Blog 3: Audiences

What we know about audiences is that they are constantly changing as the media forms evolve. As the text covered, mass broadcasting is a fairly new phenomenon having started with the introduction of radio and then film and television in the 1920s and 30s. This began the age of mass audiences, but as the media format has evolved so has the audience members. We learned in the lecture how audiences have transitioned from the passive, to the active and have now entered the interactive world thanks to such websites as Google and YouTube, and from the reading we see how media is competing with each other;

"Television is being squeezed by the new media mix. It is forced

to fight off competition for advertising revenue from computer games,

mobile media and the Internet - even from radio which is suddenly more

attractive because of its mobility...

...Television and radio stations are less important

in the marketing mix than they have previously been."

And the audiences of today are quite different from those of the 80s and even the 90s. Looking at David Morley's Active Audiences, we see that audiences are placed into 3 groups: dominant (hegemonic), negotiated and oppositional (counter-hegemonic) reading. These audience members will either accept the reading, modify it to suit their opinion or position or totally disagree with the reading. But what we are now seeing in this new interactive audience is something totally different, if people agree or disagree with the reading they can voice their opinion more loudly than ever before with the advances in technology, including Blogger.com and Facebook. The differences in interactive audiences is even greater as audiences are now capable of creating their own media, such as YouTube, thus celebrating audience empowerment and therefore increasing its popularity.