“Hello to the audience!”

Hehe.

Yesterday’s lectorial was all about – you guessed it – audiences! It was part of a series of tutes Brian has been doing on the five topics for the next assessment: audiences, institutions, texts . . . and  . . . some others . . . look, I forget, but my group is doing audiences so this was the lectorial for us.

Brian started by talking about some media theory, and once again I was glad I’d done year twelve media and so had some general idea of what he was talking about. He talked about the ‘effects tradition’ as opposed to ‘reception theories’: traditionally, media has been somewhat feared and media theorists have talked in terms of the way media influences its audiences. However, these days, we tend to look at media more in terms of audience interpretations of a text.

Stuart Hall’s encoding-decoding model, for example (#thankyouyeartwelvemedia) suggests that producers of media texts ‘encode’ texts with meaning through use of codes and conventions, and that audiences then ‘decode’ these codes and conventions to understand the text.

But the thing that was really interesting about Brian’s lectorial was his discussion of the modern audience. Our group has decided to focus on the interactivity of the modern audience, so I was pretty keen to hear what Brian had to say. He talked about the different way in which modern audiences engage with texts, compared to traditional broadcast media audiences.

For example, he talked about the phenomenon of multi-screening, and showed us a video from Deloitte about media consumption in 2014. It was really interesting to see the way in which we consume multiple forms of media at a time these days. Have a look at the video – I don’t know about you, but there were a lot of time when I was thinking, “Yeah, that sounds like me!”

Emma had the same thoughts. We spent a bit of time discussing our own media habits, and it seemed that we both spent a lot of time multi-screening. We also agreed with Deloitte’s data that TV is no longer the preferred form of media entertainment. More and more, audiences are turning to mobile devices and the internet to relax and unwind at the end of the day.

Hmm. I do spend a lot of my time on my phone, but I also spend a lot of time watching TV and I think Masterchef’s about to start! (Oh, like you’ve never watched reality TV 😉 )