Who watches this crap, anyway?

Shahbaz Ali - BDC

Why is it important?
'Audience' is a very important concept throughout media
studies.

All media texts are made with an audience in mind, ie a

group of people who will receive it and make some sort of
sense out of it. And generally, but not always, the
producers make some money out of that audience.

Thus it is important to understand what happens when an

audience "meets" a media text.
Definition
An audience is a group of people who participate in a
show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they
are called the "reader"), theatre, music or academics in
any medium.
Definition
Audience members participate in different ways in
different kinds of art; some events invite overt audience
participation and others allowing only modest clapping
and criticism and reception.
What is an audience?
Whilst its getting harder in the online age to conceive of a
media audience as a stable, identifiable group, a key
question for media studies remains this: how do people
make sense of and give meaning to cultural products?

 During the production process you will have used blogs

and social networking tools more generally to share
images and gain feedback.
Constructing Audience
When a media text is being planned, perhaps the most
important question the producers consider is "Does it have an
audience?“

 If the answer to this is 'no', then there is no point in going any

further.

Audience research is a major part of any media company,

using questionnaires, focus groups, and comparisons to
existing media texts, they will spend a great deal of time and
money ascertaining if there is anyone out there who might be
interested in their idea.
Constructing Audience
It's a serious business; media producers basically want to know
the:
 income bracket/status
 age
 gender
 race
 location

of their potential audience, a method of

categorizing known as demographics.

Once they know this they can begin to shape their text to
appeal to a group with known reading/viewing/listening habits.
Audience Categories
 One common way of describing audiences is to use a letter code to show
their income bracket:

  A
Top management, bankers, lawyers, doctors
and other professionals

B
Middle management, teachers, many
'creatives' eg graphic designers etc

C1
Office supervisors, junior managers, nurses,
specialist clerical staff etc
Audience Categories
C2
Skilled workers, tradespersons
(white collar)
D
Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers
(blue collar)
E
Unemployed, students, pensioners, casual workers
Audience Classification
They also consider very carefully how that audience might react to,
or engage with, their text. The following are all factors in analyzing
or predicting this reaction.

AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS
 These are the advance ideas an audience may have about a text. This
particularly applies to genre pieces. Don't forget that producers often
play with or deliberately shatter audience expectations.

AUDIENCE FOREKNOWLEDGE
 This is the definite information (rather than the vague expectations)
which an audience brings to a media product. Think about trailers,
posters and reviews.
Audience Classification
AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION
 This is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a
particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude
or lifestyle.
What movie/character do you associate yourself with?

AUDIENCE PLACEMENT
 This is the range of strategies media producers use to directly target a
particular audience and make them feel that the media text is specially
'for them'.
 
AUDIENCE RESEARCH
 Measuring an audience is very important to all media institutions.
Research is done at all stages of production of a media text, and, once
produced, audience will be continually monitored.
 ASIDE

Audience reaction to even early versions of a media text is closely watched.

Hollywood studios routinely show a pre-release version of every movie
they make to a test audience, and will often make changes to the movie that
are requested by that audience.
Similarly television has pilots that are shown to a selection
of the targeted audience and changes made accordingly.
Creating Audience
Once a media text has been made, its producers need to ensure that it
reaches the audience it is intended for. All media texts will have some sort
of marketing campaign attached to them. Elements of this might include
 
 posters
 print advertisements
 trailers
 promotional interviews (eg stars appearing on chat shows)
 tie-in campaigns (eg a blockbuster movie using McDonalds meals)
 merchandising (t-shirts, baseball caps, key rings)

Marketing campaigns are intended to create awareness of a media text.

Once that awareness has been created, hopefully audiences will come
flocking in their hundreds of millions. 
Counting Audience - Film
Figures are based on box office receipts, rather than the
number of people who have actually seen the movie.

Subtract the production costs of a movie from the box

office receipts to find out how much money it made, and
therefore how successful it has been in the profit-driven
movie business.
Counting Audience - Film
Be aware that a film which does not cost much to make
(eg The Blair Witch Project) and takes even a modest
amount at the box office can be considered a greater
success than a big action movie which cost more, has a
bigger set of box office receipts (i.e. lots more people
went to see it) but has a smaller profit margin.
Counting Audience - Film
Also be aware that film companies are very coy about
publishing production costs of a movie, and that they
rarely include the cost of a film's marketing budget, which
is probably at least a third of the production costs, and is
frequently more.

In some cases, the marketing budget may exceed the cost
of originally making the film - Four Weddings & a
Funeral's American marketing spend is an example of this.
Counting Audience - Print
Magazines and newspapers measure their circulation (i.e.
numbers of copies sold).

They are open about these figures - they have to be as

these are the numbers quoted to advertisers when
negotiating the price of a page.
Counting Audience – TV/Radio
Measuring the number of viewers and listeners for a
TV/Radio program or whole station's output is a complex
business.

Generally, an audience research agency (eg BARB) will

select a sample of the population and monitor their
viewing and listening habits over the space of 7 days.
Counting Audience – TV/Radio
The data gained is then extrapolated to cover the whole
population, based on the percentage sample.

It is by no means an accurate science and you can find

about some of the techniques used on google. The
numbers obtained are known as the viewing figures or
ratings.
The theories
 As students of media studies, you need a working knowledge of the theories
which attempt to explain how an audience receives, reads and responds to a
text.

 Over the course of the past century or so, media analysts have developed
several effects models, ie theoretical explanations of how humans ingest the
information transmitted by media texts and how this might influence (or
not) their behaviour.

 Effects theory is still a very hotly debated area of Media and Psychology
research, as no one is able to come up with indisputable evidence that
audiences will always react to media texts one way or another.
The theories
The scientific debate is clouded by the politics of the
situation: some audience theories are seen as a call for
more censorship, others for less control.

Whatever your personal stance on the subject, you

must understand the following theories and how they
may be used to deconstruct the relationship between
audience and text.
The Hypodermic Needle Model
Dating from the 1920s, this theory was the first attempt to
explain how mass audiences might react to mass media.

It is a crude (basic) model and suggests that audiences

passively receive the information transmitted via a media
text, without any attempt on their part to process or
challenge the data. (Relate this to Shannon-Weaver model of communication)
The Hypodermic Needle Model
Don't forget that this theory was developed in an age when
the mass media were still fairly new - radio and cinema
were less than two decades old.

Governments had just discovered the power of advertising

to communicate a message, and produced propaganda to
try and sway populaces to their way of thinking

This was particularly rampant in Europe during the First

World War (look at some posters online) and its aftermath.
An example
An example
 Origin: A British recruitment poster which
would have come out before conscription
was introduced in January 1916.

 Motive: To encourage men in Britain to

enlist in the New Armies.

 Audience: Men who are eligible to enlist

and who are in the right age group. This
changed over time but ranged from 19-40
years.This poster would not be aimed at
skilled workers in occupations required by
the Government.
An example
 Content:

 The symbol - John Bull represents the

British people, note the Union Jack
waistcoat.
 Personal appeal - Use of Question -'Who's
Absent? Is it You?'
 The finger pointing at the reader -'You'.
 Soldiers waiting in the background for 'your'
response.
An example
 Other features to note:

 Brevity of language.
 Simple message - easy to comprehend
by a reader walking past.
 The poster's message is obvious
because many people would not stop
to read a poster. A British recruitment
poster which would have come out
before conscription was introduced in
January 1916.
The Hypodermic Needle Model
Basically, the Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that
the information from a text passes into the mass
consciousness of the audience unmediated, ie the
experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are
not relevant to the reception of the text.

This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are

manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our
behavior and thinking might be easily changed by media-
makers.
The Hypodermic Needle Model
 It assumes that the audience are passive and
heterogenous (Not arising within the body; derived from another individual).

This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents,

politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain
why certain groups in society should not be exposed to
certain media texts (comics in the 1950s, rap music in the
2000s), for fear that they will watch or read sexual or
violent behavior and will then act them out themselves.
Two-Step Flow
The Hypodermic model quickly proved too clumsy for
media researchers seeking to more precisely explain the
relationship between audience and text.

As the mass media became an essential part of life in

societies around the world and did NOT reduce
populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more
sophisticated explanation was sought.
Two-Step Flow
Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet
analyzed the voter’s decision-making processes during a
1940 presidential election campaign and published their
results in a paper called The People's Choice.

Their findings suggested that the information does not

flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience
unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who
then communicate it to their less active associates, over
whom they have influence.
Two-Step Flow
The audience then mediate the information received
directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts
expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced
not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. (think Fashion)

This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of

researchers, and caused them to conclude that social
factors were also important in the way in which audiences
interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the
limited effects paradigm.
Uses & Gratifications Theory
Dependency Theory
During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with
television became adults, it became increasingly apparent
to media theorists that audiences made choices about what
they did when consuming texts.

Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up

of individuals who actively consumed texts for different
reasons and in different ways.
Uses & Gratifications Theory
Dependency Theory
In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the
following functions for individuals and society:

surveillance
correlation
entertainment
cultural transmission
Uses & Gratifications Theory
Dependency Theory
Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and
published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might
choose and use a text for the following purposes (i.e. uses
and gratifications):

Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.

Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and
other interaction, e.g. substituting soap operas for family
life
Uses & Gratifications Theory
Dependency Theory
Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts,
learning behavior and values from texts
Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living
e.g. weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been

extended, particularly as new media forms have come
along (eg video games, the internet)
Reception Theory
Extending the concept of an active audience still further, in the
1980s and 1990s a lot of work was done on the way individuals
received and interpreted a text, and how their individual
circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their
reading.

 This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding

model of the relationship between text and audience - the text
is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and
there may be major differences between two different readings
of the same code.
Reception Theory
However, by using recognised codes and conventions,
and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to
aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can
position the audience and thus create a certain amount of
agreement on what the code means. This is known as a
preferred reading.

Think semiotics.