This week’s workshop was interesting to me as that we delved into the exploration of media audience as well as the institution that is media now; going through history back to the inception of the printing press and its effects on both media and audiences alike to how media is consumed today. In this, we further went into how are views are changed by media, looking at the Middle East as an example of how coverage of incidents over there from pro and anti-terrorism outlets can assume the existence of both a passive and active audience.
But what about the Western world? Audience participation in media has long been debated as to what effect it may yield, yet we participate in media more ways than most of us realise: television ratings, social media chatter, internet voting, even complaints/aggregation act as hard evidence now that audience has power over media and how we have the ability to change how it is produced. The reception and production of media has changed as that how we access media has changed.