Continuing with the media concepts that we’re focusing on for Project Brief 4, today’s lectorial looked at media institutions.
The term institution comes from sociology and can be defined as:
an organisation founded for a religious, educational, professional, or social purpose
While this definition may refer to academic institutions such as universities or social institutions such as marriage, it can also apply to media institutions.
Examples of media institutions might include
- ABC
- Netflix
- Fairfax
- YouTube
All of these examples are organisations which regulate and structure media activity as a collective. Each take different forms and present different values to their audience, values which their employees are expected to share. While they may cater for a particular demographic, others may join their audience. For example, while Channel 10 claims to cater for “the young at heart”, this doesn’t mean the elderly can’t watch their programs.
Each of these institutions have varying degrees of power and influence over their audiences or users. For example, Facebook is known to collect the data users provide when they create an account to advertisers, so they can use the data tell sell users products on the site. The ABC on the other hand, is Government funded and doesn’t rely on advertisers to provide its services, and don’t tend to collect as much data from their audience, meaning they have less power as they don’t know as much about their audience. This isn’t to say they don’t have any influence, they simply have less than international commercial institutions such as Facebook.