AUDIENCE

In this lecture, Brian Morris outlines different types of audience: Television Audiences – from broadcast to Post Broadcast,  Active Audience theories,  Thinking about Taste Cultures, Fans and Fandom and New Media audience.

A way of looking at media changed in the eighties thanks to semiotics, representations of women, particularly the Madonna phenomena and the reflexiveness of the viewer back and narrative. This is shown in a scene in Simple Men, Hal Hartley (1991) where the main character discuss Madonna, objectification of women and whether it has been reclaimed by women.

‘I CAN’T STAND THE QUIET!’ Martin Donovan, Simple Men.

In reality, while scholars considered these issues, teenage girls had a completely different experience and instead mimicked their idol. Here we can the gamble of communication where the intended viewer has re-coded the message.

Post Broadcast Era

Advertisers are particularly interested in audience for obvious reasons in that they need to know who is their target audience to sell products to. Because media now is so diffuse, post broadcast, it is difficult for advertisers to target their brands to specific groups.

Here is a basic chart of the ‘MEDIA EFFECTS’ THEORY’:

•anxiety/suspicion re TV’s power • audience is passive / manipulated/ brainwashed • lab experiments, focus groups, playground observations

The Passive Audience

The audience are complicit in their own inactivity or questioning of content.

IDEAS OF ‘MASS CULTURE’ & ‘MASS AUDIENCES ’ -T. ADORNO & M. HORKHEIMER, THE CULTURE INDUSTRY (1963)
‘Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.’

IDEAS OF ‘MASS CULTURE’ & ‘MASS AUDIENCES ’
‘There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses … a way of seeing people which has become characteristic of our kind of society … [a way of seeing that] has been capitalised for the purposes of cultural or political exploitation’. R. WILLIAMS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY (1963)

This quote is best exemplified in The Network (1976) where the audience is being commented on, projected to while the protagonist, why trying to be an agent of change, is exploited by the very thing he represents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-umBOdafbs

Online fan communities in particular have had a reflexive effect where they have been able to lobby a series to come back on (Doctor Who) or to keep it on air (Joss Wheedon’s Firefly). They have become ‘prosumers’ – blurring the line between producers and consumers with user generated content.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.
Jay Rosen (2006),’The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink blog, June 27G

 Fans, in short, recreate are another narrative, each either adhering to the new norms of narrative imposed by the status quo of their group or appropriating characters and then authoring their own fandom. They are also no longer a marginal socially inept group but have become mainstreamed.

REFLECTION

This lecture was invaluable to myself and my collaborators as our project is Audience, choosing Cosplayer fandom as our subject. What Henry Jenkin’s has talked about in Textual Poaching is relevant to us as we explore the expression of fans: from cosplaying, online communities and trolling.

I quite enjoyed seeing ‘Simple Men’ as I remember seeing it when it first came out and recall that reflecting the discussions at the time was something that was echoed in films, especially in Tarantino’s work. Like the fandom we have set to explore, fans will appropriate content for their own means and police those who do not fall into the rigidity of imposed codes. An example of this is with cosplaying and their attention to an authentic costume.

Below is another idea that fandom can actually infantilise people, in the documentary below, ‘The Men Who Made Us Spend’.

NARRATIVE

‘A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.’

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, p. 23′

When I studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT we studied, ‘The hero with a thousand faces’ by Joseph Campbell. It covered the archetypal journey of the hero or causality: protagonist’s call to action, overcoming obstacles to a final resolution – a classic three act structure that you see in nearly every Hollywood movie (you can view a summary of the archetype structure in my Other Readings file blog).

And read by every aspiring screenwriter of course is the eponymous Robert McKee – ‘Everything is story, story is everything’.

Yes, narrative is everywhere. Even people not normally associated with discussing it like the renowned neurologist, Oliver Sacks. ‘Humans naturally create stories and narratives’. (http://bigthink.com/videos/oliver-sacks-on-humans-and-myth-making). This echoes what Adrian Miles was addressing his lecture that ‘humans are the only animals that create story’ (Ah, if only we could understand ‘whale’).

TASK
As activity, in pairs we were to map out a story of a well-known movie or story.

1. Think of a story both know
2. Map the story according to emotional highs/lows
3. Map the story according to character prominence.

Lion King

Non-narrative

Whenever I hear this term ‘non-narrative’ I can’t but help think of some tedious French film where two lovers are sitting at a distressed wooden kitchen table, and with long faces are shoving plates of camembert at each other in between interminably long pauses and then, after two hours the credits roll.  Or instead watch Andy Warhol’s Empire State Building to get the same feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Andy+Warhol+made+a+film+called+Empire+in+1964+

Yes, not a lot happens and often non-narrative is typified by bucking the conventions of narrative ie there maybe a hero, they may not overcome obstacles, there maybe no end and they maybe even on hero.Even so, so-called non-narrative forms do use elements. As this video by Daniel Askil ‘We decided not to die’ shows.

REFLECTION

As a published writer of a travel narrative, short story and scriptwriter, I didn’t find in today’s lecture much that I didn’t already know. Still, it was, like seeing an old lover, pleasurable. Watching the video ‘We decided not to die’ despite so-called non-narrative style of it each vignette had journey of the protagonist and resolution. So still they were following the classic three act structure.

TEXTS

Lecturer: Brian Morris.

Textual Analysis covers film, audio doco, policy documents, fiction, non-fiction etc. It can be hard to define. As Morris said about a U.S. Supreme Court Case, the judge exclaimed, ‘Porn. I don’t know what it is but I know it when I see it.’

Where does ‘textual analysis come from? It comes from content such as films, articles, topics and has a quantitive focus. For example, the Bobo Doll Experiment looked at the effects of child violence. Parents were given a Bobo doll and hit it. Their children watched this on a television screen. They were then told to entre the room and play with the Bobo Doll. They immediately began beating the doll. This mimicking of adult behaviour led researchers to believe there was a connection between onscreen violence and children’s violence. It’s a debate that is still being raged over today with uptake of video games.

Coming out of the Structuralist era of academia in post World War II to the mid 20^th Century, there was a turn against a particular idea of culture. Namely this was the consumerist culture or Pop Culture. Academics took a moral position that some culture was higher than others. For example, James Joyce Ulysses would’ve been regarded higher than say a Spiderman comic, which was seen as a lower culture. This brings us to our next topic, semiotics.

Semiotics

What is it?

‘Semiotics is the study of sign systems. It explores how words and other signs make meaning. It is anything that stands in for something other than itself. This lesson focuses primarily on linguistic signs. The word ‘semiotics’ dates back to ancient Greece, but its use in modern linguistics was propelled in the 19th century with the research of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure was a Swiss linguist who contributed greatly to the study of semiotics, also sometimes referred to as semiology.’ (http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-semiotics-definition-examples.html)

What is a ‘text’?

Texts are the materials traces that are left of the practice of sense-making – the only empirical evidence we have of how other people make sense of the world. This is done by:

• vehicles for the production of cultural meaning (Sign systems)
• ‘texts’ in media, coummunications and cultural studies include cultural products, images, policy documents, social practices, institutions…
• Sites where we can see the social production of ideas
• Alan McKee ‘Textual analysis: a beginner’s guide (2003) – p12. ‘This , then, is why….make sense of the world.’ See (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sbenus/Teaching/APTD/McKee_Ch1.pdf)

SOME PREVIOUS ACADEMIC MOTIVES FOR TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

‘textual analysis is an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of text’  Alan McKee.

Communication, academics argue, is a gamble. There is the possibility that the reader may not get the encoded meaning or understand it.  An example is ‘re-coding’. Ronald Reagan appropriated Bruce Springsteen ‘Born in the USA’ which was originally to communicate the working-man for his election campaign.

SEMIOTIC TRADITION OF ANALYSIS

Key starting terms:

• Sign, signifier, signified (referent)
• Denotation, connotation
• Codes
• ‘Myth’/ Ideology
  (See Daniel Chandler, semiotics for beginnershttp://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/)

A ‘sign’ can be visual, linguistic, aural, combination etc.

Signifier ‘a dog’ is a label.

Signified  what comes with that, associated with that label.

Connotation The colour ‘red’ connotes passion, anger, sexuality, communism, economic loss.

As example of constructing meaning, Morris showed a picture of children of different ages, a man and a woman and a dog sitting together picture. We immediately said ‘this is a family’. They maybe individuals but because they’re sitting close we imagine that they are a family. The dog is something that is part of the equation that we have constructed that is the ‘typical family’. We have attached meaning to these images.

When shown another image of people together all of similar age we knew immediately it was perhaps a band. We make these meanings through the use of labels we assign to each object and what it signifiers to us.

Commercials often use semiotics to sell an idea like the advertisement for cotton we see a father throwing a child into pool. While it emphasised pleasure it also sold the idea of white privilege, an exclusivity.

LIMITATIONS OF SEMIOTICS ANALYSES

‘…different modes allow to you to do different kinds of things, and not only allow you to do different kinds of things, but insist that different things are done.’ Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics: Key Figures, New Directions (79)

While we can separate images we can’t separate semitic elements when it comes to sound. Because sound is:

• Pervasive – can’t control what comes into our ears.
• Multidirectional – comes from everywhere
• Complexly layered –
• Prioritized by the ear – Janke Schaefer ‘Audio and Image’. Someone saying your name on the street.
• Sound is intimate and subjective.

These can be affect by Aural Semiotics, as Theo Van Leeuwen describes as  ‘Perspective’. The meaning of sound depends on the closeness. For example if the figure in the foreground the figure is the focus of interest. The ground sets the context or setting and the field is the background or ambient space. So we judge something based on a ‘Social Distance’.  For instance whispering (intimate relationship) to say using a microphone (public distance). If we look at broader sounds this takes us to looking at soundscape.

SOUNDSCAPE

It is a representation of a place or an environment that can be heard rather than what can be seen. Tony Gibbs, ‘The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design’. These are made up of ‘sonic components’ such as technical, emotional, pitch, volume. Looking below as this disturbing image we can already imagine the ‘soundscape’ here. The girl we might hear screaming above the other children’s cries (figure sound), the sound of footsteps, guns, radio chatter (ground sound) and sounds helicopters, explosions in the distance (field).

REFLECTIONS

Thinking about textual analysis and semiotics we do it on a daily basis without realising it. I make choices all the time if I’m going to read something based on whether it is ‘worthy’ (high culture) or not like a graphic novel (low culture). I deliberately eschew commercial television because I see it as low culture and feel morally superior when I engage in watching documentaries on enslavement of iphone workers in China a rather than my neighbour who wants to talk about My Kitchen rules.

In regards to semiotics I thought immediately of advertising as they are highly constructed images. I studied copywriting and it was always a challenge to seize an arresting image that maybe neutral to look at but then connate it with a tag line. I think this Evian ad best exemplifies what I mean.

Also, I thought about the last time I was at the pool. People leave their towels on a sun lounge to denote that this is their space. The towel is no longer a towel but a form of signifying ownership. I thought, as a funny video, I could go around town putting towels on things and saying they’re mine. Put the towel on somebody’s bike – ‘That’s mine now, thanks!’ or, upping the ante, on somebody – ‘You’re coming with me.’ I guess that’s not that far from the truth with wedding bands. ‘This maybe just a piece of round metal but once I put this on your finger…your life is over.’

Media is a form of research

This week Amy Saunders RMIT Media Librarian was our guest speaker. She illuminated us to the possibilities of research in the RMIT library and its online resources. For example, here is a list of resources to peruse:

• http://rmit.libguides.com/mjsm is an extensive online training library that helps anyone learn software, creative and business skills.  It contains a wide variety of video tutorials from experts with subject coverage including 3D + animation, audio, design, video, web and more. 
  (Not indexed by LibrarySearch)
• Referencing La Trobe has good referencing
• iSearch
• http://emedia.rmit.edu.au/isearch/search-process
• Moving Image
• World Cat
• Google Scholar
• Or ask a librarian

One of the lecturers, Brian Morris, emphasised the need for good research skills.

COLLABORATION

Here is a great example of collaboration:

Interestingly, employers are advising above most other skills is the ability to be able to collaborate. They are looking for people who can work with other people and enjoy working as part of a team.

The advantages of collaborating are that it can: develop your skills for your professional life; learn more effectively and retain knowledge longer by talking to others and teach you how to participate in group discussions.

GOOD vs BAD EXPERIENCES of Collaboration

The Good

• get great ideas
• cross pollination
• new ways of looking at things
• share ideas
• support
• more responsible
• share work load
• rigour – strong vetting process to evaluate ideas and approaches
• you can tackle bigger projects
• solve problems together

The Bad

• Working with people who are difficult
• Dominate the group
• Want things their way
• Uncomfortable expression your opinion
• Can’t reach a compromise
• People are unreliable
• Do all the work

Taking in both the good and the bad experiences this can help you:

• Develop leadership
• Gain experience
• Resolve conflict
• Negotiate for a win/win outcome
• Professional communication
• Establish peer relationships
• Deepen your knowledge
• HAVE FUN

POSITIVE COLLABORATIONS

See the lecture slides that Rachael prepared: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/2015-media-one/files/2015/04/Collaboration-SLIDES-1z0gh6m.pdf

Resources

• http://emedia.rmit.edu.au/workinginteams/

REFLECTIONS

I’ve worked in various capacities from team sales, building sites, film locations, markets and working with groups. I can say that yes, collaborations are an intrinsic part of getting things done, certainly getting big projects off the ground. You need a lot of people. I hadn’t though, considered the positive elements before; that you can learn from others, that you can have an expanding experience. I mean, I knew it afterwards but my perception of collaborating is ‘Oh, God! I’ll have to deal with someone who is going to be annoying, lazy or dominate the group with their ego.’ And yes, this has happened! But it’s good to see there are strategies out there to cope with the inevitable hiccups. I wonder how it will go with our next project? Bit daunting not being ‘in the young team.’
Also, it was good to have Amy’s lecture about the library resources. I had no idea of the breadth and scope of this resource (particularly the online books and journals) and shall visit the library in due course.