WK 9 LECTORIAL: AUDIENCES
Today we were ‘lectorialled’ on audiences. The session was full of information and really interesting in all. Here are the rambling notes I took:
‘WHAT ABOUT THE AUDIENCE?’
– 1980s: Madonna, her groundbreaking influence on music,video, lyrics, sexuality, image, etc.
Simple Men, talks criticism of Madonna in media and her influence on her audience
Who care about the audience?
– advertisers
– commercial broadcasters, cable networks
– production houses and individual program makers
– government policy makers
– social scientists / psychologists
– cultural theorists/ media scholars
CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF AUDIENCES/CONSUMERS
– from broadcasting to narrowcasting
CHARACTERISTICS OF A POST-BROADCAST ERA
– changes in: television institution/major players, technologies of production, distribution and consumption, audience practice, aesthetic sensibilities
DIGITALISATION / POST BROADCAST:
– imagining the audience differently
– fractured media landscape
IDEA 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 charactertic of our kind of society… [a way of seeing that] has been capitalised for the purpose of cultural or political exploitation.”
– R. Williams, Culture and Society,
THEORISING THE ‘ACTIVE AUDIENCE’
– A ‘reception studies’ tradition of media/cultural/television studies has focused on audiences and how hey read/ make sense of texts
– Interpellation :the process by which individuals are ‘hailed’ – in other words when the individual is prompted by a text to recognise him or herself as being a subject that belongs in a role. – Louis Althusser (1915-1990)
BROADCAST AUDIENCE AS PUBLIC
– one-to-many
– ‘social glue’/ imagines community
– virtual public sphere