MED4107 New Media and Photography | Week 7 | Conceptualising the Audience

Conceptualising the Audience Reading Response

Long and Wall (2012) talk about what an audience is, who creates them, propaganda, manipulating audiences, and moral panics in this weeks reading. Ettema and Whitney (1994) also talk about these subjects. I am going to discuss their ideas on who produces audiences, and propaganda.

Long and Wall (2012) defines audience as “an anonymous and variable collective of individuals addressed, as a group and as individuals, by organs of ‘mass’ media communication.”

Audiences can be seen as “the product of effective outcome of the planning and marketing strategies of media organisations” Long and Wall (2012). Media organisations create audiences by addressing and positioning us as a member of a group, and we simultaneously share our experience of engaging with the media (Long and Wall 2012). Media organisations produce audiences so that they can convey a message and make revenue, as Long and Wall (2012) say: “the measurement and conceptualisation of the who, what and why of audiences is vital to the business of media, in order that they might be delivered to advertisers”.  Ettema and Whitney (1994) also talk about this, as they say “audiences have an economic value… commercial media must be allowed to create and sell audiences if the media are to exist”.

Media scholars also produce audiences, however I don’t think they directly produce audiences in a way that they provide media products to them.

Sometimes, the audience can be seen as a ‘victim’. This is known as propaganda, and is defined by Long and Wall (2012) as “the intentional, conscious and active process of managing or manipulating information and ideas to achieve effects of a political or social nature”. Ettema and Whitney (1994) say how audiences can be “easily exposed to programming that may not be in their own best interest” and that the media “can cultivate an appetite for vulgar, hateful or trivial programming”. 

I agree with what has been said, however in a western world the media is more regulated than it used to be, and negative and vulgar propaganda is not around so much (in other countries in the east, propaganda is still used a lot as some countries are cut off from worldwide media). This makes me think about my personal media interests, which is new media and specifically social networks. As the internet is difficult to regulate, propaganda is easier to come about.

For further research I would like to research how propaganda on social media sites produces audiences. What would be interesting to look at would be ISIS propaganda, which targets people to fight for ISIS – and this is usually found on the Internet. The methodology I would choose is virtual ethnography, as this will allow me to observe content online, analyse it and then look at how it produces audiences, by looking at the audience’s responses online. I could also use focus groups or interviews, but it could be difficult to talk to someone who supports ISIS, and they might not be willing to talk.

References

Ettema, J. and Whitney, D., ed. (1994) Audiencemaking: how the media create the audience. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

Long, P. and Wall, T. (2012) Media studies: texts, production, context. 2nd edn. Oxon: Taylor & Francis.