M87MCMedia Audiences Mafalda Stasi
Today:Module IntroductionContent OverviewLecture
Module introduction
Module Objectives
Critically examine theories and conceptualisations of ‘the audience’
Position reception studies within media and cultural studies
Understand how different media texts address audiences
Understand how specific audiences engage with media texts
Syllabus
Spring Break
Week Date Topic
1 24 Jan Introduction
2 31 Jan Subcultural audiences
3 7 Feb Adoring audiences
4 14 Feb Spectating audiences
5 21 Feb Screening
6 28 Feb Audiences and Gender
7 7 Mar Audiences and Sexuality
8 14 Mar Audiences and Ethnicity
9 21 Mar Intersectional Audiences
10 18 Apr Recap
11 25 Apr Tutorials
Logistics
Weekly Thu 5-6.30 pm ET130
Attendance is mandatory
Materials, readings, assignments:
• http://mafaldastasi.com/teaching/postgraduate/m87mc-media-audiences
• Moodle http://moodle.coventry.ac.ukM87MC – final hand-in AD055 – general info for postgrads
Assessment
A 3.000 words academic essay– Due date 2nd May– Pass mark is 40%
Hand-in via Moodle AND paper copy
LATE SUBMISSION = MARK OF ZERO AND RESITNO SUBMISSION = NO RESIT = NO DEGREE
Serious and documented problem? You may request an extension before the due date
Essay TopicPick a media text of your choice, and analyse it in detail using one of the theories discussed in the module. Your essay should:
– problematise the notion of ‘audience’– examine specific and relevant media-audience inter-
relationships– critically analyse literature, sources and media texts relevant
to the topic– demonstrate a critically informed awareness of the historical
development of ‘audience’ as a concept– demonstrate an informed understanding of the evolution of
your chosen theories and models relating to ‘audience’ and critically evaluate these perspectives
– demonstrate the ability to present your interpretations, findings and arguments in an manner appropriate to the context
In order to succeed
Take ACTIVE charge of your learning by:Reading materials assignedCompleting all assignments Being prepared to discuss your workEngaging in class activitiesAsking questions!
Respect yourself and others by:Attending all classesArriving on time or earlyListening to other people’s contributionWorking collaboratively
Resources
• Library – http://ils.coventry.ac.uk/
• Google Scholar – http://scholar.google.com
• Moodle– http://moodle.coventry.ac.uk
• Centre for Academic Writing – http://www.coventry.ac.uk/caw/
• Harvard Reference System – http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/caw/cuhrs/Pages/CU
HarvardReferenceStyle.aspx
Academic Honesty
Your work should always be yours. We do not want you to repeat what other people said on a given topic, or even worse, copy their words into your written work.
We want to hear what you think—what your analysis can contribute to the sum total of knowledge.
Penalties for academic dishonesty range from a mark of zero to being excluded from the University
Introductions
Your name and nationality
What modules have you taken or will take
One interesting thing about yourself
Activity
On the sheets provided, write down: – Your name– What do you know about audiences?– What would you like to know about
audiences?
When you’re done, hand your paper in
Content Overview
Part 1: I watch therefore I FEEL
Emotions and feelings
• The audience-text relationship is intensely emotional
• We all display various types of attachment and feelings for a text
• This passionate relationship is not simply individual, but socially determined
Part 1: I watch therefore I AM
Identity
• The way we watch a text helps us determine and understand who we are
• Who we are influences how we read a text
• A text may address or target a specific audience
• A specific audience category may read texts in different ways
All-powerful media
All-powerful audience
Where are you in the audience-text continuum?
Stand up and arrange yourselves in a line according to what you think of the balance of power between audience and media
Activity: stand up for your case
…Don’t sit back yet!
Activity: forming groups
You will be assigned a number. Keep it in mind!
Now, look for all the people with the same number as you: they are your group
Lecture:Cultural StudiesReception StudiesAudience Studies
Culture is the texts and practices of everyday life
Culture is a terrain of ideological struggle over meaning and hegemony
“an arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured.”
The Discipline of Cultural Studies
Raymond Williams
Who decides what is culture?
Traditional working class practices are a legitimate cultural expression
“Culture is Ordinary” (1958)
[popular film] “weekly serves the leisure of twenty-five million British adults, and
which deals well or badly, but at least with great emotive power, with the values of man and society” (Williams, 1993: 186)
Stuart Hall
1969 – 1976 Director of the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)
How do we interrogate and interact with the text?
We negotiate social and cultural meaning situationally, in a cycle of “encoding and decoding”
Creation and interpretation of texts, or encoding and decoding are “linked but distinctive moments -
production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction”
(Hall 1980: 128)
Angela McRobbie
Gendered audiences: who are we still ignoring? Whose texts and
whose modes of interaction are devalued?
We need to study the intersection of gender, culture and social change
Are girls, in fact, for reasons which we could discover, really not active or present in youth sub-cultures? Or
has something in the way this kind of research is done rendered them invisible?
(McRobbie and Garber 1975: 209)
The roots of Cultural Studies
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”
Ideology: “a body of ideas and practices which seek to defend the prevailing structures of power by actively promoting the values and interests of the dominant groups in society” (Storey 1999: 28)
Ideology and Domination
For Marx, ideology is the intellectual arm of oppression
Top-down, dualistic view of power relations
Antonio Gramsci
the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (57)
Hegemony: social and cultural leadership to maintain power through consensus, agreement and persuasion
Hegemonic ideologies are pervasive, invisible, taken for granted
Oppression is a cooperative achievement
Hegemony“Consent must beconstantly won and rewon, for people's material social experienceconstantly reminds themof the disadvantages ofsubordination and thusposes a threat to the dominant class...
Hegemony... posits a constant contradictionbetween ideology and the social experience of the subordinate that makesthis interface into aninevitable site ofideological struggle”(Fiske 1992: 291).
Reception Studies: Focus on Audiences
‘We must get away from the habit of thinking in terms of what the media do to people and substitute for it the idea of what people do with the media’. (Halloran, 1970)
‘Audience’ is not an absolute concept, because it cannot
exist outside a communication
situation—audience is a construct derived
from the context
The Audience is an Illusion“There is no stable entity which we can isolate and identify as the media audience, no single object that is unproblematically ‘there’ for us to observe and analyse.
The plural, audiences, is preferable—denoting several groups divided by their reception of different media and genres, or by social and cultural positioning—yet even this term presents conceptual difficulties.” (Moores 1993: 1)
“Audience is, most of all, a discursive construct producedby a particular analytic gaze”(Alaatusari 1999: 6)
Having established that “audiences” don’t exist, we can now move on to study empirical instances of people watching stuff
… MORE NEXT WEEK!
Readings
Hall, S. (1980) “Encoding/decoding.” In Hall, S. et al., eds., Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson. (128–38)
Miller, T. (2001) “What it Is and What it Isn’t: Introducing… Cultural Studies.” in A Companion to Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell. (1-19)
All readings available on my blog, unless otherwise stated
For Next Week
Refer to the assigned readings:
– As a group, choose the three most important points the readings make, and come to class next week ready to discuss them. You will be asked to present these point formally.
– Individually, make a list of points you found unclear, and post them as a comment to this entry.
QUESTIONS?