The Audience

Question 1

Briefly explain the development of perceptions of the audience

Answer 1

1) Audience as a mass society:
- Large, heterogenous, widely spread individuals.

2) Audience as a market:
- Seen as potential consumers, but unrelated individuals. (ABOUT CONSUMPTION)

3) Audience as a group:
- Media’s power is shaped by personal factors/characteristics of the audience
- Consideration of audience’s ability to understand message as intended.

4) Motivated audience: UGT
- Audience members use/seek content that provide them gratification to fulfill specific needs.

5) Various interpretive audiences: Reception theory
- Audiences are active in the social production of meaning
- Interpretation depends on their belonging to social groups.

Question 2

Mention the four categories within McQuail’s categorization of audience types

Answer 2

1) Social group or public
2) The gratification set
3) The medium audience
4) the channel/content audience

Question 3

How do you know which type of audience to apply to your message?

Answer 3

Depends on your goal:

• what to achieve with your campaign?
• Reaction from audience?
• Likable or effective?

Question 4

Mention three media-centred goals within audience research

Answer 4

• Sales and ratings
• Finding new audience market opportunities
• Managing audience choice behavior
• Product testing and improving effectiveness from a sender’s perspective

Question 5

Mention three audience-centre goals with audience research

Answer 5

• Meeting responsibilities to serve an audience
• Evaluating media performance from an audience’s perspective
• Uncovering audience’s interpretation of meaning
• Exploring the context of media use
• Assessing actual effect on media

Question 6

Briefly explain the three main traditions of audience research

Answer 6

1) Structural tradition: Audience measurement (data of size and reach)
2) Behavorial tradition: Media effects + use
3) Cultural tradition: Reception analysis

Question 7

Mention the issues of public concern regarding media use and elaborate on the consequences

Answer 7

1) Media use as an addiction - diversion and reduced social interaction.
2) Social atomization: Isolation w. negative effects (e.g. lack of self control)
3) Audience behavior as active/passive: Lack of stimulating content.
4) Manipulation and resistance: Object of manipulation.
5) Works against minorities: Critical theory

Question 8

Elaborate on Schroeder’s implications of audience research; ‘Observers paradox’

Answer 8

We aim to find out how people behave when they aren’t systematically observed, but this can only be done by systematic observation; We intrude their lives and affects their behavior when observing!

Question 9

Briefly explain the five types of audience activity

Answer 9

1) Selective: Choosing content
2) Utility: Use for gratification to fulfill specific need.
3) Intentionality: One who engages in active cognitive processing of incoming information and experience.
4) Resistance to influence: In control of reception
5) Involvement: Arousal - caught up w. media experience (talking back to tv)

Question 10

Mention the six most relevant concept of audience reach:

Answer 10

1) Available potential audience (reception capability)
2) Paying audience (CD, books, movies)
3) Attentive audience (Reading for information)
4) Internal audience (Attention to particular type of content)
5) Cummulative (Overall reached audience)
6) Target audience (advertiser)

Question 11

Who is behind the UGT?

Answer 11

Katz, Blumer, McQuail, Gurewich.

Question 12

Mention at least three differences between the UGT and the perception of the audience being a mass

Answer 12

1) Audience being active >

Question 13

Apply the core communication models to the different perceptions of the audience

Answer 13

Transmission:

• One-way communication
• Audience being passive in meaning-making process.
• Does not include feedback.
• Assumes that message is perfectly understood.
• Seing audience as a mass.

Interaction:

• Semi-active audience
• Feedback is needed
• Interaction between audience and media

Transaction:

• Perfectly active audience
• Message is delivered through a dialogue resulting in shared meaning.
• Only perfectly active in order to gain something from media (UGT)

Question 14

Mention 5 kinds of needs gratified by the media

Answer 14

• Tension release: Escaping, diversion.
• Personal relationship: Substituting media for companionship
• Surveillance: Information helping audience member to accomplish something
• Affective: Emotionally stimulating

Question 15

Who is behind the idea of the fraction of selection within the UGT?

Answer 15

Wilbur Schramm

Question 16

Explain the fraction of selection

Answer 16

Expectation reward/effort required = frequency of activity

• Expectation reward: All the rewards we expect to get from doing something.
• Effort required: The effort/difficulty to gain these rewards.
• Frequency: How many times we end up repeating this action.

Question 17

Suppose you are a campaign planner; Elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign if your audience groups are addressed within the transmission model?

Answer 17

Weaknesses:

• One way communication to audience may lead to misunderstandings.
• Lack of understanding different groups within the audience
• Message can easily harm if not taking the preferences of the audience into consideration
• Your message will not be received, if the audience questions the credibility of it.

Strenghts:
- Because audience is assumed to be depersonalized and objectified we can define them in demographic terms (age, income, ethnicity, gender) without further investigation.

• Your message is assumed to be understood and received; People will accept and follow.
• If making a campaign with the intention of making people to act on it (an order) the transmission model is effective as it does not allow negotiation of the message.

Question 18

Suppose you are a campaign planner; Elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign if your audience groups are addressed within the transaction model?

Answer 18

Weaknesses:

• You have to observe and understand your audience (Observers paradox)
• May lead to shitstorms if audience is misjudged

Strenghts:

• Message is negotiated - you will have a bigger effect on the specific target group have knowledge about the specific group
• Audience is involved in meaning-making process

Question 19

Mention three main assumptions of UGT

Answer 19

1) Audience is active
2) Media use is goal oriented
3) Audience’s choice of media depends on gratification
4) Media compete with others sources for need satisfaction
5) Audience is aware of own media use
6) Value of media content can only be assessed by audience

Question 20

Explain Schroeder’s implication of respectively:

- When observing and when talking to an audience

Answer 20

1) Observing: Not possible without intruding their lives + affecting their behavior
2) Talking: Can not be sure that there is a mutual understanding as it derives from different social settings.

Question 21

According to Schroeder three things should be considered regarding audience research; What are these things and what do they mean?

Answer 21

1) Reliability: Is the procedure of gathering and analyzing the data consistent and systematic
2) Representativeness: Are there enough evidence to state anything
3) Validity: How accurate has it captured the intended?

Question 22

What does Schroeder say about finding the truth in audience research?

Answer 22

Audience research can never claim to find the truth about audience practices and meanings, only partial insight about how audiences use the media in a specific context.

Question 23

What does Schroeder say about the change that is developing in the consumption of television?

Answer 23

Emergence of multi-set families in which each member has access to own choice of television; TV use has become more individualized whereas part of their consumption no longer has to be negotiated with other members.

Question 24

Does the change in the consumption of television exclude collective uses of the medium?

Answer 24

No, collective uses of television is still important in some spaces of the household.

Question 25

What does ‘the anchorage of our communicative repertoire’ mean from in sociocultural context?

Answer 25

Our “field of experience” that is anchored in our way of interpreting and understanding things.

Question 26

The signifying process of an audience member can sometimes lead to misunderstandings of a message - why is that?

Answer 26

Media producers and the consumers do not always share the same communicative repertoire as this is something rooted in both personal as their collectivistic history of the social and cultural groups they belong to: No fit between encoded and decoded meaning.

Question 27

Where does the encoding process take place?

Answer 27

Takes place among the agents in media institutions

Question 28

Where does the decoding process take place?

Answer 28

Takes place among the agents of every day life; The audience