This week Brian led a lectorial based on Audiences, starting with the question who cares about audience?
Not only in the creative industry but in other professions too, such as
- advertisers
- commercial broadcasters
- production houses
- government policy makers
- psychologists
- cultural theorists
Audiences and the way they receive media texts have influenced the production, distribution and consumption of network broadcasting for many years.
Ideas of Mass Culture and Mass Audiences
- “real life becoming indistinguishable from the movies” Ardorno and M. Horkheimer The Culture Industry 1963
- “only ways of seeing people as masses…..” Williams, Culture and Society 1963
Theorizing the Active Audience
- a reception studies tradition in media studies has focused on audiences and how they read/make sense of texts
- Interpellation; the process by which individuals are ‘hailed’, in other words prompted by a text to recognize their self as being a subject that belongs in a role – Louis Althusser (1918-1990)
