LIZZY IS DOIN' THIS

I am the audience, who cares about me?

There has been a huge change in regards to the audience in a post broadcast world. The audience has moved from citizens > consumers, and active audiences are prolific, with the rise of social medias and platforms that are accessible and easy to navigate. User generated content is at an all time high and media producers, advertisers, commercial broadcasters, government policy makers and sociologists, psychologists and theorists alike, among others, all need to pay attention to this shift in engagement, production and use since the broadcast era.

The active audience, as a relatively new concept, has dramatically shaped the kinds of media that are prominent in todays society. Without the innate need to contribute, create, share views and promote passion it’s no wonder that something like Instagram or Facebook are so widely used. It’s because they’re platforms that can be truly manipulated to reflect the users views, I don’t believe any media now would survive if it didn’t reflect the audience that engages with it and I guess that is the main difference between a pre and post broadcast era.

So, what am I an active audience or fan of? I guess I’m a fan of food, coffee and wine, I love music and I’ve definitely fan-girled before. I’m not sure that there is anything that I am a truly passive audience or receiver of anymore. Because if there is anything I enjoy, or dislike, I am probably likely to voice my opinion somewhere, whether it be on this blog, on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. And it’s not even just in the way of ‘voicing opinions’ through written or spoken word, audiences now move in waves of appreciation or defamation through social-media signifiers such as ‘liking’ or ‘following’ or doing the opposite of this and denoting things, objects, sites, people or causes from our ‘liked’ items, distancing ourselves from things we don’t believe in.

During this weeks workshop we had to ‘present’ to everyone what we had come up with thus far in the way of PB4. Coming up against all the other groups WIP’s our paled in comparison but I’m not worried, we are filming the majority of our project so a lot of planning has been going into that. We did let the class know our three main focus areas and we presented some of the things we’d read while completing our annotated bibliographies to contextualise our ideas.

During this time we also gave ourselves a rough timeline of things to complete over the next few weeks. We’ve also started playing around with ideas of who we could contact to interview for our report. We all racked our brains and started jotting down names and getting contact details.

One of the things that seems to be recurring during Media One this year is comic books. I’ve never talked or listened about them so much in my life. Although I know almost nothing about them, I’ve found myself really intrigued about their history and longevity ~ especially now with all of the multi-million dollar blockbuster films being created. In Alex’s annotated bibliography research he came across some great readings about comic books, and through talking to him we’ve realised he has a bit of prior knowledge. And what a vault to open! Especially in regards to media, distribution plus the effects of audiences, regulation and changing technology!

We had the ~~v clever~~ idea during this workshop that perhaps we could make a small zine or prequel comic to compliment our doco, this idea was received well by Jasmine and our class and I was feeling very inspired and excited!

As a group we concluded that we definitely needed to talk to some comic books guys for this project brief. Alex informed Jules and I that our initial idea of who to contact were ‘dicks’ and that we definitely shouldn’t talk to them (how were we to know), instead Alex let us know about a small scale comic shop called Classic Comics, us girls put our trust in the boy for once and after the workshop we headed over to the store and asked the guys whether they’d be interested in helping us out ~ which they absolutely were! So phew, first interview sorted and we’ll be heading in with our fancy filming equipment next Tuesday.. now to hunt down our other interviewees…