Audiences Reading Blog Post
The article ‘the people formally known as the audience’ written by Jay Rosen and published on Press Think, underlines the new role of the audience that has come about due to the new broadcast pattern, a consequence of interactive media. I enjoyed Rosens writing because he underlined the key changes in the role of the audience simply, without ambiguity. Another, more specific thing that I enjoyed him describing person to person media as a ‘horizontal flow’ in contrast to the past where media was produced by major commercial company’s forcing the audience to look up and consume from a single source.
After reading Rosens initial article I skimmed through the comments. One that came of note was Mark Howards who split the audience, or as he coined ‘actience’ into two parts. A passive group who simply wants great control of what they consume, there engagement and second group who wants to ‘produce, publish and distribute’ their own original content. I think is a very true interpretation of what different people want to get out of media in general these days. Many people just want to find more sources of entertain, and other people want to entertain. An issue only arises when to many people look to entertain and not consume. For example, on Instagram I rarely post pictures, I think I have posted about 3 all up, yet, there are a select portion of the people I follow (maybe about 15/80) that would post about 3 pictures a day, and my whole feed consists of entirely these people. Though we are both on the same platform, they assume the role of producer and I assume the role of the audience.
It would be interesting to conduct a study of these various roles and see if certain age demographics lean to particular roles on social and interactive media.
Anyway, back to Rosins write-up, this time for a critique. A key issue with his writing was his lack of acknowledge of the audience that chooses to remain passive. Even though I do have social media accounts, more of the media I thoroughly enjoy consuming I find from word of mouth not google searches or clicking on links. An example of this was the American version of The Office, I heard it was a great show, so I watched it on T.V. And that’s as far as my engagement went, I didn’t share official Facebook status’s, I didn’t re-tweet, I consumed in a passive one way style, and it is this style that Rosin completely ignores in his writing. In media there still very much is a place for the passive audience.