Audiences and Producers Flashcards
What is uses and gratifications?
- Focuses on audience perspective
- Assumes individuals needs are ‘pre-potent’
- Individuals have a range of gratification options; media competes with other sources
- Individuals have agency to choose media based on their needs
- This agency in turn affects media behaviour; producers respond to audience demand
- Social interactivity is a common need driving media consumption
How is Maslow related to uses and gratifications?
- Audience needs to be taken seriously
- Concerned with: the social and psychological origin of needs, which generate expectations of the mass media or other sources, which lead to differential patterns of media exposure (or engagement in other activities), resulting in need gratifications and other consequences or how we opt in and out of media usage, depending on our needs
What is the U&G summary statement?
Less attention should be paid to what media do to people and more to what people do to the media. Such an approach assumes that even the most potent mass of media content cannot ordinarily influence an individual who has no use for it in the social and psychological context in which he lives. The uses approach assumes that people’s values, their interests, their associates, their social roles, are pre-potent(X), and that people selectively fashion what they see and hear to these interests
What are the key aspects of U&G?
- The audience is active
- The audience takes initiative in choosing media that gratifiers its needs
- The media compete with other sources of gratification (other media and otherwise)
- The audience’s intentions can be learned by surveying/interviewing audiences (cf content analysis)
- Audience needs or intentions are not judged normatively; no need is more or less valid than any others
What is U&G research?
- Can be inductive or deductive
- Inductive
- Observe behaviours, and try to identify needs
- Deductive
- Theorise needs, and then observe behaviours
- Difficulty: agreeing on needs
- Generally: Information, Personal identity, integration and social interaction, entertainment
What have been the empirical findings of U&G?
- Loneliness is a powerful motivator; leads to television consumption and ‘parasocial’ relationships with news readers
- Low life satisfaction and anxiety lead to ‘escapist’ consumption
- Personality factors can predict consumption of violence/horror
- Poor health/mobility leads to reliance on television
- (Empirical research here is v. hard)
What is the external validity of U&G?
- Criticisms include lack of precision and reliable measurement
- Are needs ‘exogenous’?
- Does lack of a unified mythology affect results and limit falsifiability?
- Have we perpetuated this idea because it feels intuitive?
- Are these really people’s needs?
- Are we just overlaying meaning onto observed behaviour?
What are cultural studies?
- ‘Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings - the ‘giving and taking of meaning’ - between the members of a society or group
- We can’t decouple culture and communication
- The ‘Cultural Turn’
- Cultural Media Studies
What was the cultural turn?
- First real ‘cultural studies’ school didn’t exist until 1964
- Early research centred around the University of Birmingham led by Stuart Hall
- Interdisciplinary; informed by Frankfurt School (Adorno, Habermas, etc), Gramsci, Althusser, Marx
- Hegemony and power
- Capitalism and class
- Feminism
- Globalisation
- Cultural consumption
What are the most important cultural media studies?
- Media ecology (Marshall McLuhan & Toronto School)
- Ritual & representation (Carey; Baudrillard)
- Semiotics & Representation (Hall; Eco)
What is media ecology?
‘The medium is the message’
What is ritual and representation?
A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintantendce of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs
What is semiotics and representation?
- Culture is about ‘shared meanings’, through the medium of language, by which we ‘make sense’ of things and produce and exchange meaning
- Encoding/Decoding
What is encoding/deding?
- Four stages to communication
- Narrative is important; helps to reproduce meaning
- There is scope for some misunderstanding, but no ‘polysemy’
- Meaning is shaped by institutional forces and reproduced accordingly
- Three decoding ‘positions’
What are the stages of communication?
- Production
- Message is created with meaning (similar to frames)
- Circulation
- The message is perceived, not fully received yet
- Use
- Message is received and interpreted (or decoded); this requires active input from the receiver (audience)
- Reproduction
- The decoded message has an ‘effect’: attitude change, entertainment, behavioural change, learning etc
