Review of last class

• Mass audiences vs. niche audiences:
  • link between these 2
  • although we speak of smaller markets, the mass audience hasn’t disappeared (e.g. superbowl)
• (fragmentation of the audience?)
  • We don’t have fragmentation that is final and absolute. There are smaller markets, but still larger markets (see above)
• Passivity vs. activity
  • Uses and gratifications discusses media audience as individualistic. We won’t be talking about that. Instead, we’ll be talking about how audiences are active.
• Messages vs meanings
  • We don’t just take in messages; we also apply meanings and make sense of them
• Today’s lecture: audience reception
  • Audiences as consumers vs audiences as citizens
  • Audiences as object vs subject
  • Mass effects vs interpretation
  • Audience reception: meaning; genre; context

Review: fragmentation

• Different logos:
  • Started with ABC World of Sports, then ABC split to ESPN, ESPN Classics, and NFL Network for different niches

Magic bullet theory

• There’s one answer for everything – we won’t follow this

Hypodermic needle

• Everyone is getting the same message and getting it directly
• Inglis calls this S–>R model, “an idiotically simple idea”
• S: Stimulus—a message that gets sent to consumers who respond
• R: Response—audiences simply receive messages the way they are sent. There is no complication. Audiences are empty vessels that are simply filled with messages
  • The problem is that this model casts society as consumers. Essentially, audiences are meant to be controlled—typically by sending messages that they like to receive.
  • You give them what they want and audiences want to be entertained. So audiences aren’t viewed as citizens who are capable of individual thinking; rather it says that mass media satisfies base desires. There HAS to be something more than this as this model is far too simplistic.
  • It thinks of audiences in terms of effects. Do audiences respond the way we expect them to? Not really. How do we determine if their responses are the appropriate response?

The quest to see how people are ‘affected’ lead to the study of how people are effected

• People are affected, but we search for media effects. Media affects is the search for something (e.g. survey results) that can quantify how people can be effected.
• It’s the difference between viewing the audience as an object vs. audience as subject.
  • An object is acted upon, and a subject acts.
  • A subject is a thinking, acting agent. Hence, we will look at audiences as subjects. How do they act, how do they do things with the media; how do they make sense of it?

For Inglis, audiences are practical subjects making active use of the cultural expressions they find. (vs. being a coach potato, a mindless consumer: i.e. audience as an object).

• Audiences are meaning making entities.
• Cultural expressions: how people connect media to real life experiences.

Audiences in real life are “messy”—not like studying people in a controlled environment

• Problems with the Hawthrone Effect: when people are paid attention to, their productivity increases.
• Audiences tend to be inattentive: people don’t pay attention to every stimulus. However, if they are told of the stimulus, it will become more apparent. That’s what happened with the Hawthrone effect. They know they were being studied so they increased their productivity because that is what they were expected to do. When audiences know they are being studied, they tend to act differently.
• This is why Inglis called the S–>R model useless because it doesn’t take into account everything else.
  • Different media have different effects on us; the same media can have different effects
  • E.g. is television making children anorexic (distorted views of women) or making them obese (watching instead of playing)?
  • People shouldn’t be treated as things. We don’t automatically respond to stimuli. The object does not think about how it is supposed to respond to the stimulus (e..g a thermometer raises with it’s how and decreases when it’s cold); by contrast, people DO think. Thus, people aren’t just objects—they have an ability to think and act and thus, should be treated as subjects.
  • The same response likely won’t be repeated again by people. Water always boils at a certain temperature; but human beings are self reflexive.
• Audiences are not something to be measured at the end of a one-way process. Water stops boiling when removed from heat, but people, after watching a show, continue to think about it. Thus, media audiences are no involved in a one-way relationship. Audiences exist in a 2-way or multi-lane highway. This is what effects tends to lose out on. To understand if TV makes you thin or obese, you have to look at the self reflexive component. Humans can think about how they want to respond to it—they can think about how good a show is compared to last weeks show; determine if they want to be a fan; etc.
• Essentially, media aren’t just used to satisfy individual needs and goals (uses and gratifications model), but rather used to connect people to their wider culture around them.
  • If we’re bored we tune into material that can excite us; if lonely, we tune into things to make us happy

We should attend to modes of interpretation (Inglis)

• Which is to say, how messages and audiences fit together (and how audiences make messages fit in with their lives and experiences
  • Effects isolate individuals from the world around them.
  • Affects looks at your situation and how you interpret it to the world around you.
    • We need to pay attention to the process: that audiences and messages fit together.
    • We should look at how it makes audiences feel, why they interpret certain things as being good and enjoyable compared to others. What is the meaning of abstract art? How do you interpret what you see? à your interpretation of an abstract art piece will likely be different than another.

The direction we’re headed in next week (Inglis mentions Hall’s model)

• Interpretation usefully understood as decoding
• Messages are encoded for us and it’s up to us to decode them

We have to discover the balance between manipulation and expression

• Inglis talks about the idea of what we pay attention to? We have to pay attention to the balance of manipulation from one side and expression on the other.
• Manipulation: is someone controlling your every move? E.g. corporate interests, programming that wants us to act in a certain way
• Expression: people aren’t confined to act a certain way
• Audiences that are completely passive are manipulated; audiences that are complete active are expressive. Inglis says both are inaccurate. We can’t always express ourselves the way we want to.
• Example from Hockey All Star game. Vote Rory Fitzpatrick campaign: audiences voted in for essentially a ‘nobody’ rather than voting for who the NHL wanted to be at the game.

John Corner – reception & media audiences

• Reception can be broken down to examine the following questions
  • WHAT meanings audiences make of what they see, hear and read
  • WHY these meanings rather than others are produced by specific audiences from the range of interpretive possibilities
    • In a world where you can be exposed to so many things, why do you choose to be exposed to one thing and not another?
  • HOW these activities of meaning-making might relate to ideas about the power of media and their ability to shape public knowledge, sentiment and values
    • How media might shape public knowledge: John Corner distinguishes popular knowledge from popular culture. We traditionally view audiences in terms of popular culture, but why not view them in terms of public knowledge.
      • We always talk about negative effects, but what about good effects?
• Reception: three key things to pay attention to regarding audiences’ reception and interpretation of messages: 1) meaning, 2) genre, 3) context
• Meaning
  • How do we make sense of meaning?
  • Rather than looking for objective results, reception looks for subjective meanings
    • We’re not looking at objective facts like scientific studies; audience examination is a process of looking for subjective meanings—your meanings may be different than mines.
  • Audiences confront media as “texts”—not as discrete products or “works”
    • Meaning is not limited by authorial intent!
    • Think about texts vs work. Television and films are texts to be read by audiences. We read meanings into things.
    • As an author in media culture, you don’t make meanings alone. The producer cannot control the meanings. Meanings are rather created by producers of text in conjunction with their readers (e.g. the Flick Off campaign in Toronto)
    • The meaning of something is not fixed until audiences construct the meaning of texts. Authors create a message, but meanings aren’t limited to authorial intent. Audiences are involved in making meanings. Meaning is open to be received or rejected by audiences.
  • 3 different types of meaning:
    • Intra-textual (requiring analysis of textual structures): the text is not a fixed thing. There are different elements to messages. It looks at the relationship between the elements that make up the meaning of that particular text. What are the component parts of a message—how is it made?
      • Paying attention to the component parts of the text
      • What story is being told; who are the characters, what style is it.
      • Things that come out of the actual text itself.
      • Star Wars: the story of the rebels vs the empire; Luke Skywalker vs whoever. We understand the text based on what is presented to us.
    • Inter-textual (requiring analysis, among other things, of genres and relations between them): the relationship between one text to others. We’ve all been exposed to multiple messages, not because of what they say, but because of associations we have with them. Thus, sometimes we link one text with others.
      • Meaning is constructed by linking the text to others
      • Situating a “text’s meaning” in a wider field of meanings
      • Star Wars is not just the film. There are related films, books, video games, Lego and other toys, etc.
        • The intra-textual element leads us to make connections to other texts.
        • How do we make sense of Star Wars by associating it with other texts? How are meanings constructed by placing them in other texts? E.g. Family Guy episode on Star Wars
      • Inter-textual meanings don’t have to directly reference the original text. We can situate The Matrix with God, with other science fiction films, etc.
    • Interpretive (requiring research into the situation practice of ‘receptive’ understanding): how the situation in which you find yourself, the reality of where you are and what you’re thinking at that particular time
      • How do audiences situate the text into their own practices & understandings?
      • There are many ways people can interpret a text.
      • NOTE: obviously, interpretation can be inter-textual too.
  • 3 different levels of meaning:
    • Primary signification: what you recognize immediately when you experience a message; the literal meaning of the thing itself. Essentially, what you see.
    • Secondary signification: suggesting that there are secondary levels to this meaning. When you have an association with something, that’s secondary signification. When you see something and it makes you think of implications and associations of that text, it goes beyond the primary level. E.g. the White House at the primary level is that it’s a big white house; secondary is that the White House is the home of the president and if you don’t like the president, you think of something else.
    • Evaluation: after seeing it and thinking of secondary associations, you often evaluate it in terms of whether it’s good or whether it’s bad.
      • How audiences can attach a special significance to something.
  • Media is not a linear thing. We don’t go from primary to secondary to evaluation. Part of the reason for this is because media is inter-textual. We can associate something with multiple and various texts. We go through all these things all the time.
    • The reason for this is that meaning is polysemic: One word can have multiple meanings.
  • Despite a general textual ‘openness’—we cannot ignore that there is a considerable degree of DETERMINANCY possessed by texts
    • Media producers would like to determine what you think about their products.
    • We have to think of media audiences as the coming together of interpretive action and textual signification
      • Audiences act, think and interpret. Producers have, at their disposal, signification. Producers want to signify certain things. Corner talks about texts and what they want to signify. Inglis talked about manipulation/expression; Corner discusses this in interpretation/signification
      • Metaphor: we make structures/buildings and then we live in them. So our freedom is confined with what we built. We can make meanings but we can only respond to what is given to us.
• Genre: social situation—this lecture room is a genre (stadium seating, non-moving chairs)
  • Disco vs. Folk? Both are types of music. Recognizing that a song is in a certain genre leads you to expect certain things.
  • Why do you find one more meaningful than the other?
    • Answer could be pleasure: one allows you to have a certain experience.
  • Genre is one way of organizing meanings.
• Context—our experiences are never context free. We are always in a ‘con-text’.
  • For audiences to make sense of something—to make it meaningful, it has to be socially situated. It has to be placed in a particular context
  • A context is a situation that can be described by discussing other texts. It is the relationship between one text and another. We exist within a national context, in a social context. Do you drink to get drunk? Do you drink for other purposes?
  • There are 2 types of context:
    • Social relations of viewing: we pay less attention to what is viewed and more to how it’s viewed and where it’s viewed
      • Objective variables: who are you? What is the context in which you exist? Are you male/female? How old are you? What class are you in?
      • Subjective factors: your knowledge of a certain genre can change; some audiences are experts, others are neophytes;
    • Space time settings: what we traditionally associate with context. We are in the lecture hall at the moment—our physical context.
      • Where are you at a particular time, at a particular place? Basically, it is the location. You may watch a TV show at home, at a friend’s house; you may watch a hockey game on TV at home, in a bar, or at the actual stadium. The location will change the nature of the experience.

Corner says you need to pay attention to Meaning, Genre, and Context in order to make sense of someone’s experience

Review:

• The audience can certainly interpret media content
• But the audience’s power is not so large and wide-ranging that it trumps the power of the media: you have the power to interpret but the media has the power to package certain things for delivery—you can accept/reject, but you do so as a receiver
• Similarly, audiences don’t have any instinctive ability to resist most of what they see or hear in the media
• There are questions of communicative form; and then there are questions of interpretive activity
  • To fully understand audiences, we should look at both. We can’t just look at the context, we need to look at the dynamic relationship between the 2.