MEDIA 1 WEEK 8 1. CONSIDERING FANDOM/AUDIENCES 2. JEREMY BOWTELL - ROUGH CUT / FINE CUT A T T E N T I O N

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1 MEDIA 1 WEEK 8 1. CONSIDERING FANDOM/AUDIENCES 2. JEREMY BOWTELL - ROUGH CUT / FINE CUT A T T E N T I O N

2 TEXTUAL ATTENTION BBC Planet Earth II - iguana vs snakes TEXTUAL ATTENTION The question is how texts establish relations with their readers as well as representations of whatever their subject matter might be. JOHN HARTLEY 1999: 493

3 ATTENTION & AUDIENCES What about the audience? A context and case study: Television Audiences from Broadcast to Post- Broadcast Era Early theorisations of the mass audience Active Audience theories Fans and Fandom The People Formerly Known as the Audience WHO CARES ABOUT AUDIENCES AND THE KINDS OF ATTENTION THEY GIVE TO MEDIA? Advertisers Commercial broadcasters, cable networks etc Production houses and individual program makers Government policy makers Social scientist/psychologists Cultural theorists/media scholars

4 CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF AUDIENCES/ CONSUMERS from broadcasting to narrowcasting? from citizens to consumers? BROADCAST TO POST-BROADCAST KEY DEBATES changes in: -television institutions/major players -technologies of production, distribution and consumption CHARACTERISTICS OF A POST- BROADCAST ERA -audience practices/ conceptualisations -aesthetic sensibilities

5 Post-Broadcast paradigm ->imagining the audience differently FROM THE IDIOT BOX 4 CORNERS (ABC) Type a quote here. JOHNNY APPLESEED broadcast paradigm F R O M G L U E D T O T H E T E L LY ( )

6 EARLY THEORISATIONS OF AUDIENCE MEDIA EFFECTS THEORY Media effects theory: anxiety/suspicion re TV s power audience is passive / manipulated/ brainwashed lab experiments, focus groups, playground observations

7 IDEAS OF MASS CULTURE & MASS AUDIENCES -Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts. -T. ADORNO & M. HORKHEIMER, THE CULTURE INDUSTRY (1963) IDEAS OF MASS CULTURE & MASS AUDIENCES There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses... a way of seeing people which has become characteristic of our kind of society... [a way of seeing that] has been capitalised for the purposes of cultural or political exploitation. -R. WILLIAMS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY (1963)

8 CHALLENGING THOSE EARLIER ACCOUNTS OF MEDIA AUDIENCES THEORISING THE ACTIVE AUDIENCE A reception studies tradition in media/cultural/television studies has focused on audiences and how they read /make sense of texts. - some key early academic texts for television studies Stuart Hall s encoding/decoding model (1980) David Morley, The Nationwide Audience (1980) Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (1984) Ien Ang, Watching Dallas (1985)

9 THEORISING THE ACTIVE AUDIENCE ACKNOWLEDGES complexity of viewing activity cultural competencies sociocultural context of viewing RESEARCHING AUDIENCE PRACTICES

FANDOM FANS [are] often stereotyped and pathologised as cultural Others - as obsessive, freakish, hysterical, infantile and regressive social subjects.

10 FANDOM FANS [are] often stereotyped and pathologised as cultural Others - as obsessive, freakish, hysterical, infantile and regressive social subjects. Pop culture s take on fandom has typically been one of distaste and critique, with fans emotional attachments to media texts and celebrities being viewed as irrational... - M.Hills (2007)

11 Fan cultures are a problem for legitimate culture because of their insistence on muddying boundaries - treating mass culture texts as if they deserved the same attention as canonical/high culture texts... FANS FANS Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers (1992) key early text on television fandom the term fan - has never quite escaped earlier connotations of religious and political zealotry, false belief, orgiastic excess, possession, and madness a scandalous category - fans disrupt established taste distinctions raise crucial issue of critical distance (the bourgeois norm) vs emotional involvement with the text Jenkins - an interest in characterising fans as active producers and manipulators of meaning notion of fans as textual poachers - exercising agency in finding pleasure in aspects of the text that are not necessarily valued by producers/ those with institutional training

12 FANS emergence of participatory culture and interactive practices on the part of audiences due to: -new technologies -subcultures promoting DIY ethic (prosumers) -changes in media industries/products requiring more active modes of spectatorship internet as a new knowledge space (Levy s idea of collective intelligence ) knowledge culture meets fan culture (fans and producers interacting) H. JENKINS (2006) THIS WEEK S READING The Night of a Thousand Wizards (2010) HENRY JENKINS

13 FANS Online fan communities: concerned with interpretative activity as well as affective connections often activist in the sense of lobbying to keep their series on air sites of creativity - often involved in extending the original textual world and the possible meanings generated (e.g. slash fiction) sites where individuals demonstrate their competencies (a form of distinction/pop cult literacy), but also to make this expertise more broadly available H. JENKINS (2006) FANS Have fannish modes of engagement become mainstreamed/normalised/economically exploited in contemporary culture? [Especially in relation to those genres/forms that previously had operated around the expectation of a critically distanced spectator/audience?] A crucial part of the people formerly known as the audience?

14 PORTLANDIA (2012) - ONE MOORE EPISODE

15 THE PEOPLE FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE AUDIENCE from two quite different perspectives THE PEOPLE FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE AUDIENCE the relatively recent transformation of media (consumption, production, dissemination, networking) blurring of established boundaries between producers and consumers ->increase in UGC (user-generated content), produsers, prosumers

16 MEDIA-CONSUMER-SURVEY-2014/INDEX.HTM THE PEOPLE FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE AUDIENCE TOM PIKE, VIDEO RESPONSE TO JAY ROSEN POST, FOR INTEGRATED MEDIA 2

17 The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we re here. JAY ROSEN

KANZ BROADBAND SUMMIT DIGITAL MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES DIGITAL CONTENT INITIATIVES Kim Dalton Director of Television ABC 3 November 2009

KANZ BROADBAND SUMMIT DIGITAL MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES DIGITAL CONTENT INITIATIVES Kim Dalton Director of Television ABC 3 November 2009 We live in interesting times. This is true of many things but especially