Media Audience Behavior

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Media Audience Behavior

• Introduction

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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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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

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How do we distinguish between active and passive
audiences?

• Which viewers work?
• What kind of work do they do?

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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 todays audiences be defined as either one or
  the other?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Forms of AudiencesSimple

• Immediacy, localized, ceremonial Distance
  between performer and audience
• Superstars and star texts
• Active decoding, passive behavior
• Performed in spaces / closed between shows
• Public

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Forms of AudienceMass

• 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

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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

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Forms of AudiencesDiffused

• 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

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Viewing Metaphor

• Football in America

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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

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A manipulator of time

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

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A socialized agent

• Teaches us how to get along in society - roles
  and rules
• Emphasizes specialization
• About containment and breaking free

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Opposition to boring baseball

• 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

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Alternative to religion

• FOOTBALL
• Superstars
• Sunday games
• Ticket
• Complex plays
• Coaches
• Stadium
• Fans
• Beer/hotdogs

• RELIGION
• Saints
• Sunday services
• Offerings
• Theology
• Clergy
• Church
• Congregation
• Wine/eucharist

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Capitalist enterprise

• Diverts peoples 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

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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?