Tuesday 3 June 2014
Tuesday 27 May 2014
Thursday 24 April 2014
Monday 21 April 2014
Monday 24 March 2014
Audience - OCR G325 Question 1b
In covering this topic you need to be aware of a broad shift from a perception of a ‘mass audience’ to one which recognises that, whatever the size of audience, it is made up of individuals. Along with this altered view is a shift in emphasis from what the media do to the audience to an acceptance that audiences bring many different approaches to the media with which they engage.
Blumer 4 Stages.
In its earliest form audience theory believed that an audience was a mass, Blumer set out 4 stages
First, its membership may come from all walks of life, and from all distinguishable social strata; it may include people of different class position, of different vocation, of different cultural attainment, and of different wealth. .....
Secondly, the mass is an anonymous group, or more exactly is composed of anonymous individuals [Blumer means anonymous in the sense that unlike the citizens of earlier communities, the people who are members of the mass audience for the media do not know each other].
Third, there exists little interaction or change of experience between members of the mass. They are usually physically separated from one another, and, being anonymous, do not have the opportunity to mill as do members of the crowd.
Fourth, the mass is very loosely organised and is not able to act with the unity of a crowd.
Hypodermic model
The original model for audience was the effects/hypodermic model which stressed the effects of the mass media on their audiences. This model owes much to the supposed power of the mass media - in particular film - to inject their audiences with ideas and meanings. Such was the thinking behind much of the Nazi propaganda that was evident in Triumph of the Will and similar films. It is worth noting that totalitarian states and dictatorships are similar in their desire to have complete control over the media, usually in the belief that strict regulation of the media will help in controlling entire populations. The effects model has several variants and despite the fact that it is an outdated model it continues to exert influence in present debates about censorship and control in the media.
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School developed concerns about the power which modern mass media had to propagandise on behalf of fascism. This has evolved over time to become similar to the effects model albeit a less theoretical variant. This has developed in response to the violent content of certain TV programmes, so far from controlling people the media is bringing about societies moral downfall. Some of the moral watchdogs, or the 'moral majority' as they styled themselves, took issue with TV output that was deemed to be explicitly sexual, too violent or in other ways offensive. Their concerns were for those vulnerable members of the population who could be corrupted as a result of such material. Perhaps the best known of these groups in the UK was the National Viewers and Listeners Association which argued that TV was a direct cause of deviant behaviour, especially among the young. The problems with the effects model, in whatever form, have to do with its roots in behaviourist psychology. The behaviourist explanation of human behaviour (Skinner and Pavlov) looks increasingly hard to justify as we have come to develop a fuller understanding of the complexities of human behaviour, which is not predictable nor is it controllable. There are also the difficulties of linking cause and effect in terms of how we engage with media texts. The large number of studies that have been done do not prove the case conclusively either way. These range from the Walters and Bandura experiments to studies that count incidents of violence on TV. Other criticisms of this model centre on the stress that it places on the audience as passive, whereas newer models suggest that the audience is much more active than was initially supposed. This model, it seems, is something of an outdated view of audiences but it is constantly revived by politicians and social commentators when moral panics are generated around issues such as 'video nasties' and their influence on children (e.g. the Bulger case) or computer games allegedly damaging literacy skills or contributing to violent behaviour (e.g. the Grand Theft Auto or Man Hunt computer games). Such concerns often try to scapegoat parts of media output as if these were the sole relevant factor in anti-social behaviour. This approach ignores the other factors that work as a mix to influence behaviour i.e. home, school, peers and social interaction.
Uses and gratifications
A more recent model of audience is that of uses and gratifications, which suggests that there is a highly active audience making use of the media for a range of purposes designed to satisfy needs such as entertainment, information and identification. In this model the individual has the power and they select the media texts that best suit their needs and their attempts to satisfy those needs. The psychological basis for this model is the hierarchy of needs identified by Maslow. Among the chief exponents of this model are McQuail and Katz.
The main areas that are identified in this model are:
a) the need for information about our geographical and social world news and drama
b) the need for identity, by using characters and personalities to define our sense of self and social behaviour film celeb
c) the need for social interaction through experiencing the relationships and interaction of others soap sitcom
d) the need for diversion by using the media for purposes of play and entertainment. game show and questions.
The active audience
More recent developments still suggest that there is a decoding process going on among the active audience who are not simply using the media for gratification purposes. Morley's view of dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings of texts is a semiological approach because it recognises the importance of the analysis of signs, particularly visual signs, that shape so much of modern media output. In this model, at its simplest level, the audience accept or agree with the encoded meanings, they accept and refine parts of the text's meanings or they are aware of the dominant meaning of the text but reject it for cultural, political or ideological reasons.
Preferred/dominant reading
The preferred reading is the reading media producers hope will take from the text. For example, an advertisement for a McDonald’s Big Mac is intended to encourage feelings of hunger and a desire to buy a McDonald’s. Assuming the majority of the audience share this reaction then this is also the dominant reading.
Oppositional reading
Audience members from outside the target audience may reject the preferred reading, receiving their own alternative message. The health-conscious, anti-globalisation campaigners and vegetarians will most likely respond to the McDonald’s advert with frustration and annoyance.
Negotiated reading
The ‘third way’ is one in which audiences acknowledge the preferred reading, but modify it to suit their own values and opinions. A negotiated response to the McDonald’s advert might be “I love Big Macs – but one a month is enough as they aren’t good for me.”
Mode of address
Still in line with the active audience idea is the concept of mode of address. This refers to the way that a text speaks to us in a style that encourages us to identify with the text because it is 'our' kind of text. For example Friends is intended for a young audience because of the way it uses music and the opening credits to develop a sense of fun, energy and enthusiasm that the perceived audience can identify with. This does not mean that other groups are excluded, merely that the dominant mode of address is targeted at the young. Mode of address can even be applied to entire outputs, as in the case of Channel Four which works hard to form a style of address aimed at an audience which is informed, articulate and in some ways a specialised one. Newspapers, too, often construct their presentation to reflect what they imagine is the identity of their typical readers.
Ethnographic model
The latest research into audience has resulted in an ethnographic model, which means that the researcher enters into the culture of the group and uses questions and interviews to try to understand media engagement from the perspective of the group. What seems to be emerging from this work is
a) the focus on the domestic context of reception of media texts
b) the element of cultural competence, and finally
c) technologies.
The first of these stresses the fact that engagement with the media is often structured by the domestic environment because of the domestication of entertainment and leisure. It appears that the home is not a free space and there are issues about finance for purchase of media goods, control of the remote, the gendered nature of watching TV and the 'flow' of TV that fits alongside or within a set of domestic relationships. So TV viewing may not be the concentrated, analytical business that some theorists suggest.
The second area is best understood in terms of texts that can be identified as belonging to a genre that has gender appeal. For example, soaps are usually seen to have a strong female bias in viewing audience. There is a selection of competencies that are brought to such texts so knowing about cliff-hangers; the role of the matriarch or the fluid nature of character relationships simply adds to the pleasures associated with the text. Think about the texts that you enjoy and even though you know how a text will be shaped or how it will end these are not barriers to your enjoyment of that text. Competencies even include the very expectations that you have for the text. The male preference for news and more factual forms can be seen as a feature of cultural competence because men occupy more public space than domestic space and therefore feel the need to be aware of the public worlds reflected in such texts.
The third area identified relates to the way we engage with the hardware in order to enjoy the output of the media. There seems to be a strong gender divide here with computers and complex technology fitting into the category of 'boys’ toys'. If present trends in technology continue then there is a real danger that just as our society is dividing along lines of information-rich and information-poor then there will be a further demarcation along gender lines. This explains why schools and TV programmes need to present positive gender representations and good practice that supports females and technological expertise. You will note that many of the lifestyle programmes that are on TV use females in less traditional roles as a way of redressing the balance (think Suzie Perry on the ‘Gadget Show’).
Overall the shift in the models for audience has gone from mass audience to individual viewer with stress on the active audience rather than the passive model. The level of activity in the implied audience is related to the uses, pleasures, cultural competence, situation and available technology for the particular audience.
Tuesday 18 March 2014
Monday 17 March 2014
Key Terms for Postmodernism and 'The World's End'
1) Self-reflexivity can be found everywhere in pop culture, for example the way the Scream series of movies has characters debating the generic rules behind the horror film.
2) irony and parody. Connected to the former point, is the tendency of postmodern artists, theorists, and culture to be playful or parodic. Shows or films will often parody themselves in mid-stride.
3) a breakdown between high and low cultural forms. Postmodernists often employ pop and mass-produced objects in more immediately understandable ways, even if their goals are still often complex (eg. Andy Warhol's commentary on mass production and on the commercial aspects of "high" art through the exact reproduction of a set of Cambell's Soup boxes).
4) retro. Postmodernists and postmodern culture tend to be especially fascinated with styles and fashions from the past, which they will often use completely out of their original context.
5) visuality and the simulacrum vs. temporality. Given the predominance of visual media (tv, film, media advertising, the computer), both postmodern art and postmodern culture gravitate towards visual (often even two-dimensional) forms. As a result, Baudrillard and others have argued (for example, through the notion of the simulacrum) that we have lost all connection to reality or history. Pop culture also keeps coming back to the idea that the line separating reality and representation has broken down.
6) late capitalism. There is also a general sense that the world has been so taken over by the values of capitalist acqusition that alternatives no longer exist. One symptom of this fear is the predominance of paranoia narratives in pop culture. This fear is, of course, aided by advancements in technology, especially surveillance technology, which creates the sense that we are always being watched.
7) disorientation. MTV culture is, again, sometimes cited as an example as is postmodern architecture, which attempts to disorient the subject entering its space. Another example may be the popularity of films that seek to disorient the viewer completely through the revelation of a truth that changes everything that came before (Inception)
Saturday 8 March 2014
GENRE THEORY
- The identification of a text as part of a genre (such as in a television listings magazine or a video rental shop's section titles) enables potential readers to decide whether it is likely to appeal to them. People seem to derive a variety of pleasures from reading texts within genres which are orientated towards entertainment. 'Uses and gratifications' research has identified many of these in relation to the mass media. Such potential pleasures vary according to genre, but they include the following.
- One pleasure may simply be the recognition of the features of a particular genre because of our familiarity with it. Recognition of what is likely to be important (and what is not), derived from our knowledge of the genre, is necessary in order to follow a plot.
- Genres may offer various emotional pleasures such as empathy and escapism - a feature which some theoretical commentaries seem to lose sight of. Aristotle, of course, acknowledged the special emotional responses which were linked to different genres. Deborah Knight notes that 'satisfaction is guaranteed with genre; the deferral of the inevitable provides the additional pleasure of prolonged anticipation' (Knight 1994).
- 'Cognitive' satisfactions may be derived from problem-solving, testing hypotheses, making inferences (e.g. about the motivations and goals of characters) and making predictions about events. In relation to television, Nicholas Abercrombie suggests that 'part of the pleasure is knowing what the genre rules are, knowing that the programme has to solve problems in the genre framework, and wondering how it is going to do so' (Abercrombie 1996: 43). He adds that audiences derive pleasure from the way in which their expectations are finally realized (ibid.). There may be satisfactions both in finding our inferences and predictions to be correct and in being surprised when they are not (Knight 1994). The prediction of what will happen next is, of course, more central in some genres than others.
- Steve Neale argues that pleasure is derived from 'repetition and difference' (Neale 1980: 48); there would be no pleasure without difference. René Wellek and Austin Warren comment that 'the totally familiar and repetitive pattern is boring; the totally novel form will be unintelligible - is indeed unthinkable' (Wellek & Warren 1963: 235). We may derive pleasure from observing how the conventions of the genre are manipulated (Abercrombie 1996: 45). We may also enjoy the stretching of a genre in new directions and the consequent shifting of our expectations.
- Making moral and emotional judgements on the actions of characters may also offer a particular pleasure (though Knight (1994) argues that 'generic fictions' themselves embody such judgements).
- Other pleasures can be derived from sharing our experience of a genre with others within an 'interpretive community' which can be characterized by its familiarity with certain genres (see also Feuer 1992, 144).
Nicholas Abercrombie - Genre Theory
Nicholas Abercrombie 'the boundaries between genres are shifting and becoming more permeable' (Abercrombie 1996)
David Buckingham - Genre Theory
'genre is not... simply "given" by the culture: rather, it is in a constant process of negotiation and change' (Buckingham 1993)
Steve Neale - Genre Theory
'genres are instances of repetition and difference' (Neale 1980)
'difference is absolutely essential to the economy of genre' (Neale 1980)
: mere repetition would not attract an audience.
(Robert Stam 2000) - Problems with Genre labels
extension (the genre can be too broad or narrow to give an accurate idea of what a text is like) normativism (upon hearing of a genre you make assumptions towards the text before you've even seen it); monolithic definitions (not all texts can be neatly categorised into just one area); biologism (some people view genres as living things which evolve over time)
Thursday 20 February 2014
Monday 17 February 2014
Playlist II
Playlist II (A-side)
1. Old World - The Modern Lovers
2. Love Letters - Metronomy
3. He's Frank - The Monochrome Set
4. Digital Witness - St Vincent
5. All the Young Dudes - Mott the Hoople
6. Talking Backwards - Real Estate
(B-side)
7. Stars of Track & Field - Belle & Sebastian
8. La Verite - Francois & the Atlas Mountains
9. Mercy - TV on the Radio
10. I Need my Girl - The National
11. Eple - Royksopp
12. Blue Moon - Beck
Friday 7 February 2014
Friday 31 January 2014
Thursday 30 January 2014
Wednesday 29 January 2014
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