simple Men.

In reality, while scholars considered these issues, teenage girls had a completely different experience and instead mimicked their idol. Here we can the gamble of communication where the intended viewer has re-coded the message.

Post Broadcast Era

Advertisers are particularly interested in audience for obvious reasons in that they need to know who is their target audience to sell products to. Because media now is so diffuse, post broadcast, it is difficult for advertisers to target their brands to specific groups.

Here is a basic chart of the ‘MEDIA EFFECTS’ THEORY’:

•anxiety/suspicion re TV’s power • audience is passive / manipulated/ brainwashed • lab experiments, focus groups, playground observations

The Passive Audience

The audience are complicit in their own inactivity or questioning of content.

IDEAS OF ‘MASS CULTURE’ & ‘MASS AUDIENCES ’ -T. ADORNO & M. HORKHEIMER, THE CULTURE INDUSTRY (1963)
‘Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.’

IDEAS OF ‘MASS CULTURE’ & ‘MASS AUDIENCES ’
‘There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses … a way of seeing people which has become characteristic of our kind of society … [a way of seeing that] has been capitalised for the purposes of cultural or political exploitation’. R. WILLIAMS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY (1963)

This quote is best exemplified in The Network (1976) where the audience is being commented on, projected to while the protagonist, why trying to be an agent of change, is exploited by the very thing he represents.

Online fan communities in particular have had a reflexive effect where they have been able to lobby a series to come back on (Doctor Who) or to keep it on air (Joss Wheedon’s Firefly). They have become ‘prosumers’ – blurring the line between producers and consumers with user generated content.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.
Jay Rosen (2006),’The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink blog, June 27G

 Fans, in short, recreate are another narrative, each either adhering to the new norms of narrative imposed by the status quo of their group or appropriating characters and then authoring their own fandom. They are also no longer a marginal socially inept group but have become mainstreamed.

REFLECTION

This lecture was invaluable to myself and my collaborators as our project is Audience, choosing Cosplayer fandom as our subject. What Henry Jenkin’s has talked about in Textual Poaching is relevant to us as we explore the expression of fans: from cosplaying, online communities and trolling.

I quite enjoyed seeing ‘Simple Men’ as I remember seeing it when it first came out and recall that reflecting the discussions at the time was something that was echoed in films, especially in Tarantino’s work. Like the fandom we have set to explore, fans will appropriate content for their own means and police those who do not fall into the rigidity of imposed codes. An example of this is with cosplaying and their attention to an authentic costume.

Below is another idea that fandom can actually infantilise people, in the documentary below, ‘The Men Who Made Us Spend’.