I’d like to return to semiotics today if I could, and talk particularly about the social conventions relating to colour.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about semiotics, after we focused on it in one of our lectorials. Basically, semiotics is the theory that discusses communication through signs, and the meaning we gain from signs. Eg, if I hold up my forefinger and middle finger in the sign of a v, you might read that as a sign for peace. There’s nothing about my fingers that actually contains the meaning of peace, but it’s a socially accepted sign that you can recognise.

What I want to talk about this week is colour as part of semiotic theory. About a week ago I uploaded a post about a poster I made for Hockey Victoria’s Women and Girl’s Round. As you’ll notice, the poster is mostly in pink and reminds us to wear pink on the day (hence my pink fingernails in the picture below). At the Women and Girl’s Breakfast with guest speaker Nova Peris, we were even given pink towels and roller balls.

I’m definitely in two minds about all this pink. As a feminist, there’s a part of me that hates the way we feel we can reduce a whole gender to a single colour, especially one that is somewhat associated with childishness and, for want of a better word, sissy-ness.

But on the other hand, also as a feminist, I love having a clear and recognisable way to celebrate women in my sport. I don’t just play hockey; I coach it, I umpire it (as you can tell from my shirt in the picture) and I’m a member of my club’s committee. I live hockey, and I’m lucky enough to be able to see first-hand the amazing skill, dedication and sportsmanship women bring to my club. However, I’m unlucky enough to be a able to understand how little respect there is in the world for women who play sport. I love that Hockey Victoria has a Women and Girls Round, and I love the idea of getting people to show their support through wearing pink.

And there’s no denying that pink is recognisably feminine, even though this wasn’t always the case. If Stephen Fry and QI are to be believed, up until the 1940s it was actually the other way around; pink was used for baby boys as it was a watered-down form of the aggressive and masculine red, where powder blue was a cooler colour and therefore suited to the girls. At some point, though, they switched, and today the colours are pretty universal signifiers of each of the genders. For example, take a look at this Huggies ad, which demonstrates perfectly the use of the two together:

And it’s not just for gender that colour has significant meaning within the world of semiotics. For example, what more widely recognised signs for ‘stop’ and ‘go’ are there than the colours red and green? And although it may be different in other cultures, in the Western World it’s still generally accepted that you wear black to a funeral.

Colours are a perfect example of semiotics; in most cases they have no literal association with what they signify, and yet our social conventions assign them meanings of their own. While this can lead to frustrating simplification of more complicated issues (such as gender), on the whole it allows for communication that transcends language and can be widely understood.

In yesterday’s tute, our group took the opportunity to pool resources for our annotated bibliography. Basically, in preparation for our assessment on interactive media audiences (working title: participation generation), we all looked at a variety of sources and summarised them in reference to their academic value and relevance to our project. I’m not going to write up too much here, because the bibliography is pretty wordy in itself (hence why I’ve only uploaded my section), but it’s pretty fascinating if you’re interested in media theory. Read it, skim it or just look at the pictures (spoiler alert: there aren’t any). Enjoy!

1. Cover, R; 2006; ‘Interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history’; New Media and Society; Sage Publications (Chicago); volume 6 issue 1; pp. 139-158

I found this to be a fascinating, in-depth article that was particularly relevant to our group’s work because it focussed not just on how interactivity exists for modern media audiences but on the resistance to this interactivity, a point that I had not considered before. Cover talks about a ‘battle of control’ between media creators and media audiences, describing how some interactivity – such as using elements of a media product in another – can be dislike by media authors. I think this was a particularly unique and interesting take on media interactivity that I will make an effort to incorporate into our project as I hadn’t thought of it before. Cover also discusses the way in which interactivity has redefined the term ‘audience’, which could provide a good way for us to link our focus on interactive media to our wider subject area of audience. I found Cover’s section on the history of interactivity a little irrelevant, as his contention seems to be ‘we’ve always wanted to interact with texts but never could’, however he did cite one example that I think we could discuss in our media product, which was an SBS TV show as early as 2002 called Twentyfourseven that invited viewers to vote by SMS to determine the ending to the show. I had never heard of this happening in TV before and seeing as we were wanting to discuss a similar example from YouTube, I think this is something we could definitely discuss in our project.

2. Brennan, K; 2014; ‘Audience in the service of learning: how kids negotiate attenion in an online community of interactive media designers’; Learning, Media and Technology; Routledge (London); volume 40 issue 2; pp. 1-20

This article was a little disappointing for me, as it was not quite what I had expected and less relevant to our project than I had hoped. Nonetheless, it had some interesting points that we could use in our project. The paper outlined a long term qualitative and quantitative study undertaken by MIT, in which a website named ‘Scratch’ was started for young people to produce and share ‘projects’. This was my first issue with the paper: though the analysis of the research methods and findings was in depth I found it difficult to understand exactly what ‘Scratch’ was and the nature of projects produced on the site. It also became clear that the focus of the research was on interaction between media producers, rather than media that was itself interactive (our focus), making it less relevant to our project. However, it still had some interesting findings, particularly regarding the youth market that our focus on online media might lead us to concentrate on. Firstly, the idea of social media users being ‘audiences’, a point I had not considered before. The paper suggests that in some respects ‘Scratch’ resembles social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter, and yet describes users not as such but as ‘audiences’. The idea that your friends on Facebook become your audience when you are posting things such as videos or photos (or perhaps even voicing your opinion on an issue) was a considered and new one (I thought), and one I would look to using in our project.

3. Finnerty, A J; 2011; ‘NCM media networks and audience entertainment group engage movie audiences with the first national interactive big screen cinema game in the us’; Business Wire (New York); accessed 2/4/2015

While the content of this article was very interesting and it was relatively easy to read, as an academic resource for our purposes I have to say it is probably quite limited. The article (somewhat dated now as it was made in 2011) describes a new (at the time) interactive video game advertisement that was to be shown in movie theatres before feature films. Lasting 90 seconds, the video seats the audience next to a classic cartoon character on some sort of log flume ride, and by  collectively raising and moving their arms, the audience forms one mass “human joystick” that controls the character as it moves and allows them to collect points along the way. While I found this a particularly interesting concept, I would have to suggest that the article’s credibility as an academic source is somewhat limited by its obvious (to me at least) bias. Phrases such as “the audience always wins by being among the first in the U.S. to experience the future of cinema advertising” and “this exciting new campaign” suggest to me that the article was produced by someone affiliated with the creators of the video, and thus its analysis of the impact of the video is probably limited. Nonetheless, I think that there are a few important points that our group can gain from this source: one is the idea of physical interactivity – that is, not just online discussion but actual movement that affects a piece. The second relevant point is interactivity in the cinema; generally cinema audiences are seen as being fairly non-interactive (at least in comparison to online or broadcast media), so it was interesting to look at interactive audiences from that perspective.

4. US Federal News Service; 2010; ‘Social media: presenting MCAs new river to an interactive audience’; US Federal News Service (Washington); accessed 2/4/2015

I have to concede that this was a particularly poor article. Its first problem was that it was overly simplistic and fairly unanalytical; the first two-thirds of the article seemed to be dedicated only to describing a brief (and completely shallow) history of media, which was useless from an academic perspective. I also did not realise when first selecting it as an article that it had actually been produced by the United States Marine Corps. Thus, the remaining third – which actually did discuss interactive media – focused entirely on the use of interactive media by the US Marine Corps. It was obviously biased to shed good light on this institution, and so lacked depth in its analysis of media use. However, this did not mean that it was entirely useless; while we may not refer specifically to this article in our project, it provides an interesting perspective on the industrial uses of interactive media, particularly social media. For example, the article discusses the value of social media in distributing advertising, stating that “every time a Facebook user becomes a fan of a Marine Corps page, an update is posted on their profile for all of their friends to see. This creates numerous opportunities for Marine Corps pages to reach millions; and as a Facebook page traffic increases, so does the traffic to official websites.”

5. Smith, D K; 2014; ‘iTube, youTube, weTube: social media videos in chemistry education and outreach’; Journal of Chemical Education; ACS Publications (Washington); volume 91 issue 10; pp. 1954-1959

This article was interesting to read in that it was written by a science professor, and so came not from the perspective of a media academic but from the perspective of an ordinary person seeking to enjoy the benefits of interactive, online media. The author, David K Smith from the University of York, was looking for ways to engage his students further in their chemistry units. He reflected upon popular chemistry channels he had seen on YouTube, and so decided to utilise the site in his own teachings. The article outlines not only his own creation of YouTube videos but his student’s use of YouTube to create projects that explore chemistry. Overall, the article was very easy to read and quite accessible, which kept me engaged and interested in the subject matter, but obviously its relevance to us was limited as its focus was not on a media perspective. However, the structure of the article itself and the research within it I felt was quite telling of the benefits on interactive, online video. For example, there was one section where Smith was analysing the duration of hits on his videos, as YouTube can supply the information regarding how long a particular viewer has watched a video. Smith’s use of this information to understand his viewers’ habits and in turn shape his content I thought was a very valuable insight into the value of interactive media technology, and a point that we could definitely incorporate into our own work. Smith further highlights the way in which interactivity can help producers tailor their content when he says, “the comments feature of YouTube enables a real dialogue with viewers, for example, if there are things viewers have not fully understood, want further information on, or disagree with.” This industrial value of online interactive technologies is a point that will be worth discussing in our project.

6. Dembin, R M; 2015; ‘I saw it in the lobby’; American Theatre; Theatre Communications Group inc. (New York); volume 32 issue 1; pp. 62-64

I found this to be a fascinating, well-written and engaging article. While other articles I read focused on digital and broadcast media, particularly online media, this article focused on theatre, which I thought was a really interesting format in which to look at interactivity. Dembin describes the particularly modern idea of an ‘interactive lobby’, looking at examples of when producers of a theatre show have created interactive exhibits, displays and activities for the lobby space of their theatres. These displays ranged from the traditional, such as a ‘face-in-the-hole’ painting that allows audiences to feel transplanted into the story, to more complex, modern activities such as show-specific apps and touch-screen displays for comments. I thought the idea of looking at interactive audiences not just in the online sphere but through physical, tangible interactivity was relevant to our project as it was not something I had considered and therefore something we should look into to including in our work. Dembin also brings up some points about interactivity that are relevant observation for our project as they can be transferred to other media formats; for example, he discusses the idea that interactivity can connect audiences not just to the media text but to each other: “These installations bring theatregoers closer not only to the play they’re seeing, but to each other as well.” I think interactivity of audience members with each other, as well as with a text, is an interesting extra dimension we could add to our project. I think this article will provide a valuable source of information to us as it makes good observations but is quite accessible and easy to read.

7. Lang, T; 2013; ‘Evolution of interactive print’; Target Marketing; North American Publishing Company North American Publishing Company (Philadelphia); volume 36 issue 6; pp. 23-24

This article, such as the article about the interactive cinema ad, I thought was particularly interesting because it discussed interactivity within the context of a medium that is not usually associated with it. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t actually talk much about audiences, but still creates an interesting discussion regarding interactive technologies. It discusses the technology of the ‘visual search’, a technology that allows users to take pictures of printed images and text with their smartphones or portable devices and do a web search based on that picture. It was a well-written article, and easy to read, however its lack of focus on audience limited its relevance to us. However, the focus on print was particularly interesting to me and I think something we could consider drawing on in our project. The article also had a focus on brand engagement, which I think would be particularly interesting to discuss in our project; advertising draws heavily on interactivity and interactive media in the modern world and this article could give us some point to include. For example, Lang says, “Engagement is key; it’s no longer profitable to talk at consumers with stale content. With these new technologies, marketers can truly embrace and crosspromote multiple platforms, enabling consistent communications across all touchpoints. A marketer’s dream!” Another interesting and relevant point Lang makes is interactivity across more than one medium: “So wouldn’t that [the control modern audiences have over their own media consumption] require marketers to not pick a platform – mobile/online vs. print/offline – but instead find a way to consistently communicate across all channels?” This is a point I feel we could include in our project.

“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 😉 )

So I promised a post about Thursday’s tute, and here it is.

This is the way Jac, Dusty and I think (have a look out for our self-portraits dotted around the page 🙂 ). It’s our brainstorm about what we’re going to do for our group assessment on the subject of media audiences. We want to focus on the interactivity of modern audiences in the online realm, like on YouTube or Twitter.

That’s all I’m going to say for now; I’m away from home this weekend so on borrowed wifi, and there’s a few more posts coming this week on some academic articles related to the project, so look forward to those.

Sorry for the delay guys – I’ve been away this weekend so I’ve missed my Friday post; later today I’ll do a post on Thursday’s tute but today I want to show you something I made. I realised the other day that for a media student, I hardly ever actually post any media, so have a bit of a squiz at this poster I made for my hockey club:

Hockey Victoria, hockey’s officiating body in this state, has organised a ‘women and girls round’ to celebrate women in sport. Our club, as you can tell, is taking part, and we wanted to promote the things we were doing. As a an amateur but interested photoshopper, I volunteered my services. I don’t know how good it would seem to a professional graphic designer, but I’m pretty happy with it and I think it does the job.