Intro to Communication

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Intro to Communication

• AK/SOSC 2410 9.0/6.0
• Summer 2006
• Course Director Pierre Ouellet
• www.atkinson.yorku.ca/sosc2410/

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From Mass to Public to Audience
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Lecture Outline

• Reviewing the conception of the mass
• Essentialism vs, Constructivism
• Commodification and commercialization
• the public sphere, public opinion, publicity and
  public life
• the emergence of the audience
• the active versus passive debate
• uses and gratification theory
• the audience as public versus as market.
• Audience Research Traditions
• Structural
• Behavioural
• Cultural

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Reviewing the Conception of the Mass

• Three principles of social mass
• relationship between mass and individuality
• intellectual and aesthetic reaction to the mass
• individual development of consumer market
• introduction of the mass media.

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Essentialism

• The term describes the idea that creatures,
  including humans, objects and things (texts
  representations artifacts) are possessed of
  particular characteristics and attributes which
  constitute their true nature. The essence of a
  thing or being is fixed and unchanging and
  possessed of a dual character, both as the innate
  property and the external typology to which all
  objects or beings conform.

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Constructivism

• The prevailing academic and scholarly opinions
  dismiss, on the whole, most essentialist
  arguments, proposing instead that the body
  itself, as prototype of essentialist existence,
  is materially shaped by social ideologies,
  cultural practices and personal experience.

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Commodification

• The transformation of an object or practice from
  the realm of use-value to exchange-value and even
  fetish-value.
• A Marxist concept that describes all things in a
  society (even people) as commodities. All
  material and social phenomena are products of a
  society and contribute to the production of other
  components in that society. This concept
  emphasizes the Marxist strategy of evaluating
  everything in terms of the economic exchange and
  competition occurring in culture.
• www2.cumberlandcollege.edu/acad/english/litcritweb
  /glossary.htm

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Commercialization

• Sequence of actions necessary to achieve market
  entry and general market competitiveness of new
  innovative technologies, process and products.
  (IPCC)?www.climatechange.ca.gov/glossary/letter_c.
  html
• The process of developing markets and producing
  and delivering products for sale (whether by the
  originating party or by others). As used here,
  commercialization includes both government and
  private sector markets. ?grants.nih.gov/grants/fun
  ding/phs398/instructions2/p3_definitions.htm

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The Public, Publicity and Public Life

• Early conceptions of the public
• Habermas and the Public Sphere
• public versus private public spheres
• the creation of Public Opinion and the control of
  mass media information
• the public as audience.

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Habermas and the Public Sphere

• According to Habermas, the public sphere is "a
  realm of our social life in which something
  approaching public opinion can be formed. Access
  is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the
  public sphere comes into being in every
  conversation in which private individuals
  assemble to form a public body" ("PS" 49). A
  rhetorical theory of the public sphere emphasizes
  that "sphere" is a metaphor. The public does not
  exist prior to the conversations that bring it
  into being. ...?www.wfu.edu/zulick/MovementTheory
  /glossary.html
• A concept in continental philosophy and critical
  theory, the public sphere contrasts with the
  private sphere, and is the part of life in which
  one is interacting with others and with society
  at large. Much of the thought about the public
  sphere relates to the concept of identity and
  identity politics. ?en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_s
  phere

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Distinguishing Public from Private Spheres

• The Public Sphere included matters of political
  and social concern while economic and family
  matters remained private.
• The Public Sphere was the domain of males of a
  certain social class and was therefore
  exclusionary by nature.
• The disinterested idealism of the Public Sphere
  was, according to critics, a self-serving
  illusion which is maintained to this day in
  notions of philanthropy and other such discourses.

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Public Opinion

• Often proposed as the representative expression
  of popular/populist ideas, values or beliefs
  framed in terms of social practices, current
  events or political agendas.
• Critical theorists and other social analysts
  point to the history of public opinion and the
  work of Lippmann and others to discuss the
  agenda-setting and social engineering aspirations
  of the practices of gathering and disseminating
  public opinion.

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The Emergence of the Audience

• Historical traditions and characteristics
• the origins of the modern audience
• the active versus passive debate
• the audience as market
• a typology of mass audience formation.

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Historical Traditions and Characteristics

• According to McQuail, early public events or
  performances
• 1. were planned and organized
• 2. they were public in nature
• 3. their content was secular and oriented to the
  enjoyment, entertainment and pedagogy of those in
  attendance
• 4. the attendance had a voluntary aspect
• 5. these events occurred typically within an
  urban environment and often had a commercial
  basis
• 6. these events were part of a larger apparatus
  which included writers, performers, musicians,
  producers and so forth
• 7. these events conformed to a set of conventions
  which defined not only their content but the
  nature of those who attended them as such,
  performances could be differentiated according to
  class, gender, race and so forth.

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The Modern Audience and Technological Change

• The first modern audience can be said to be the
  result of the invention of the printing press
• Every modern technological change brought about a
  new set of concerns about audience effects and
  new research methods to understand these effects
• The dialectic of alienation and community has
  been the meta-narrative of modern audience
  formation and research.

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Conceptual Origins of the Modern Audience

• as an "ideal type"
• of considerable size and widely dispersed
• with anonymity of membership
• with a shifting and changing composition
• without a sense of collective identity
• not "rule bound" in the traditional sense of the
  term
• appearing to be subject to outside influence
• without interpersonal relationships between
  members as well as
• the outside source (message/text)
• the nature of the communication was seen as
  inherently manipulative in intent
• in the end, a pejorative connotation came to be
  applied to this type of social formation.

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The Active vs. Passive Audience Debate

• Original meaning of concepts
• The passive audience as shift in participatory
  mode from interaction to concern with content
• Eventually assumes negative connotations based of
  the fear of effects and the docile subject.
• Has been rethought in terms of uses and
  gratification theory.

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Uses and Gratification Theory

• Uses and gratification theory challenges the
  assumptions of the passive nature
• of the audience consumption of mass media texts
  in mass society.
• It proposes that the viewer actively participates
  in the production of meaning as
• well as deriving a variety of pleasures and other
  necessary emotional uses from
• their relationship with texts.
• Uses and gratification theory is based on several
  assumptions, including
• the intentionality of texts, their modes of
  construction and the subjective
• nature of intertextual signifying relationships
  (against the purely
• transmissive model).
• the idea that the media reflects the lifeworld
• the universality of human experience
• the primacy of the appeal to emotions (Plato vs
  Aristotle) and the possibility of
• oppositional responses to dominant meanings.

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Uses and Gratification Theory

• To be amused
• To see authority figures exalted or deflated
• To experience the beautiful
• To share experience with other
• To satisfy curiosity and be informed
• To identify with the deity and the divine plan
• To find distraction and diversion
• To experience empathy
• To experience extreme emotions without guilt
• To find models to imitate
• To gain identity

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Uses and Gratification Theory

• To gain information about the world
• To reinforce belief in justice
• To reinforce belief in romantic love
• To reinforce belief in magic, the marvelous, the
  miraculous
• To see others make mistakes
• To see order imposed on the world
• To participate vicariously in history
• To be purged of unpleasant emotions
• To obtain outlet for sexual drives in a
  guilt-free context
• To explore taboo subjects with impunity
• To experience the ugly
• To affirm moral, spiritual and cultural values
• To see villain in actions

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The Creation of Niche Markets

• Audience remains insular
• Part of re-feudalization process without
  oversight transparency and accountability
• Brings about the privatization of public
  space
• Still operates according to the logic of
  commercialized culture industry
• Transmissive model
• Top-down hierarchy
• Professionalized communication
• New technologies and concentration allow for
  niche message to replace mass message with
  same effect.

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The Audience as Market

• members are seen as aggregate of individual
  consumers
• size and limits are defined primarily through
  economic criteria
• there exists no necessary relationship between
  members of a given market or demographic, save
  for patterns of consumption and socioeconomic
  status
• there are no social or normative relations with
  the mediated text
• there is no conscious awareness of membership or
  identity as part of a given audience
• this formation does not provide the basis for
  continuity and is thus considered highly unstable
  at the individual level
• research interests focus only on size of
  membership and individual patterns of
  consumption.

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Media Models - Market and Public Sphere
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A typology of Mass Media Audience Formation
The conception of the audience which proposes
society as the source and focuses on the receiver
of the mass mediated message is divided into the
social group, understood as the general public,
and the gratification set which is based on
personal need and desire.
In considering the media as the source
responsible for audience formations, we can
distinguish between an orientation to content
referred to as fan group or taste culture at the
micro level and an affinity for a particular
channel or medium at the macro level.
Society as Source
Media as Source
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Audience Research tradition

• The structural approach
• The behavioural approach
• The socio-cultural tradition

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Traditions in Audience Research
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