Green Eggs and Sam

Today we discussed audiences (a topic within Project Brief 4).

Types of audiences: Fans/Active cohorts/passive audiences

We also learn about who cares about audiences?

• Advertisers
• Commercial broadcasters, cable networks etc.
• Production houses and individual program makers
• Government policy makers
• Social scientists/psychologists
• Cultural theorists/media scholars

This is interesting to consider when you put this into day to day life where we are surrounded by media that attempts to tell us or even sell us something. Walking through the city on my way home was interesting as I felt almost rather claustrophobic due to the realisation that in fact we are bombarded with a lot of information even if we don’t actively engage in the information.

Television as ‘cultural technology’ : Glued to the Telly (1995) / it’s not just an address to an audience of consumers it is an address to all of the Australian public.

• Dame Pattie Menzies – what will the impact of telly in the home be? “entertaining children and the housewife”.
• The housewife is the most vulnerable to the effects of what is broadcast on Television.
• TV is about the place where families can bond and be together (post WW2 (fixing up the social fragmentation)).
• Imagined audience vs. actual audience
• Digitalisation / Post-Broadcast Era
• > imagining the audience differently : ‘The Idiot Box’ 4 corners (ABC).
• post broadcast is interesting from an institutional/advertising perspective – who are the audiences / there used to be a mass audience but now there is a fractured media landscape (multiple niche audiences) (this impacts ratings)
• ‘Media effects’ theory: anxiety/suspicion re: power
• Ideas of mass culture and mass audiences:
• 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.

There are in fact no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses… a way of seeing people which has been 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)

• Interpellation: the process by which individuals/readers are ‘hailed’ – in other words when the individual is prompted by a text to recognise or himself as being a subject that belongs in a role e.g. singing the national anthem at the football. (Louis Althusser (1918-1990)).

Theorising the ‘active audience’:

• – some key early academic texts for television studies
• : Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model (1980)
• : David Morley, The Nationwide Audience (1980)
• : Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (1984)
• : Ien Ang, Watching Dallas (1985) – invited people who watched it to write to her about what they enjoyed about the show/how they viewed it – did her analysis this way as it provided her with many different people with different background: realism: emotional realism – taking something out of it in terms of qualities and the international perspectives. What was its appeal?

• Broadcast audience as ‘public’ – one-to-many/’social glue’/imagined community/virtual public sphere

• Ratings:
  • exposure is the key measurement
  • must appeal to the inherence ‘correctness’ of the measurement
  • uses a probability, statistical, sample
  • delivers a ‘single number’
  • is syndicated to reduce costs to subscribers
  • has generally been third-party
  • is regularly audited by independent parties
  • limits on intrusion
  • is expected to work in the public interest (i.e. accurately represent a public audience)

Fandom:

• Stereotyped and pathologised as cultural – obsessive/freakish/hysterical/infantile and regressive social subjects: pop culture’s take on fandom has typically been one of distaste and critique, with fans emotional attachments to media texts and celebrities being viewed as “irrational”…
• Henry Jenkins (3^rd) – Textual Poachers (1992):
• – characterising fans as ‘active producers and manipulators of meaning’
• Portalandia (2012) – One moore episode/fans have become more active/engaged with show producers and contributing to the production side of these different shows.
• Online fan communities

Have fannish modes of engagement become mainstreamed, normalised, and/or economically exploited in contemporary culture?

• I believe perhaps as I am a huge fan of many celebrities and have found that it is more common these days now thanks so social media to be part of these fan groups which are highly populated. The fact that these are so highly populated suggests that they are very mainstream.