Audience

Who watches this crap, anyway?

Shahbaz Ali - BDC

Why is it important?'Audience' is a very important concept throughout media

studies.

All media texts are made with an audience in mind, ie a group of people who will receive it and make some sort of sense out of it. And generally, but not always, the producers make some money out of that audience.

Thus it is important to understand what happens when an audience "meets" a media text.

DefinitionAn audience is a group of people who participate in a

show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called the "reader"), theatre, music or academics in any medium.

Audience members participate in different ways in different kinds of art; some events invite overt audience participation and others allowing only modest clapping and criticism and reception.

Definition

What is an audience?Whilst its getting harder in the online age to conceive of a

media audience as a stable, identifiable group, a key question for media studies remains this: how do people make sense of and give meaning to cultural products?

During the production process you will have used blogs and social networking tools more generally to share images and gain feedback.

Constructing AudienceWhen a media text is being planned, perhaps the most

important question the producers consider is "Does it have an audience?“

If the answer to this is 'no', then there is no point in going any further.

Audience research is a major part of any media company, using questionnaires, focus groups, and comparisons to existing media texts, they will spend a great deal of time and money ascertaining if there is anyone out there who might be interested in their idea.

It's a serious business; media producers basically want to know the:

income bracket/status age gender race location

of their potential audience, a method of categorizing known as demographics.

Once they know this they can begin to shape their text to appeal to a group with known reading/viewing/listening habits.

Constructing Audience

One common way of describing audiences is to use a letter code to show their income bracket:

ATop management, bankers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals

BMiddle management, teachers, many 'creatives' eg graphic designers etc

C1Office supervisors, junior managers, nurses, specialist clerical staff etc

Audience Categories

C2

Skilled workers, tradespersons

(white collar)D

Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers

(blue collar)E

Unemployed, students, pensioners, casual workers

Audience Categories

Audience ClassificationThey also consider very carefully how that audience might react to, or engage with, their text. The following are all factors in analyzing or predicting this reaction.

AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONSThese are the advance ideas an audience may have about a text. This

particularly applies to genre pieces. Don't forget that producers often play with or deliberately shatter audience expectations.

AUDIENCE FOREKNOWLEDGEThis is the definite information (rather than the vague expectations)

which an audience brings to a media product. Think about trailers, posters and reviews.

AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATIONThis is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a

particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle.

What movie/character do you associate yourself with?

AUDIENCE PLACEMENTThis is the range of strategies media producers use to directly target a

particular audience and make them feel that the media text is specially 'for them'.

AUDIENCE RESEARCH

Measuring an audience is very important to all media institutions. Research is done at all stages of production of a media text, and, once produced, audience will be continually monitored.

Audience Classification

ASIDE

Audience reaction to even early versions of a media text is closely watched. Hollywood studios routinely show a pre-release version of every movie

they make to a test audience, and will often make changes to the movie that are requested by that audience.

Similarly television has pilots that are shown to a selection

of the targeted audience and changes made accordingly.

Creating AudienceOnce a media text has been made, its producers need to ensure that it reaches the audience it is intended for. All media texts will have some sort of marketing campaign attached to them. Elements of this might include

posters print advertisements trailers promotional interviews (eg stars appearing on chat shows) tie-in campaigns (eg a blockbuster movie using McDonalds meals) merchandising (t-shirts, baseball caps, key rings)

Marketing campaigns are intended to create awareness of a media text. Once that awareness has been created, hopefully audiences will come flocking in their hundreds of millions.

Counting Audience - FilmFigures are based on box office receipts, rather than the

number of people who have actually seen the movie.

Subtract the production costs of a movie from the box office receipts to find out how much money it made, and therefore how successful it has been in the profit-driven movie business.

Be aware that a film which does not cost much to make (eg The Blair Witch Project) and takes even a modest amount at the box office can be considered a greater success than a big action movie which cost more, has a bigger set of box office receipts (i.e. lots more people went to see it) but has a smaller profit margin.

Counting Audience - Film

Also be aware that film companies are very coy about publishing production costs of a movie, and that they rarely include the cost of a film's marketing budget, which is probably at least a third of the production costs, and is frequently more.

In some cases, the marketing budget may exceed the cost of originally making the film - Four Weddings & a Funeral's American marketing spend is an example of this.

Counting Audience - Film

Magazines and newspapers measure their circulation (i.e. numbers of copies sold).

They are open about these figures - they have to be as these are the numbers quoted to advertisers when negotiating the price of a page.

Counting Audience - Print

Measuring the number of viewers and listeners for a TV/Radio program or whole station's output is a complex business.

Generally, an audience research agency (eg BARB) will select a sample of the population and monitor their viewing and listening habits over the space of 7 days.

Counting Audience – TV/Radio

The data gained is then extrapolated to cover the whole population, based on the percentage sample.

It is by no means an accurate science and you can find about some of the techniques used on google. The numbers obtained are known as the viewing figures or ratings.

Counting Audience – TV/Radio

The theoriesAs students of media studies, you need a working knowledge of the theories

which attempt to explain how an audience receives, reads and responds to a text.

Over the course of the past century or so, media analysts have developed several effects models, ie theoretical explanations of how humans ingest the information transmitted by media texts and how this might influence (or not) their behaviour.

Effects theory is still a very hotly debated area of Media and Psychology research, as no one is able to come up with indisputable evidence that audiences will always react to media texts one way or another.

The scientific debate is clouded by the politics of the situation: some audience theories are seen as a call for more censorship, others for less control.

Whatever your personal stance on the subject, you must understand the following theories and how they may be used to deconstruct the relationship between audience and text.

The theories

The Hypodermic Needle ModelDating from the 1920s, this theory was the first attempt to

explain how mass audiences might react to mass media.

It is a crude (basic) model and suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data. (Relate this to Shannon-Weaver model of communication)

Don't forget that this theory was developed in an age when the mass media were still fairly new - radio and cinema were less than two decades old.

Governments had just discovered the power of advertising to communicate a message, and produced propaganda to try and sway populaces to their way of thinking

This was particularly rampant in Europe during the First World War (look at some posters online) and its aftermath.

The Hypodermic Needle Model

An example

An exampleOrigin: A British recruitment poster which

would have come out before conscription was introduced in January 1916.

Motive: To encourage men in Britain to enlist in the New Armies.

Audience: Men who are eligible to enlist and who are in the right age group. This changed over time but ranged from 19-40 years.This poster would not be aimed at skilled workers in occupations required by the Government.

Content:

The symbol - John Bull represents the British people, note the Union Jack waistcoat.

Personal appeal - Use of Question -'Who's Absent? Is it You?'

The finger pointing at the reader -'You'. Soldiers waiting in the background for 'your'

response.

An example

Other features to note:

Brevity of language. Simple message - easy to comprehend

by a reader walking past. The poster's message is obvious

because many people would not stop to read a poster. A British recruitment poster which would have come out before conscription was introduced in January 1916.

An example

Basically, the Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciousness of the audience unmediated, ie the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text.

This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behavior and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers.


It assumes that the audience are passive and heterogenous (Not arising within the body; derived from another individual).

This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents, politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media texts (comics in the 1950s, rap music in the 2000s), for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent behavior and will then act them out themselves.


Two-Step FlowThe Hypodermic model quickly proved too clumsy for

media researchers seeking to more precisely explain the relationship between audience and text.

As the mass media became an essential part of life in societies around the world and did NOT reduce populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation was sought.

Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analyzed the voter’s decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice.

Their findings suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence.

Two-Step Flow

The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. (think Fashion)

This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm.

Two-Step Flow

Uses & Gratifications TheoryDependency TheoryDuring the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with

television became adults, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts.

Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways.

In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:

surveillancecorrelationentertainmentcultural transmission

Uses & Gratifications TheoryDependency Theory

Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (i.e. uses and gratifications):

Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and

other interaction, e.g. substituting soap operas for family life


Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behavior and values from texts

Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living e.g. weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, particularly as new media forms have come along (eg video games, the internet)


Reception TheoryExtending the concept of an active audience still further, in the

1980s and 1990s a lot of work was done on the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading.

This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code.

However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.

Think semiotics.

Reception Theory

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Audience