Basically, this weeks readings focussed on the audience of several media outlets – and how the audience is taking control.
Who is the audience?
- a group of consumers of a communicative event of some sort, those who are physically, and collectively, present in the same place, as the addressees of a sermon or speech or theatrical production.
- New forms of electronic broadcasting (radio, television) expanded the meaning of audience – consumed messages at the exact same time “life in common”
- Daily national press created a broader sense of community and a sense of collectively shared, secular historical time which everyone can become involved
- Media power impacts the audiences opinion, actions and thoughts. The media has the power to manipulate what an audience sees and hears, and hence is an intensely powerful influence on the world
Taking control
- “Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watchTV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have. Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business. But we’re not on your clock any more. Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, has explained this to his people. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place.”
