As a part of our collaborative work for Project 4, our tight nit group is researching audiences, audience influences, aspect of audiences and types of audiences. My first reading which we read as a part of the media readings for week 9 is 2. Jay Rosen (2006),’The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink blog, June 27.
What I was able to take from this pretty short article was in short audiences are people.
“The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence” an extension of this is how people are stereotyped, generalised and portrayed/represented which I will discuss further in our encompassing analysis.
Being on the radio I found it’s a great way to not only express yourself but express your passions and communicate with an audience that can not only relate to you but can understand the content that you are discussing, like television the audiences decide to tune in because audiences will genuinely interested in a topic they can relate to.
Another interesting discussion point raised in the article is editing, shooting and distributing content in a video form. The discussion is based around how although audiences or media creators can’t freely go onto television and display their own stories, forums like YouTube and Vimeo are allowing audiences to create a video and build their images and express themselves for a wider unrestricted audience.
Yet another fascinating point relates to the traditional exclusive editors who would have the important decision on deciding the front page of the news, and nowadays the we as an audience can choice the front page and edit the news, our own front pages of course being status and new we choose to share which can be more important to others than actual main stream news.
And finally another stringent point made was regarding a highly centralised media system which has connected people (audiences) “up” to big social agencies and centres of power. This has created a consequential vertical flow of media instead of a seemly horizontal flow. We can no longer trust where our information is going. Within a blink of an eye we can contact anyone of our friends or a stranger and someone is monitoring that information as it is send through cyberspace. Our own conversations as audiences, direct to one another are private and unmonitored but as soon as words, photos, data, information is send through these different social forums it is unknown to the unsuspecting audience how much someone else knows about your life.
It is often the case and as i’ve learnt through this article the media creator has a choke hold over the audiences, they are the puppeteers, the master manipulators of the audiences and what they put out there is bait for the audience to digest and believe. Every news story, every commercial, every news flash, every status, every film, every sitcom, every billboard, every piece of media created is intended for a specific audience, and creator intents to entice the audience to believe what they create and passively accept it.
Michael Serpell
Reading: Jay Rosen (2006),’The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink blog, June 27.