3P18 - AUDIENCE BLOG #1
Greetings, audience member. While I have your captive attention for the remainder of what amounts to as my first ever blog post, I wish to provide personal reflection on the discourses and recent events pertaining to the examination of audiences.
There are almost endless definitions of 'audience', such as this one from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/audience : a. A group of viewers or listeners of a work of art or entertainment, especially those present at a performance.
John Sullivan's "Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power" posits that there are two primary conceptions of audience. First is the "Information-Based" audience, which focuses on the relation between the sending of a message and the content of the message itself. This, of course, is similar to Shannon & Weaver's model of communication, stating that every act of communication involves a sender and a receiver (the audience) through some sort of channel. In the space between sending an receiving, there is always some sort of noise (whether physical static, for example, or subjective (mis)interpretation) which affects the message in minute or major ways, depending on the pervasiveness of the noise. Sullivan also references the "Meaning-Based View" of audience, whereby the communication between the sender and the receiver of a message is continuous, and since any number of factors can affect and change the message, the message itself is de-emphasized over the interpretation of the message (however false or correct it may be) by the receiving audience.
Please take a moment to watch, in whatever amount you desire, this video:
There are multiple audiences here residing along a endlessly variably spectrum of passivity or active standing. The riot police themselves are an audience, witnessing and the anarchistic rebellion of displeased Greeks. The rioters are audience members as well. Some are more violent and active than others, physically attacking the police, whereas many function more as bystanders - bystanders who, through the psychological shift to a 'mob mentality' may be assured, simply through observation, that a more aggressive stance must be adopted. The individuals who decided to record video evidence are audience members who made a choice to remain behind the lens of a visual capturing device rather than participate in any other way that the people on screen are behaving (at least for the time they are recording and observing). Perhaps most interesting is that we, an audience across the Pacific Ocean, in a continentally and culturally divided country are able to view the event with as much verisimilitude as anyone else who views the video. Activists across the world may - and do - respond by sending relief funds. This type of aid has a much greater chance of materializing when one is able to observe the event through a temporally continuous visual medium as opposed to, say, news print. Still, there are others who perhaps formed prejudice against the Greeks, deeming them 'animalistic' or 'uncivilized', based on the brief and insufficient documentation of a profoundly complex issue.
As you can see, audiences are not simply 'one thing or the other', in truth. Definitions invariably must simplify and condense the identification of anything to a quickly digestible bit of text. This isn't enough, but if I were to offer a modestly satisfactory description of 'audience', it would be something along the lines of: "Those who, on a conscious or unconscious level, absorb, and therefore participate in, the reception of some sort of communicated information".
This definition, I believe, exists outside of time. Audience conventions, reception, and behaviour has changed a great deal through my life time. When I was born, the internet was not yet commonplace in every home. Television, radio, and news print were the primary sources of media reception - and individual response to the any of these outlets proved to be incredibly difficult; there was no reciprocity. Audiences were, to no fault of their own, more naive and less involved with the production or criticism of media texts. Now, due to the internet and the privilege of 'net neutrality', there is a far greater deal of reciprocity. Audiences are now able to transcend the 'barrier of reception', and respond, criticize, or make demands of the Senders.
Here is a passage from Press & Livingstone's article regarding audience research in the age of newer, more complex forms of media. I believe that it encapsulates the importance of both what it is directly addressing (audience research) and the indirect function of audiences within technologically complex media frameworks:
In an age of new information and communication media, why persist with a theory developed in
the age of mass broadcasting? The reason is, primarily, that we find huge existing strengths in
theory, method and findings. These strengths are essentially two-fold, together accounting for the
recent successes of audience research:
-
(a) the introduction of the ethnographic tradition into the field of media and communications
– the advantages of this work include its interdisciplinarity, the richness of its data and
insights, its ability to integrate the study of text and viewer, contextualization, and the
development of a critical tradition of media studies, particularly in integration with a
program of empirical studies; and
- (b) the substantive arguments developed within audience research and their critical intervention into theories of dominant media power, which are largely based in either or both of political economy and textual studies, theories including the theory of media imperialism, globalization discussions, etc.
An interesting "scandal", and subsequent audience criticism that has recently arisen is the Volkswagen emissions disingenuity. The German car company was recently discovered to have long been hiding an insidious software feature that tunes the engine function to a more 'environmentally sound' output during emissions testing, which then of course disengages to a less efficient and more polluting function after testing. Here is a link to the article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/volkswagen-has-made-a-fool-of-its-customers-with-emissions-scandal/article26463892/
Volkswagen has made no attempt to deny the allegations, and in fact has pulled the culprit models from distribution in both the United States and Canada. This, in part, is due to the strong criticism received not only from the press, and government environmental protection agencies, but from angry Volkswagen owners who publicly express their contempt and feelings of betrayal on forums, news comment sections, and social media. This "scandal" is a perfect example of how a modern audience can immediately receive, critique, and distribute/contribute their opinion (which quickly becomes a mass consensus) to reform or address an issue.
Thank you. You may now relinquish your attention.
