Monthly Archives: April 2016

Audience Research Thoughts

Alan McKee raised some interesting points in this week’s reading, ‘A beginner’s guide to textual analysis’ about audience research. Interviewing audiences regarding their interpretations of texts can produce interesting and unexpected insights. However, McKee also focuses on its drawbacks; it can be cumbersome and expensive, as often research is not as simple as asking audiences to tick a box.

McKee notes: ‘audience research does not find out ‘reality’: it analyses and produces more texts’. He argues that there is a difference between what a person thinks about a text, and what they say they think about a text, to the person who is interviewing them. People may change their answers to appear more sophisticated, emphasizing programming that they think is perceived as better quality.

This prompted me to think about how often people change their behaviour and what they say in order to influence people’s perception about them. For instance, if for whatever reason a person is asked to list their favourite TV shows, or hobbies, they may curate that list according to the impression of themselves they wish to create. An obvious example would be online dating profiles, where almost every person lists ‘travel’ as a hobby.

It is relevant to the way we curate a social media presence, using selection and omission, to highlight parts of ourselves that we think will appeal to others, especially a broader audience.

Week 5 Lectorial + Readings

Textual analysis was the key topic from today’s Lectorial. In order to analyse texts, as the topic suggests, we first have to realise what a text is. Texts are vehicles for the production of cultural meaning, or the evidence of the way other people make sense of the world. As Alan McKee proposes, ‘to understand the world we live in, we have to understand how people are making sense of the world,’ and it is through textual analysis that we can attempt to do so.

Therefore, textual analysis is an attempt to guess the most likely interpretations that may be made of a text by its audience. There is no ‘correct’ interpretation, just as no text is an accurate or ‘real’ representation of reality. We can use certain methodology, such as semiotics, however, to attempt to make ascertain the most likely interpretation of a text. Semiotics is the study of signs in texts, which can be visual, linguistic, aural and more. There are two parts to a sign: the signifier, and the signified. For example, the colour green is a signifier, which can signify jealousy, or nausea, or nature.

Importantly, the context in which these signifiers are place alter its meaning. Context is always needed to accurately interpret a sign. As McKee demonstrated with his example of the colour ‘brown’ not existing in Welsh, signs can mean different things to different people or groups of people. The majority of a certain society may interpret green to be related to jealousy, a different culture may more strongly associate it with something else. Similarly, placed within a different context, like a garden, it can be seen as natural and relaxing.

According to McKee there are three levels of context that can affect textual analysis:

  1. The rest of the text
  2. The genre of the text
  3. The wider public context in which a film is circulated.

These must be kept in mind when analysing a text, as they are important in interpreting the signs accurately within their context.