Audiences: What do people do with media?

This week's lecture focused solely on audiences and their responses, looking at reception studies using a textual analysis in order to assess audience's receptions. We also went on to discuss limitations of certain theories using textual analysis (such of those of the Frankfurt School).

Long and Wall's chapter on 'Investigating audiences' looks at audiences from several points of view. Effects are considered, compared to uses and gratifications, in which we look at what audiences take from a text, and how different gratifications can interlink, relating to Gillespie's reading and their study of soap television and the uses and gratifications taken from audiences, including personal identity in characters. McQuail mentions uses and gratifications including personal identity and surveillance and other theories mentioned, include encoding and decoding (Stuart Hall), looking at how audiences decoding of the programme.

The second set reading, (Gillespie: 2003) was a case study of the soap opera 'Neighbours', with references to other programmes including 'Home and Away' and an analysis of audience’s responses within an area named Southall. Responses included those of students who felt that they couldn't talk about the topics with family members, but with friends at school (such as relationships) therefore creating uses and gratifications, as mentioned in (Long and Wall: 2012, 245) "Investigating audiences" chapter).

When looking for an audience study, I came across a text written by Birmingham City University's (Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore, 2011) around the relationship between nationality and humour, looking at audiences from Britain and Norway and their responses to a British television show; The Office (BBC2, 2001-3), and a Norwegian one; Nissene på Låven (TVNorge, 2001). The study uses a series of study groups (a total of twenty five) to analyse audiences watch two sitcoms, and how the aid of subtitles for both creates results. As mentioned by (Bore, 2011: 351), audiences seemed to prefer subtitling over dubbing foreign-language programming, in which it “was frequently criticized and ridiculed”. Audiences are accustomed to the methods adopted in their country, which may be similar to Gillespie’s idea that standards are created based around geography (what is and is not acceptable or the norm: in Gillespie’s study talking to family members about relationships is not the norm, and here dubbing is not).

I would potentially undertake a similar methodology (either a focus group or virtual ethnography of online forums) and research a programme such as Mad Men, in which YouTube channels and forums have been created because of its popularity with audiences. Because of this, a potential research question developed from this week’s lecture and reading may be along the lines of ‘To what extent do online forums and channels such as ‘Orange Couch’ show positive responses form audiences to the television show Mad Men?’

Bibliography;

BORE, INGER-LISE KALVIKNES , 2011 'Transnational TV Comedy audiences' IN Television & New Media, 07/2011, Volume 12, Issue 4 (Accessed 23rd March 2015)

GILLESPIE, MARIE (2003) “Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change” IN Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (eds.) The Audience Studies Reader. London: Routledge.

LONG, P and WALL, T (2012) ‘Investigating audiences: what do people do with media’ IN Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context (2nd Edition), London: Pearson. pp 300-337