The media are nothing without an audience, but how do media professionals really know anything about their viewers, listeners, and readers? One of the features of modern industrial societies is that we are connected to huge numbers of people we don't see or know anything about; the mass media are in an extreme version of this situation.
Read this online lecture, called "The Mystery of the Audience" to get an introduction to this situation, and to see how it functions in the case of broadcast ratings.
If the TV industry seems to wish that the audience would sit still and allow themselves to be easily counted, new technologies from remote control to digital video seem to be encouraging the audience to take a much more active role.
Read the following three articles about people doing things with media that seem to trouble traditional ways of doing things from the New York Times:
- Amy Harmon, "Star Wars' Fan Films Come Tumbling Back to Earth," New York Times, April 28, 2002
- Marshall Sella, "The Remote Controllers," New York Times, October 20, 2002
- Warren St. John, "Why Tivo Owners Can't Shut Up," New York Times, April 20, 2003
Post at least one comment or question about these readings by 6:00 pm June 22, and at least one response to someone else's posting by midnight June 22.
Next, read MediaMaking, Chapter 9, "Consuming the Media." There are many concepts here useful to understanding the character and activities of the audience. While you read, look for answers to the following questions:
- What is the encoding/decoding model and what are preferred, oppositional, and negotiated meanings?
- What are the assumptions of functionalist approaches to the audience?
- How do anonymous, institutional, and family relations influence the sociology of media consumption?
- What are fans, fashions, and subcultures, and how do they matter to media consumption?
Post an answer to at least one of these questions by 6:00 pm June 23rd, and a response to someone else's post by midnight of the same day.
Finally, there are larger trends of measurement of people using new technologies that have been developing for about 20 years. Read the article by Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., "Tracking the Audience," Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., (from John Downing, Ali Mohammadi, and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi (eds.), Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction, Newbury Park: Sage, 1990, pp. 166-179) in which he sounds a cautionary note about the impact of "surveillance" on democracy.
Do you think Gandy is right? Post a response to Gandy's article by midnight on June 24.