Representation Of Women

Representation Of Men

Techniques

POV shots

Why is it useful?

Insert shots

why is it useful

Close up shots

why is it useful

Shot reverse shot

why is it useful

Film Rating

Researching Audiences

Stuart hall – Hall views audiences as both the producers and consumers of texts: decoding the meaning encoded by the originator of the text. His approach to textual analysis is that the consumer actively negotiates the meaning.

Research methods

How do we measure audiences?

Sales, subscriptions, ratings and figures

Who measures audiences?

NRS, ABC, BARB, Bookseller

New Media

New ways to measure audience – Facebook, twitter, online forums, YouTube, Google, twitter trends.

Research

Quantitative research e.g. questionnaires

Number based

Closed questions to generate exact answers.

Very factual

Qualitative Research e.g. interviews, focus groups

Analysis of existing products

Open questions to generate answers open to interpretation

Individual preferences

Considering Audiences

Audience Engagement – This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text.

Audience Expectations – These are the ideas the audience have in advance of seeing media text. This particular applies to genre pieces. Don’t forget producers continually play with or shatter audience expectations

Audience Foreknowledge – this is definitive information that audiences bring to a media product (rather than vague expectations).

Audience Identification – this is the way audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle.

Audience Placement – search it up ben

Audience Research – search it up ben

Look up and research and copy and paste USP – Unique selling point

Audience Positioning

 

Stuart Hall proposed audience positioning, by suggesting that the mass media create and define issues of public concern and interest through audience positioning. He was concerned with the power that the media have including how it spreads idea's in particular social values, to create dominant ideologies, meaning that they frame public debate surrounding certain issues e.g. the role of women in society, asylums and immigration, the welfare system and the monarchy.

 

He looked at the role of audience positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by different social groups. Hall came up with a model suggesting three ways in which we may read a media text:

 

Encoding and Decoding

Dominant Reading - reader fully accepts the preferred reading (audience will read the text the way the author intended them to) so that the code seems natural and transparent.

 

The negotiated reading - the reader partly believes the code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests.

 

The oppositional reading - the readers social position places them in an oppositional relation to the dominant code. They reject the reading.



 

Polysemy is the capacity for a text to have multiple meanings. It is to do with how individuals interpret and decode readings in different contexts and cultures. 

 

Types of Audience

Types of audience

Mass audience – often termed broadcast audience. Those who consume mainstream or popular texts such as soaps or sitcoms.

Niche audience – much smaller but very influential. A niche audience is small, select group of people with a very unique interest.

 Categories

Audiences can be divided into the categories based on social class/grade.

Audience research

Audience research is a major part of any media companies work. They use questionnaires, focus groups, and pre film screenings and spend a great deal of time and money finding out who would be interested in their product.

Demographics

Media producers are interested in:

Income/status

Age

Gender

Race

Location of their potential target market. This is called the demographics. Once they know this (as well as the psychographics) they can start to shape their media text to a group with known viewing habits.

Psychographics

Every advertiser wants to target a particular type of audience. Therefore, media companies produce texts that target a particular ‘type’ of audience.

In terms of commercial media, much of their funding is generated by advertising revenue. Their product needs to appeal to a specific type of audience so that advertisers will pay to promote their product.

Most media products can define their ‘typical’ audience member. Often with a psychographic profile.

Group A

Lawyers

Doctors

Scientists

Well paid professionals.

Group B

Teachers

Middle management

Fairly well paid professionals

Group C1

Junior management

Bank clerks

Nurses

‘white collar’ professions

Group C2

Plumbers

Electricians

Carpenters

‘blue collar’ professions

Group D

Manual workers such as:

Drivers

Post sorters

Group E

Students

Unemployed

Pensioners

Audience

Why are audiences important?

Without audiences there would be no media

Media organisations produce texts to make profit

Uses and Gratifications

The belief that audiences passively receive messages is long gone. Katz and blumer proposed from their research into audiences behaviour that audiences use media texts for a variety of reasons.#

Impact of new technology

Old media (tv, print, radio) which used to have high audience members must now work harder to maintain audience numbers.

Digital technology has also led to an increasing uncertainty over how we define an audience, with the general agreement that a large group of people reading the same thing at the same time is outdated and that audiences are now fragmented.

Fragmented audience

The divison of audiences into smaller groups due to the variety of media outlets.

Example: newspapers and magazines – you can now view the hard copy and online version (sometimes free).

 The aim is to hit as many people as possible/sell more copies and generate a larger audience. But measuring the audience becomes harder.

So how do institutions continue to make money?

Nothing in life is free

Free apps always have adverts, unless you pay to remove adds.

Websites and search engines work hard to target you with ads whilst you consume free online versions of your media product.

These adverts are carefully constructed and selected for the primary audience for each text.

With newspapers, printing less copies and switching to online distribution can reduce production costs. (see your local newspapers).