MediaSpace Wiki

Media Crit Spr2010 Session14

Mini-Lecture: Audience-Oriented Criticism

• The text covers three distinct methods that focus on the audience
  1. Reception theory
     • Studies relationship of medium to the consumer
     • Concerned with how messages seduce and engage an audience
  2. Reader-Response theory
     • Studies how consumers respond to messages as they consume them
     • General involves doing ethnographic audience research
     • Observing consumption behavior
  3. Reader-oriented criticism
     • Studies relationship that a consumer has with a story
     • Presumes that every story presumes a consumer and is packaged for that audience
     • But assumes that meaning resides in the audience
     • We will give most of our attention to this method

Reception theory

• Answers much different questions
  • Who is the intended consumer?
  • How has the narrative been constructed for that audience?
    • How does it address them?
    • How does it recruit them?
  • What assumptions does the teller make about the audience?
    • Reception theory is, at its fundamentals, focused on the demographics of audiences

View excerpt from "The Incredible Hulk" pilot episode

• How does this excerpt address and recruit a demographic

• Key issues
  • Generalized types of consumer
    • Can be viewed in many ways
      • Fictive: an imagined prototype user
      • Model: the perfect target (e.g. women 16-35)
      • Intended: the target you build a message for
      • Implied: the target your message suggests it is for
    • Examples in the real world:
      • Soccer Mom's
      • NASCAR Voters
      • Yuppies
  • Modes of address
    • Cinematic: hiding the workings of the medium
    • Rhetorical: engaging the viewer
      • Fictional engagement in which the camera is addressed as the audience
      • Sympathetic engagement in which an actor stands in as a representative audience member
      • Direct engagement via call-in, direct audience interaction, and similar techniques
      • The use of interactive technology and live viewer statistics
• The biggest use of this method is recruiting viewers for advertisers.
• But there are other interesting applications
  • Reeves and Nash find that people often treat media as if they were people
    • interacting with their television as if it can hear them
    • assuming that a computer has intent
  • One outcome of this observation is the creation of media that appear to have a personality
    • the Window's "paper clip"
    • animated characters on cell phones
    • animated characters on the help section of web sites