M87MCMedia Audiences Mafalda Stasi

mafalda.stasi@coventry.ac.uk

Today:Module IntroductionContent OverviewLecture

Module introduction

Module Objectives

Critically examine theories and conceptualisations of ‘the audience’

Position reception studies within media and cultural studies

Understand how different media texts address audiences

Understand how specific audiences engage with media texts

Syllabus

Spring Break

Week Date Topic

1 24 Jan Introduction

2 31 Jan Subcultural audiences

3 7 Feb Adoring audiences

4 14 Feb Spectating audiences

5 21 Feb Screening

6 28 Feb Audiences and Gender

7 7 Mar Audiences and Sexuality

8 14 Mar Audiences and Ethnicity

9 21 Mar Intersectional Audiences

10 18 Apr Recap

11 25 Apr Tutorials

Logistics

Weekly Thu 5-6.30 pm ET130

Attendance is mandatory

Materials, readings, assignments:

• http://mafaldastasi.com/teaching/postgraduate/m87mc-media-audiences

• Moodle http://moodle.coventry.ac.ukM87MC – final hand-in AD055 – general info for postgrads

Assessment

A 3.000 words academic essay– Due date 2nd May– Pass mark is 40%

Hand-in via Moodle AND paper copy

LATE SUBMISSION = MARK OF ZERO AND RESITNO SUBMISSION = NO RESIT = NO DEGREE

Serious and documented problem? You may request an extension before the due date

Essay TopicPick a media text of your choice, and analyse it in detail using one of the theories discussed in the module. Your essay should:

– problematise the notion of ‘audience’– examine specific and relevant media-audience inter-

relationships– critically analyse literature, sources and media texts relevant

to the topic– demonstrate a critically informed awareness of the historical

development of ‘audience’ as a concept– demonstrate an informed understanding of the evolution of

your chosen theories and models relating to ‘audience’ and critically evaluate these perspectives

– demonstrate the ability to present your interpretations, findings and arguments in an manner appropriate to the context

In order to succeed

Take ACTIVE charge of your learning by:Reading materials assignedCompleting all assignments Being prepared to discuss your workEngaging in class activitiesAsking questions!

Respect yourself and others by:Attending all classesArriving on time or earlyListening to other people’s contributionWorking collaboratively

Resources

• Library – http://ils.coventry.ac.uk/

• Google Scholar – http://scholar.google.com

• Moodle– http://moodle.coventry.ac.uk

• Centre for Academic Writing – http://www.coventry.ac.uk/caw/

• Harvard Reference System – http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/caw/cuhrs/Pages/CU

HarvardReferenceStyle.aspx

Academic Honesty

Your work should always be yours. We do not want you to repeat what other people said on a given topic, or even worse, copy their words into your written work.

We want to hear what you think—what your analysis can contribute to the sum total of knowledge.

Penalties for academic dishonesty range from a mark of zero to being excluded from the University

Introductions

Your name and nationality

What modules have you taken or will take

One interesting thing about yourself

Activity

On the sheets provided, write down: – Your name– What do you know about audiences?– What would you like to know about

audiences?

When you’re done, hand your paper in

Content Overview

Part 1: I watch therefore I FEEL

Emotions and feelings

• The audience-text relationship is intensely emotional

• We all display various types of attachment and feelings for a text

• This passionate relationship is not simply individual, but socially determined

Part 1: I watch therefore I AM

Identity

• The way we watch a text helps us determine and understand who we are

• Who we are influences how we read a text

• A text may address or target a specific audience

• A specific audience category may read texts in different ways

All-powerful media

All-powerful audience

Where are you in the audience-text continuum?

Stand up and arrange yourselves in a line according to what you think of the balance of power between audience and media

Activity: stand up for your case

…Don’t sit back yet!

Activity: forming groups

You will be assigned a number. Keep it in mind!

Now, look for all the people with the same number as you: they are your group

Lecture:Cultural StudiesReception StudiesAudience Studies

Culture is the texts and practices of everyday life

Culture is a terrain of ideological struggle over meaning and hegemony

“an arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured.”

The Discipline of Cultural Studies

Raymond Williams

Who decides what is culture?

Traditional working class practices are a legitimate cultural expression

“Culture is Ordinary” (1958)

[popular film] “weekly serves the leisure of twenty-five million British adults, and

which deals well or badly, but at least with great emotive power, with the values of man and society” (Williams, 1993: 186)

Stuart Hall

1969 – 1976 Director of the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)

How do we interrogate and interact with the text?

We negotiate social and cultural meaning situationally, in a cycle of “encoding and decoding”

Creation and interpretation of texts, or encoding and decoding are “linked but distinctive moments -

production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction”

(Hall 1980: 128)

Angela McRobbie

Gendered audiences: who are we still ignoring? Whose texts and

whose modes of interaction are devalued?

We need to study the intersection of gender, culture and social change

Are girls, in fact, for reasons which we could discover, really not active or present in youth sub-cultures? Or

has something in the way this kind of research is done rendered them invisible?

(McRobbie and Garber 1975: 209)

The roots of Cultural Studies

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”

Ideology: “a body of ideas and practices which seek to defend the prevailing structures of power by actively promoting the values and interests of the dominant groups in society” (Storey 1999: 28)

Ideology and Domination

For Marx, ideology is the intellectual arm of oppression

Top-down, dualistic view of power relations

Antonio Gramsci

the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (57)

Hegemony: social and cultural leadership to maintain power through consensus, agreement and persuasion

Hegemonic ideologies are pervasive, invisible, taken for granted

Oppression is a cooperative achievement

Hegemony“Consent must beconstantly won and rewon, for people's material social experienceconstantly reminds themof the disadvantages ofsubordination and thusposes a threat to the dominant class...

Hegemony... posits a constant contradictionbetween ideology and the social experience of the subordinate that makesthis interface into aninevitable site ofideological struggle”(Fiske 1992: 291).

Reception Studies: Focus on Audiences

‘We must get away from the habit of thinking in terms of what the media do to people and substitute for it the idea of what people do with the media’. (Halloran, 1970)

‘Audience’ is not an absolute concept, because it cannot

exist outside a communication

situation—audience is a construct derived

from the context

The Audience is an Illusion“There is no stable entity which we can isolate and identify as the media audience, no single object that is unproblematically ‘there’ for us to observe and analyse.

The plural, audiences, is preferable—denoting several groups divided by their reception of different media and genres, or by social and cultural positioning—yet even this term presents conceptual difficulties.” (Moores 1993: 1)

“Audience is, most of all, a discursive construct producedby a particular analytic gaze”(Alaatusari 1999: 6)

Having established that “audiences” don’t exist, we can now move on to study empirical instances of people watching stuff

… MORE NEXT WEEK!

Readings

Hall, S. (1980) “Encoding/decoding.” In Hall, S. et al., eds., Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson. (128–38)

Miller, T. (2001) “What it Is and What it Isn’t: Introducing… Cultural Studies.” in A Companion to Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell. (1-19)

All readings available on my blog, unless otherwise stated

For Next Week

Refer to the assigned readings:

– As a group, choose the three most important points the readings make, and come to class next week ready to discuss them. You will be asked to present these point formally.

– Individually, make a list of points you found unclear, and post them as a comment to this entry.

QUESTIONS?