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Media Audience Behavior

Media Audience Behavior. Introduction. Question:. What do we know most about audiences from existing comm theories and resources? • Who chooses what (Neilson) • What they choose what they do (expectation) • What they get out of it (uses and gratifications).

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Media Audience Behavior

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  1. Media Audience Behavior Introduction

  2. Question: What do we know most about audiences from existing comm theories and resources? • Who chooses what (Neilson) • What they choose what they do (expectation) • What they get out of it (uses and gratifications)

  3. What do we need to know about audiences? • How people make choices about what media they choose and what performances they see • Psychology and sociology of the viewing experience

  4. How do we distinguish between active and passive audiences? • Which viewers work? • What kind of work do they do?

  5. How do we distinguish between texts of fantasy and reality? • Reality texts require reader to postpone immediate gratification • Fantasy viewers are entertained through escape Can today’s audiences be defined as either one or the other?

  6. Audiences defined • Collective term for ‘receivers’ in mass comm process: source channel, message, receiver, effect • Readers or viewers of media,channel or performance • Media audience not observable

  7. Historical influences • Previously defined by place (local, global) people (gender, demographics), medium, message content, time (prime, drive) • Audience as Mass: aggregate of detached individuals with focused attention • Audience as Market - links sender and receiver in calculative rather than social relationship - cash transaction

  8. Audience-Sender relationship models • Transmission model - audience as target; to influence or control • Ritual or expressive model - audience as participant; sharing experience • Attention model - audience as spectator; entertainment focus with no meaning transfer

  9. Notion of performance • Involves a relationship between performer and audience • Is a live event (worship, political meeting, sports, concerts, funerals, carnivals etc) • Involves ceremony and sense of sacred and extraordinary • Social distance in public spaces

  10. Forms of Audiences:Simple • Immediacy, localized, ceremonial Distance between performer and audience • Superstars and star texts • Active decoding, passive behavior • Performed in spaces / closed between shows • Public

  11. Forms of Audience:Mass • No spatial location • Indirect communication • Post-modern, mass-mediated society; fragmented performances • Global spaces • Low ceremony, low attention • Star-audience relationship; para-social, imitation • Watch to reinforce own opinions • Motivated by loneliness, curiosity

  12. Types of mass audiences • Illiterates - visuals only; 60% of general audience; sex fiction and adventure comics • Pragmatists - 30% general audience; social beings, interested in status, thing oriented, advertising targets; Readers Digest, Time • Intellectuals - less than 10%; concerned with issues and ideas; thinkers; Harpers, Atlantic Monthly

  13. Forms of Audiences:Diffused • Everyone is an audience all the time • Media-drenched society, lots of time watching, listening • Performative society • Continuing roles • World is a spectacle; we are both watchers and being watched • Global and local, public and private • Imagined and interpretive communities

  14. Viewing Metaphor: Football in America

  15. A game of signs • Country is a football stadium during Superbowl • Actual seat in stadium signifies wealth - box for riches, bleachers for poor • Codes/signals are used in huddles to transmit play messages • Much of game is based on deception - fooling the other team

  16. A manipulator of time • Instant replay • Slow motion • Avant-guard film with stream of consciousness back and forth through time

  17. A socialized agent • Teaches us how to get along in society - roles and rules • Emphasizes specialization • About containment and breaking free

  18. FOOTBALL Urban Educated players Specialized Team effort Vicarious excitement Body a weapon Up-tite audience BASEBALL Pastoral Country boys General Individualistic Relaxation Bat a weapon Relaxed audience Opposition to boring baseball

  19. FOOTBALL Superstars Sunday games Ticket Complex plays Coaches Stadium Fans Beer/hotdogs RELIGION Saints Sunday services Offerings Theology Clergy Church Congregation Wine/eucharist Alternative to religion

  20. Capitalist enterprise • Diverts people’s attention from social situations • Huge business that exists to make $ • Players are commodities • Players have no loyalty, only huge salaries • Advertisers exploit viewers • Means of social mobility for minorities

  21. Questions for discussion 1. How do those perceptions fit into these types of audiences: • Active / passive • Reality / fantasy • Simple / mass 2. Can we accept the notion of a diffused audience as an a priori for this class?

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