MACS 110 | Introduction to Mass Communication Theory

                Week 10        -back to MACS 110 weekly-             translate  

Developments in Audience Theory - Questions for Consideration

Some of the following questions address you, as an audience member, in order to attempt to tie audience theory into practice.

Explain the difference between source-dominated and audience-centred theory.  Which of the two is linked with the uses and gratifications model ?

What are some of the gratifications you gain from media ?  How do you make media content serve your expectations ?

To what extent are you consciously aware of having been conditioned by mass media ?

Differentiate between media uses and media functions (aims/goals of the media industry).  How might media uses subvert media functions ?

In addition to 'Surveillance of the Environment,' the other three classic functions of mass media are:  Correlation of Parts of Society;  Transmission of Social Heritage; and Entertainment.  How does your use of the same media fit into these four categories ?

What might be some negative effects of media that are unintended functions ?

How might some media strategies backfire ?

Provide examples of how interactivity, demassification, and asynchronicity apply to use of the Internet.

Have you engaged in "semiotic disobedience" ?  If so, how ?

How might moderate effects theory be related to cultivation theory ?

Provide significant examples of each of the following types of media effects: cognitive, affective, and behavioural.

Explain the significance of each of the following:

  • Information-Processing Theory - including the importance of selective perception
  • Entertainment Theory - as it relates to mood management theory, in particular the concepts of: excitatory potential; absorption potential; semantic affinity; and hedonic valence
  • Social Marketing Theory - including: the possible role of opinion leaders, and the creation of an integrated communications strategy

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Media and Audiences

Barthes argues that the meaning of a text is inscribed by the audience who essentially re-write it.  Barthes argues that in effect the reader becomes an author, rendering the creator of the text as good as dead - hence the title the ‘Death of the Author’.

Stuart Hall also argues that the meaning of a text is negotiated in its reception by the audience.   Hall looks at the way in which cultural interaction generates consent for hegemony – the dominant ideology of the ruling class.  What insights can Hall's framework of preferred, oppositional, and negotiated readings provide in understanding the polysemic nature of media audiences ?  What are some of the cultural filters that affect interpretation ?

Style is political - visual signifiers encode systems of belief.  It's not popular culture - it's corporate culture. 

Does the economic structure of both the movie and music industries, for example, make their products formulaic ?  Does this industrialization of media content undermine innovation in that creative talent is being undermined because of "lowest common denominator programming ?"  Is our culture made up of  the cheap and the imitative, or, as Fredric Jameson puts it, ". . . the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past ?"  Rather than creative production, are we constantly sold creative reproduction ?  Henri Lefebvre calls this the "increasing primacy of the neo."   Was Robert Pitman, who turned the music industry's free promotion videos into MTV, correct  when he said, "what entertains the masses is not so much originality as adroit repackaging of the familiar."  Frith and Horn refer to this process as "the reduction of art to the vacuous routines of mechanical reproduction."  How much of a factor in movie production is the merchandising of related products such as toys, bedding, bags, trading cards, action figures, computer games, and dvds ?  How much does the 'star system' affect movie production ?  Is it a valid argument to say that media corporations are just giving the public the movies and music it  wants  ? 

These documentaries address how style is encoded into products aimed at youth:  | The Persuaders | Merchants of Cool  |  Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (Part One)

SRI Consulting Business Intelligence -- An SRI International Business Partner

 

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