The Media and Audience Research

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The Media and Audience Research

One can begin to realize the effects and concerns of the media when analyzing the terms mediatization and industrialization brought forth by K. Ross and V. Nightingale in their article, “Audiences in Historical Perspectives.”  In the most basic and simplistic of explanations they identify media, or mediatization as, “the ways human cultures develop technologies that replicate, and usually also amplify, human senses and communicative power”(13).  Media has given people the ability to transcend space and time, to read about, see or hear events that occurred thousands of miles away.  However, what is more important is their idea of industrialization, not in its typical definition, but seen as the influence of the profit driven and commercial manipulation of media in a capitalist system, and the social and cultural transformations that occur because of it.  The history of media studies on audience can be seen as a series of oscillations between viewpoints which have stressed the power of the message over its audiences and perspectives which stress the barriers the keep the audience neutral to the message.  Theories such as “the magic bullet” or ideas of critical theory emphasize structure and a passive audience, while others highlight many attributes to these recent social changes, not just the media, that keep the audience anything but inactive viewers of messages.  Through the readings over the past few weeks, I have developed my own theory on media’s influence over the audience.  The audience has agency, and choice, and other influences upon its actions then just mass-mediated messages, but what the audience does not have is the ability to remove itself from a society that is deeply immersed in a corporately ideological, profit driven, socially constructed world.

The idea of media and it bearing direct effects arose out of one of the first social scientific studies.  This research project, known as the Payne Fund studies, began to look at and assess content of film, who is going, and the effect due to the exposure of certain themes and messages.  During the time of these studies, the 1930’s, there was an increased interest in quantitative methods of research.  Herbert Blumer, who led this positivist research, wrote about his findings in the book entitled Movies and Conduct.  A series of interviews with moviegoers, this writing focuses on, “the tangible influence of motion pictures”(Blumer 13, emphasis added).  Blumer writes that these direct effects of movies and film can be seen in external behavior such as in child’s play, dress or imitating love techniques.

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 The difficulty with this study is that it is almost impossible to quantitatively measure the mental effect a film has on a person.  We can measure the physical regurgitation of scenes and accents, makeup and fashion, but because these are physical, overt behaviors, one can deduce that there exists some sort of control and choice.  When a girl bats her eyes like her favorite movie star, or wears her hair in a certain style, it is a conscious action, a choice to comply or rebel to the Hollywood image.  It is what we can’t see and document that is more ...

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