Critical Approaches

Audience Response:

There are many different ways that an audience can respond to a piece of media.

Stuart Hall suggested that audiences respond with either a Preferred, Negotiated or Oppositional reading of the text but there are other ways an audience can respond:

• Participatory

• Cultural Competence

• Fan Culture

Participatory:

Now more than ever audiences are able to participate and interact with the media they are consuming.

Audiences are invited to ‘have their say’ on news stories, debates and even TV programmes.

Social media has enabled this move towards participatory media. People join Facebook pages, they comment on blogs or write their own. They tweet about TV programs while they are happening.

Participatory media can include blogs, wikis, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, podcasts and video blogs.

It is direct interaction or creation of media by it’s audience. The audience is this case is not at all passive but very active.

Twitter Case Study:

Twitter understands it’s role as a participatory media tool and includes lots of advice on it’s website for developers and producers to help them use it’s services.

https://dev.twitter.com/media/twitter-tv

Here is data from the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards. You can see how the sharp spikes correspond directly to major moments in the show:

D   Adele performs

E   Beyonce's performance begins...

F   ...and ends with the big reveal of her "baby bump

Cultural competence:

Media texts require us to have a certain level of cultural understanding to be able to interpret them.

At a basic level, this could mean being able to read the language that a magazine is written in.

At a deeper level, it means being able to interpret signs and symbols that we use a visual shorthand to communicate ideas.

We recognise these signs in our own culture but find it harder to understand when looking at others.

We create and attach meaning to signs and symbols in many different forms.

Language is often the hardest symbol to understand if you are from another culture.

This series of lines and shapes means nothing to most people who only speak or read Western languages.

मोटर-गाड़ी

Language is often the hardest symbol to understand if you are from another culture.

This series of lines and shapes means nothing to most people who only speak or read Western languages.

मोटर-गाड़ीWhen the meaning is put to us in a series of shapes and lines that we can interpret, the meaning becomes clear.

Car

Cultures create their own language. This can be written, verbal and visual. Members of the culture have a shared understanding; a competence with the culture.

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Fan culture:

Fan culture describes an audience taking an active role in the creation of media based on an existing product.

This is particularly prevalent in the Sci-Fi genre of media. (http://trekfanfiction.net)

Fans will write additional stories, TV episodes and alternative endings to their favourite films, TV shows and books.

Henry Jenkins has researched extensively this participation of fans with a media text and their interaction with each other.

Facebook, YouTube, blogs and Twitter have helped groups of fans find each other more easily.

They used these networks to share their own work and comment on the work of each other

http://www.fanfiction.net contains millions of pieces of fan fiction based on books, comics, anime, games, TV shows, films and plays.

It contains communities and forums where fans share their stories.

It has come under pressure in recent years to remove some of the content as it is based on their copyrighted work and intellectual property of others.

It has also removed stories of an adult nature.

Some authors of fan fiction have even broken in to main stream publishing.

50 shades of Grey started out as a piece of fan fiction based on the Twilight franchise.

Events like Comic con allow fans to get together, often dressed as their favourite superheroes.

Artist sites like RedBubble.com offer another outlet for fan culture. Often fans design more interesting merchandise than media producers themselves.

YouTube:

YouTube offers another outlet for fan culture with many different videos from covers of peoples to favourite songs to instructional videos on making superhero costumes or doing cosplay make-up.

Task 4Pick at least one media text and investigate how its audience responds to it.

You can pick a different product for each response or try and stick with just one.

For each response, participatory, cultural competence and fan culture, explain the response and then use examples to show it working in practice.

It can be any text or any producer you like. This allows you to look at a franchise of films or a band or a series of books or a TV series as a whole.

Great British Bake Off:

Using the official hashtag #GBBO as well as a range of others, fans and viewers enter in to a participatory experience, sharing comments and reactions with others.

GBBO generated 161,516 tweets between 7.30pm and 9.30pm. That works out a whopping 1,346 tweets per minute or, to be even more specific, 22.4 tweets per second.http://www.irishexaminer.com/

There is an element of cultural competence with a text like this. Not only are there specific baking terms but knowing the names of contestants, past and present, helps fans take part in the debate.

GBBO is an example of cultural competence.

Fans can attempt recipes and challenges seen on the show and often use social media to share their success (or failure).

A whole range of books and kitchen items are available for fans to buy and the judges often appear live at events that fans can attend.