exam 1 media audieces study guide

Media/ Insinuate listen and monitor mass audiences they keep track of them through surveys, public opinions polls, media ratings, marketing analytics etc. How the audience likes/ dislikes your media

Example: Presidents approval rating A/ B test in digital marketing 

Used by: Private companies & public insinuate

Audience- as - mass

Audience as outcome definition

Model that shows the strong influence of powerful media on it’s audience (does media use cause strong effects on individuals).

• What os the audience doing as a response to your movie?

• social scientist 

Audience as agent Definition

 Model that emphasizes audience “ selecting a specific media so acquire their/ meet their own needs and desires, Then interpreting that media based off of their own personal experience. 

• How the audience interprets your media from their presumptive

Used by: Scholars in media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, etc

Greek theater audiences

Explanation: It was a mass event with thousand of citizens coming together, the energy was pretty interactive, and rowdy, helped exercise the audience's civic participation by having them be educated and involved in debates.

Who could attend: Mostly Privileged male citizens, sometimes women, interesting bonuses the government sometimes would pay for poor citizens to attend. 

1. Audiences after the invention of the printing press 

1. Audiences started to exist in solitude through book reading

2. More members of the general public became audiences

• Because the number of books went up, the literacy rate of europe went up having audienceship of books be spread from elite to now the general public.

• Audience members were able to read books by themselves, at any time, at any place.

1. Structure

• Established social relationships that reproduce over time, is made to maintain the status quo which contains and enables certain types of behaviors among curtain groups.

Example: Social institutions like church, school system, or organizational order, cultural norms like rules and laws 

1. agency

•  Being able to freely makes decisions and take actions to reach the goals of ones personal desires or beliefs, is made to alter or reproduce social structures 

Example: Social activist groups, citizen media, user generated content, fan fiction 

Media panics

( reaction against a new type of median) 

•  Moral panic spread much of early media effects research 

Moral panics

• strong reaction to spread of new social behavior or phenomena

Gemeinschaft

(Community)Most close to family and friends will not rely much on media influence 

1. Gesellschaft

(“Society”) Less connetion of friends and family easily/ heavily influenced by the media 

1. Mass society theory

1. Emphasized the direct influence of media on an individual, as their ties to families, communities, etc. are cut off 

1. The Payne Fund studies (a collection of a dozen studies)

1. Mixed results in terms of how strong the effects of films on individuals were; some studies report strong effects, others did not ( could not find a clear pattern)

• Surveys, experiments, interview involved children/youth on the effects of movies such a physical. Emotional impacts, effects on attitudes/ beliefs, factual learning, etc

1. The War of the Worlds radio broadcast and Hadley Cantril’s study

• What the study did: Survey and interviews that sought to understand how many people panicked and why, as well as seeing why some individuals panicked an others didn't.

• Highlighted the specific characteristics of the audience such as being paranoid, and their proximity to Princeton, NJ

1. World War I propaganda and the Committee on Public Information (CPI)

1. was established to 1) rally public support for the U.S. involvement in the war and 2) demonize the enemy

• They did this by managing information environment as well as manipulating symbols or psychology

Who created CPI?

George Creel’s

1. World War II propaganda and Why We Fight films

1. These films were only effective at expanding soldiers’ knowledge about the war, NOT effective at changing their attitudes towards allies or motivating them to fight in the war

The Personal Influence study (opinion leadership + the two-step flow theory

1. Step Two in the “two-step flow”: Opinion leaders pass on said messages to their followers

• Paul Lazarsfield's team interviews with 800 women on the products they were buying and why

The Elaboration Likelihood Model

Media use + the motivation to process and the ability to understand” = influence by the media 

1. Cultivation theory

Media + Time= Influence by Media 

• The conception of reality is developed though exposer to television of a period of months and years 

• Finding of “ Mean-world syndrome (the world being scary)

1. Plato’s views on public opinion 

The task of governing should be reserved for experts, scientist and philosopher 

1. Aristotle’s views on public opinion 

he collective will could be superior to the opinions of individual men

1. The Bourgeois public sphere

1. Examples include political discussions in English coffeehouses and French salons

2. Signified the growing power of the middle class, NOT the masses, women, or minorities

• Citizens were transacting business and politics with one another without direct influence of the state.

1. Straw polls

No random sampling used, which is the major shortcoming compared to modern public opinion polling 

• Informal, unsatisfied tallies like sliding hands, and counting ballots at events 

• Go based off of conscience samples (whoever shoes up or response s Not representative )

1. Probability sampling

• Participants are selected at random form the population thar there is a known chance of being included in the sample.

This includes: telephone interviews, voter records, car registration, computerized randomization dialing and online opt-in.

1. Leading questions

 often use certain words to lead to a specific answer

Ex: “How bad do you think the President's new policies are?”

1. double-barreled questions

is a question that asked about more than one topis but discussed two different issues.

Ex: How satisfied are you with the quality and price of our products?

1. Who conducts public opinion surveys

• Government agencies

• Internal polls by political campaigns 

• Academic research center 

• New corporations 

• Independent polling companies (gallup)

nonattitudes

• Asking about something on which the person has no opinion

• EX: A participant picking or saying whichever answer choice when u reality instead of saying I don’t know they pick a random answer instead of looking uninformed.

• "I don't know the answer, but I'll make one up so I don't look dumb."

Nonresponse bias

• A systematic bias in the ability to reach specific people 

EX: : "I'm not answering this survey at all because I'm too busy/uninterested/don't have access."

1. The audience commodity 

Same time media content is being “sold” to the audience, th attention of the audience is being “sold to advertisers.

1. Nielsen ratings and its limitations

• Measurements is binary: Watching or not watching doesn't measure for how much one pays attention.

• Unite of analysis: television households

Nielsen ratings Demographics 

Definition: age, gender, income, race, etc

1. Certain groups are “invisible” or underrepresented in TV programming due to advertisers having little interest in them these groups being some live audiences over

•  50 or latino/ hispanic audiences because of stereotypes