Media Audience
Key Concept 4. “How audiences are constructed and addressed by media texts and how audiences interpret and respond to media texts” (Syllabus 2027 p.15).
The concept has two halves: audiences as constructed by industry, and audiences as active interpreters.
What the syllabus requires
You study (Syllabus 2027 p.15):
- how audiences are grouped and categorised by media industries, including by age, gender and social class, as well as by lifestyle and taste
- how media producers target, attract, reach, address and construct audiences
- how media industries target audiences through the content and appeal of media products and through the ways in which they are marketed, distributed and consumed
- the interrelationship between media technologies and patterns of consumption and response
- how audiences interpret the media, including how they may interpret the same texts in different ways, using a variety of theories or ideologies
- how audiences interact with the media and can be actively involved in media production
- how specialised audiences can be reached, on a local, national and global scale, through different media technologies and platforms
- how media organisations reflect the different needs of mass and specialised audiences, including through targeting
- how audiences use media in different ways, reflecting demographic factors as well as aspects of identity and culture
- the role and significance of specialised audiences, including niche and fan, to the media
Audiences as constructed
Categorization — by age, gender, social class, lifestyle and taste.
Mode of address — how a text encourages a reader to recognize themselves as the addressee: “how is a particular audience being addressed by these elements? How is a potential reader encouraged to see her/himself as the addressee?” (SoW p.9). Magazine covers are the main teaching text, because the address is on the surface.
Mass and specialized audiences — reached in the magazine pitch through “an argument, perhaps, that a niche rather than mass market exists for the publication” (SoW p.12).
Niche and fan audiences — named by the syllabus as significant, and reachable globally through platforms.
Audiences as active interpreters
The syllabus requires that you understand how audiences “may interpret the same texts in different ways, using a variety of theories or ideologies” (p.15).
You explore Stuart Hall’s ideas of encoding and decoding when making sense of a media text (SoW p.14). See Stuart Hall for the dominant / negotiated / oppositional model — the three positions from which a reader can interpret a text.
The media diary
Exercise
“Keep a media diary for one day – list everything you watched, listened to, played, interacted with as well as where you did it, using what technology, whether alone or in company, and for what purpose.”
Six recorded dimensions: what, where, on what technology, alone or with others, and why — over exactly one day.
Its purpose is forward-looking (SoW p.16): “This simple exercise starts to build the foundations for the Media Ecology element of Component 4 – it starts to reveal the ‘mediascape’ that we all inhabit.” Diaries you keep in Grade 11 become the raw contrast material for the Grade 12 synoptic essay, so keep them.
Seven insights the diary is expected to surface (SoW p.16): media consumable anywhere on mobile technology; media on demand; limited live viewing except events and sport; social media creating a new communal live experience; news as a stream of updates rather than a fixed form, place and time; “old media” competing and integrating rather than dying; and near-universal availability via piracy.
The attention economy
The work goes past description (SoW p.16): “there is an opportunity here to go beyond the descriptive level of experience and to consider conceptual positions, such as ‘the attention economy’.” You consider what it is and “how does it explain how I use Facebook?”, then turn to “the actual economy of intellectual and artistic property (which will call forwards to work on regulation in Component 4).”
The component closes with a question: “What media are worth paying for? Why?” (SoW p.16).