This video connects questions about media audiences to older concerns about public entertainment. Connecting media audiences with older forms of public events, the video explains how audience research seeks to examine how engagement with media content becomes the basis for politically significant forms of public engagement.
Audio TranscriptAuto-generated
to begin, I'm going to suggest a few reasons why
audiences are interesting to study from a cultural point of
view. The first point to make is that the way
that we think about media audiences is quite different from
the way that past generations thought about audiences for other
cultural forms, particularly theater and in looking at these past
cultural forms.
We can nevertheless see some of the reasons why audiences
are worth studying.
So if we look at the work, for example, of
the american author, Richard Butch, Richard Butch has done research
on 19th century theater audiences um, in in both in
the UK and also the United States.
And what he's found is that theater audiences In the
18th and 19th century were a fairly rowdy bunch that
theaters were places where there was all kinds of bad
behavior going on.
People went to theaters and behaved much in the same
way as we might think of football supporters behaving today.
And you can see this is a drawing which is
a representation of 18th century theatre in London.
And what you can see is that people are getting
up to all kinds of bad behavior.
They're not behaving at all in the way that we
think of theater audiences today.
And the point that Butch makes about these past incarnations
of audiences is that they represent a particular question that
still holds true today.
And this is the audience research is really about what
happens when groups of people come together seeking entertainment and
whenever that's happened throughout society, the outcomes have been unpredictable.
That is all kinds of unexpected outcomes happen when people
gather together to be entertained and that the things that
happen when people come together to be entertained quite often
makes authority figures feel threatened.
And that's true of a lot of contemporary media forms
today. Even things which we might normally think of as
not really involving doing that much, like watching tv.
So audience research at base from a cultural text point
of view, investigates what happens to society when people gather
together seeking entertainment and what are the political effects of
that? And I suppose one, there are a few other
ideas that have rickard throughout time um, that surround those
sorts of questions.
So why do audiences matter Well from a political point
of view?
Quite often, audiences worry us again, we can return to
the 18th and 19th century.
Um, for an indication of where these concerns come from.
What we see on the left here is a picture
of 1/19 century execution and this is actually drawing of
an execution of three misleading is an execution of a
14 year old boy, A boy called John Amy Bird
Bell who was executed for murdering another boy for a
small amount of money in the 19th century.
And the interesting thing about this event was that it's
the thing that really turned the tide of public opinion
against public execution.
Um, up until that point, people had regularly attended public
executions as a form of entertainment.
People would take their families and have picnics and watch
people being executed for fun.
Uh, and um politicians in the 19th century around the
execution of John Amy Bird Bell began to say that
this is not really, this is unbecoming of a civilized
society that in a civilised society, people shouldn't be entertained
by these sorts of spectacles.
Um, this is something that needs to be taken far
more seriously and that staging these sorts of things as
a form of public entertainment debases the audience.
It appeals to their lowest, um that their lowest, their
bassist feelings.
Um, and when you, when you kind of debates audiences,
you also debates society as a whole.
So this idea that entertainment cultivates some of our less
finer feelings kind of stirs up unhelpful emotions and passions
within us and it will be better off if this
didn't happen.
And I suppose we can see the same arguments being
made around media audiences.
So the picture on the right is of a a
woman called jade Goody who is sadly no longer with
us, but who was a regular on reality tv um
internationally in the early part of this century, end up
dying very tragically of cancer and actually had her cancer
diagnosis revealed to her live on reality television.
Um and this was seen as being uh kind of
a representation of everything that's wrong with reality tv.
That that we weren't were there to be entertained by
people's weaknesses by their pains, by the way that they
are exploited.
Um And that reality tv is really not something is
something that audiences clearly due to enjoy but it's something
that we really shouldn't enjoy it.
Also we kind of had this idea that entertainment corrupts
its audience.
And one of the things that we're going to be
doing is saying, well actually if we look at one
of the reasons of doing audience research is to talk
about some of the mhm some of the complications with
that with those concerns, But there are other reasons to
study audiences.
One is that they kind of fascinate us.
So in the late 1930s a social sociologist called Hadley
Cantrill did a study called the invasion from Mars and
this was research on a radio play, public reactions, audience
reactions to a radio play by Orson Welles, which was
a radio play that told a fictional story about America
being invaded by Martians but told the story in the
form of a news broadcast.
And significant numbers of the audience were convinced that they
were listening to an actual invasion from MArs.
Um and this, you know, would run into several 100.
I mean, it wasn't like millions and millions of people,
but a significant enough number of people to um to
prompt handily can drill to go off and research.
Well, why did people react like that?
One of the interesting things that he found was that
many people's reactions were really quite rational.
So some people, for example, thought that when they were
listening to the radio, they've been listening to heighten tensions
from europe with nazi Germany.
And they actually thought that what they were listening to
was it was a new story about the Nazis invading
and and and trying to increase the terror amongst americans
population by disguising themselves as Martians.
Now, when you think about what was happening in europe
a couple of years later with Nazi bombing and what
you think about the attack on Pearl Harbor, um Hadley
Control made the point later on in life that that
wasn't such an outlandish fear.
Um so so really what this represented was the way
that a lot of early mass communication researchers looked quite
closely at what audiences were doing and we're really kind
of fascinated by what they saw because they saw some
really complex audience reactions.
And so early mass communication researchers realized very, very quickly.
There was really a great deal to many factors behind
understanding how audiences reacted to particular types of media content.
And this was something that deserved to be studied in
quite some detail because it was a new phenomenon and
one that was really, really quite surprising and complex and
not something that could be summarized by the sorts of
simplistic fears seen in the previous set step.
And then more recently, by the time we were moving
to the later part of the 20th century, you had
media researchers who were arguing that fan culture the audiences
kind of show us the way.
So this is a book called textual poachers by Henry
Jenkins. And this was a book about fan cultures, about
how groups of people who were fans of particular sorts
of tv shows.
And this book particularly looked at fans of Star Trek,
but also considered many other types of science fiction.
Uh and it showed how groups of people really built
their built entire communities and lives around these, this type
of media content.
And the argument was two things firstly, um Popular entertainment
allows audiences to imagine the world not as it is,
but as they would like it to be.
And so in talking about popular content, popular popular media,
fan cultures quite often talk about a world that they
would like to live in and more than that they
actually begin to build those worlds.
So you may have heard of things like fan conventions,
fan fiction, so on and so forth.
And what these are are very real communities that fans
build inspired by and based based on media content.
Um, so quite often movie, you know, so we can
talk about marvel movies or um, science fiction shows or
whatever it is.
Um, quite often, fan communities will, will build up around
these around these shows because they offer a real community
feeling and experience for media audiences.
So if we look at fan cultures, what we see
is the way that audience researchers began to ask how
media became the basis for, and the inspiration for social
participation, the creation of communities based around media content.
And this has been a very accessible and success and
successful approach to media audiences.
So what we can see then, are there are several
questions surrounding media audiences that focus on how people interact
with society and social questions through the popular content, the
popular, popular culture and entertainment that they consume, exposed themselves
to or interact with, and that's the basic reason, and
the basic question behind qualitative audience research that operates from