The idea of an audience to be important when it comes to interacting with text has highlikely been around as long as human communication itself and was already picked up and written down by Greek philosopher Aristotle in 4th century BCE. Since the arrival of mass media, especially television and later the Internet its concept has changed drastically. Now, audiences are able to constantly access the extreme amount of information online whenever they please. This change leads to the questions whether audiences still exist at all nowadays.
An audience is understood to be an assembly of spectators or listeners at a public event, for example a play, film, concert, or meeting. There are four main theories on audiences. The 'Hypodermic Needle '
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Especially television and now the Internet have "[...] been described as a 'cultural forum ' reflecting various themes in society which are subjected to selective readings or interpretations by viewers" (Drummond and Paterson, 1986: 125) which is why studies not only often focus on its distribution of analytic power and potential but also target the questions about analysing media texts, and the critical response and participation of its audience.
The concept of an audience used to be different from what it is now, varying between whether to stress the power of the text or message over its audience or not, and this influence on the engagement of using the media (Morley, 1999). With the rise of new technologies, especially after the early 1980s, the now offered new options and choices changed the way of watching television and its rating. Before, '[...] the practice of audience measurement for American television was a relatively stable and quite business ' (Ang, 1991: 68), later the '[...] viewers seem to have responded by eagerly altering their viewing habits, and multiplying the range of their viewing activities ' (Ang, 1991: 69). What Ang was already discussing twenty years ago, is still applicable today after the success of the Internet. Nearly everything on the World Wide Web, leading from youtube advertisement to dating profiles,
As a polysemic text, television has the power to inspire a range of interpretations according to the denotation or encoding of the producers and the connotation or decoding of the televisual consumer. As first described by Stuart Hall in Encoding/Decoding, and then by Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch in Television as a Cultural Forum there exist three basic categories of potential readings of a singular text within the broad range of potential interpretations: dominant or preferred, negotiated, and oppositional, each of which depends on the ideological, political, and social position of the interpreter, as well as their experiences, making them, according to Newcomb and Hirsch cultural interpreters, or cultural bricoleur. As a parody, a genre
Another Example of the audience is towards the end of the article, Kimmel uses a statistic about a certain age group. Kimmel says on page 482, “Men ages 19-29 are three times less likely to wear seat belts than women the same age.” Through that example, the reader will know the audience is definitely younger men.
When an author is presenting an assertion in the context of a specific purpose, it is vital that he/she should have an explicit awareness of his/her audience because the audience are the individuals who will watch and listen to the presentation. The author has to visualize the audience’s expectations and reactions. It is also vital that an author should be aware of his/hers audience because the audience can cause an impact on the author and on their writing. “… Have your listeners seriously consider your point of view and to win their respect through the logic and skill of your argument...” (Page 4) Winning the respect through the logic and skill of your argument by your audience is a great why the author should consider the diverse characteristics of their audience. It is also important for the
My audience applies to everyone in the US. My audience is very broad because my topic touches base on an issue that can or could potentially affect anyone directly or indirectly as well.
Neil Postman’s novel Amusing Ourselves to Death seeks to look at media and how it shapes and defines culture. Postman has been cited as one of the major media theorists and a great philosopher of his time. To understand the book fully it is important to remember where it came from. The idea was born out of a speech Postman gave about the book 1984 and A Brave New World. It takes the ideas behind these novels and looks at them in a contemporary light, where the “Big Brother” is our own television sets. Television is obviously a form of media and it delivers a message. However, that message and media has its own agenda, to above all entertain. Postman believes that television has become the primary media-metaphor and by that definition
The role of media has often been a subject of much debate, particularly in terms of its role in portraying and conveying truth to the target audience. Some argue upon its utility as a means to disseminate information and to rectify perceptions and facts in the minds of the viewers; while others squabble on the amount of misrepresentation which is often adopted by media as a means to project baseless arguments which lead to severe impact on the minds, especially those who are unlearned and uneducated. In today’s burgeoning era, the role of media still remains a largely disputed topic but fragmentation of media has become a broadly accepted and also, widely noticed phenomenon. Not only have new
The transition from the written word to image has changed the public discourse dramatically, as television is an entirely different medium, requiring a different type of content to satisfy its viewers. Neil Postman argued that television excluded serious literary debate from mainstream media, because it wasn’t compatible to the format of television shows and commercials. Postman’s fear was that television would strip religion, education, politics and commerce of their seriousness, and turn them into entertainment. His prediction was mostly accurate, and it also applies to the internet, which affects public discourse in a similar way to television, even though it does this in slightly different ways.
The audience is society as a whole especially those that think that connection with media can overcome lack of conversation
Neil Postman was an athlete, student, teacher, philosopher, writer, and many more things. All these experiences give him a very unique outlook and world view. He prides himself on being a critic on culture and theorist of media. He began his professional teaching career at NYU where he founded their graduate program on media ecology. He remained a professor there until he died of lung cancer in 2003. Of the several works he wrote he is best known for Amusing ourselves to Death in which he analyzes today’s media culture and our obsession with TV media. This book arose from a panel he did discussing George Orwell, Nineteen Eight-Four and comparing it to our contemporary society. In the first three chapters of this book he touches on a variety of topics such as metaphors and media how they shape our world view and epistemology.
in Rethinking the Media Audience: The New Agenda, edited by Pettri Alasuutari. New York: Sage Publications.
To avoid the one-sidedness of textual analysis approaches, or audience and reception studies, I propose that cultural studies itself be multiperspectival, getting at culture from the perspectives of political economy, text analysis, and audience reception, as outlined above. Textual analysis should utilize a multiplicity of perspectives and critical methods, and audience reception studies should delineate the wide range of subject positions, or perspectives, through which audiences appropriate culture. This requires a multicultural approach that sees the importance of analyzing the dimensions of class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexual preference within the texts of media culture, while studying as well their impact on how audiences
In the text, “Popular Culture” by David Pattie talks about the programs in television, affairs going on around the world and the intersection between popular
Media influence is the force by which ideas are injected into people’s lives shaping the very culture of society. This influence is masqueraded through hidden media message, resulting in a change in its audience which can be positive or negative, abrupt or gradual, short term or long term. Although mass media’s influential effect can reach a wide ranged audience as an agent of socialization the responsibility to contain what it releases has not been of importance. “The media’s socially significant obligations are formally ignored.” (A.S. Zapesotskii, 2011, p 9). Media messages can be exerted through many different outlets such as TV shows, music, movies, commercials, news, magazines, games which are all gravitated to entertain audiences ultimately offering personal gratification that can sometimes blur the lines between reality and
306-7) explains the ways in which audiences engage with media texts by decoding them according to dominant, negotiated or oppositional codes. These modes of interpretation take into account how different people interpret media messages. This points out the relevance of audience which is not pointed out by semiotic analysis.
What do we really mean by television? The way we watch television has drastically changed over the last fifteen years due to new technologies such as digital television and services providing on-demand access. These drastic changes have had a huge effect on viewers and have “allowed online streaming platforms to dominate and revolutionize the way the audience consumes” (Aliloupour) media, ultimately allowing the viewer to be in total control of how, when and where they want their content. The idea of only being able to watch television on a television set is now a thing of the past. Due to technology, the audience now has a vast variety of options on how they can access content. By using scholarly articles, research in new media and Internet sites I will be analyzing current television and where the future of television will be heading.