I’ve really started getting into listening to music on Spotify. I’ve been a casual music listener for years, but I usually just settled for YouTube to find songs and let Autoplay go. I have to admit though, I never really liked Autoplay (I hated it, who even decides that One Direction should be followed up by Meghan Trainor? And don’t even get me started on dodgy sped up lyric videos…) but I guess I was too lazy to find an alternative. But when I wanted to find a new album that just couldn’t be found anywhere remotely credible without paying $$$ I had no choice! I already had a Spotify account that I’d never really activated, so logging in wasn’t a problem. What I’ve noticed over the past month or so of daily use of this program is MEDIA. Surprise! I bet you were wondering where Uni was coming into this. After every few songs an ad plays and it’s honestly gotten so common to me now that I could probably recite the 3 audio advertisements that they play. One of the advertisements that plays is, and I don’t know if you remember, but the one that I was shown during a Media Research project a few weeks back. The one about voting from the Australian Electoral Commission? Yep! I was among the first to be shown that as an audience feedback thing where I got to give my opinion so that they could make their product ready for the public. So I’ve heard about Ballet Boxes a little too many times for the average teenager, I’d say.

(These are just a few of the advertisements on the program, including a promotional audio for Justin Timberlake)

I could deal with ads actually, I found it kind of nice to have a break between songs (well, no okay that’s a bit of a stretch, but I could tolerate the ads). Now though – I can’t stand them. Because they’re overplayed! I’ve heard the same three ads about 5 hundred times and I’m sick of it. Spotify does a lot of self promotion on it’s program, one of the ads constantly reminds me that if I just upgraded to Pro I wouldn’t even have to hear the ad telling me to upgrade to Pro. Still, I’m resilient (and broke) and will endure the ads if it means listening to hundreds of different favourite songs and artists for free. That’s a fair deal, I reckon.

I was thinking the other day about how much media I actually consume daily, and I thought I’d write a blog post about it. The concept struck me because while I was researching for PB4 I came across some interesting statistics. For example, Facebook has 14 million users in Australia alone – that’s over half the damn population! And Instagram as 5 thousand, which is crazy! I also found some statistics about women, young women like myself, and our interaction with social media. We tend to use websites like Instagram for longer than our male counterparts. Which is pretty easy for me to believe, considering the first thing I checked when I woke up this morning was my social media accounts. I literally just got distracted by my urge to check/update Tumblr and Facebook while mid writing this. How Meta.

But seriously – my generation uses social media a lot. And its kind of insane, actually. Statistics show we use the internet for up to 9 hours a day, but if I’m honest, I use it way more than that on the weekends when I’ve got no homework. On a free day I check my phone as soon as I wake up, get out of bed and go on my laptop and stay there most of the day – and night. And even when I do have Uni work, I’m constantly checking social media or researching for said work. It’s constantly in the background or forefront of my day to day life.

It was right after Thursday’s workshop when myself and some friends were having lunch and realised Instagram had updated their app – in a big way. We got to comparing the old interface and app icon with the new one (which looks like this by the way):

The whole thing really struck me as good thing to post about, because like me and my friends from Workshop, the whole internet seemed to combust at the update. We definitely didn’t like the update – mostly the icon is what threw me. Instagram has never updated their application icon before – not in the 5 years since the app first launched. So as you can imagine, this was a deal breaker for many that the theme layout update just doesn’t compare to. With the internet being the way it is it became a kind of meme on several platforms. It reminded me a lot of the interaction of Audiences with a media product, especially social media, which we’ve discussed in Lectorials before. The controversy surrounding this has even gone to the extent of there being ‘hacks’ to get the old interface back!

This article at Forbes was quick to address that Instagram is simply trying to get with the times – and that the old icon has looked out of place with the regular IPhone updates for a long time now.

This week’s workshop was cancelled, which is a shame, but my group took the time to discuss and research for the upcoming project anyway. We’re doing audience, and if I’m honest we’re all a little collectively confused by the brief. There’s still a lot of time until it’s due, but we wanted to start brainstorming now because we don’t want the time to run away with us. Everyone did a little research on what audio/video essays actually are, which I didn’t know about at all before this brief. I found some really helpful video explanations of things. We also did some research just on Audience – our topic – which I feel slightly more confident with. I actually did quite a bit of audience related work in Year 12 Media, so I wrote a list of some things I could remember just off the top of my head. Here it is!

Audience is an individual or collective group of people who consume media texts. This consumption can be categorised in a variety of ways. Over the years, many theories have been developed in order to ascribe types of media consumption and media influence from the perspective of said audiences.

Some well known theories are the Hypodermic Needle Theory – the theory that suggest audiences are entirely dictated by the media they consume, the Agenda-Setting Function theory – which believes media cannot decide what people think but can ascribe what to think about.

Audiences can be radio listeners, television viewers and movie goers. Audiences occur whenever there is media to consume – from advertisement to novels.

Terms like ‘target audiences’ exist in order to create media specific to a type of individual which the media creator wants to view their product. For example, the movie Frozen has a target audience age of children, and possibly even of gender. Target audiences are also important when it comes to rating the appropriateness of a film, novel or TV show. That’s when ratings from G – General, to R18+ are used to tell people what media is consumable for them. Target audiences (and audiences overall) help categorise media and make it profitable. Without audiences, media cannot make money or even be produced in the first place, as there would be nobody to consume it.
There are several types of audiences, ranging from impressionable to sceptical when it comes to the level of influence media has on them.

Anybody love a good 70’s classic? Gloria Gaynor? Anyone?

I’ve spent a lot of my week at home. Scratch that – a lot of my week in bed. Whenever anyone empathises with me I just say ‘I WILL SURVIVE’. I actually haven’t been to Uni since Monday, which sounds crazy, except I only have 3 days in a week anyway. I was weirdly nauseas on Tuesday, recovering Wednesday and then my chronic illness decided to knock on my door Thursday morning – or rather – knock on my train carriage as I was mid-commute to my 9:30am Workshop. And then to top it all off, Friday my body thought a cold would be a really good addition to an already stressed out Lucy. So it’s really been fun! (I really hope you can sense the sarcasm).

While all that has been going on, I’ve been trying my hardest to manage the workload that’s all due next week. I’ve done a very rough draft of PB3, almost finished by Cinema Studies essay and slowly been working on blog posts. I churned out 4 in one go on Monday, but then was hit with illness for the rest of the week, so those 4 weren’t so impressive anymore, just the bare minimum for the week.

One thing I did do through the week was attend a Top Secret Research Program. Basically I got paid to analyze and critique advertisement and media that hasn’t been released to the public yet. I obviously cannot tell you anything about it aside from that, but I thought it related to my course in some distant way. It was really interesting looking at media that way, it reminded me of year 12 and when we used to analyze elements of media campaigns. Things like codes and conventions in order to attract target audiences. An enormous amount of effort and talent goes into things that we just ignore or not give a second thought. Even things like pop up animated ads (which we were shown at the research place) which usually I’d not even see because of adblock. Made me actually appreciate the work that goes into these things, but won’t change my opinion on clicking next whenever I see one!