Media Audience Final

Semiotics

Semiotics

De Saussure

Connections between signs and referents are always changing

Structuration Theory

Giddens

Any type of social behavior reproduced over time

• Agency

• Power

• Structure

Foucault’s Panopticon

A Surveillance Panopticon

Corporal Punishments to Disciplinary Punishments

• Poster: technologies could create a “superpanopticon”

• Andrejevic: internet creates lateral surveillance (peer to peer monitoring)

Technological Advances

Printing Press

Internet

Social Media

Cultivation Theory

Gerbner

The more you watch something, the more likely you are to believe it

• Intoxification

• Scalability

Audience Models

Audience as Outcome

Audience as Mass

Audience as Agent

Audience as Outcome

Audience is captive and must listen

Audience as Mass

Rhetor must gain audience attention and keep it

Audience as Agent

Audience has a choice in what they can consume

Two Schools

Frankfurt and Birmingham

Frankfurt School

Marxist

Culture Industry/control and subjugate

Birmingham School

Decoding media and social class

Convergence

media content to be displayed on any number of devices

Digitalization

translating media into digital code

Modes of Surveillance from the Panopticon

Poster - “intrusive surveillance”

Andrejevic - “lateral surveillance”

Taxonomic Collective

Ang

A mass undifferentiated group that only has spectatorship in common

Blind Spot

Smythe

We (consumers) become a part of the capitalist system; “audiences are commodities - perform labor for advertisers”

Source Credibility (Limited Effect Theory)

Trusting a source as credible

Consistency Theory (Limited Effect Theory)

drive for cognitive consistency is key motivator for all human behavior

Cognitive Dissonance (Limited Effect Theory)

need for consistency is so great that individual will rationalize their actions to resolve inconsistencies

Selective Perception (Limited Effect Theory)

process of reentering the words to match previously held beliefs

Selective Exposure (Limited Effect Theory)

consciously avoiding messages that challenge your beliefs

Elaboration Likelihood Method (ELM) (Limited Effect Theory)

effects depend on individual’s motivation to process the message

• Central Processing - active engagement

• Peripheral Processing - cognitive shortcuts

Social Learning Theory (Long Term Effect: Violence)

Bandura

How children socialize

Hall

Encoding/Decoding

• Denotative: literal

• Connotative: contextualized

Intoxification (Long Term Effect: Social)

intoxication by too much information

Scalability (Long Term Effect: Social)

Social media increases negative emotions

Ontology of Audiences

Ontological Reality

• Sudy of what is/classified

• Audiences are constructed

• Audiences are situated

• Audiences are abstracted rather than objective realities

Fan Interactions

• Mary Sue

• Slashing

• Filking

Mary Sue Stories

Interting author like character

Slash Stories

Inserting an emotional/sexual relationship

Filking

creation of music/poetry

Polysemy

the ability of a media text to be interpreted differently by different viewers

Intertextuality

interdependence of all textual meaning upon the structure of meaning proposed by other texts

Textual Poaching

de Certeau

Reading and Making Interpretations

Petty Producer Model

Consumer-Enthusiast-Fan