Queensland University of Technology

creative industries
ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET
Student Name: __JON-ERIC MELSAETER Student
Number:_N_4243579_
Unit Coordinator’s Name: _Jason Sternberg_______________________
Tutor’sName:____Josh Green_______
Unit Code: __KCB 349_ Unit Title: _MEDIA AUDIENCES
Assignment Title: TAKE HOME EXAM

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Due Date: __28th april 2003__ Number of Words Written:
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Jon-Eric Melsaeter
N 4243579
Tutor Josh Green – fri 3-5
ESSAY 1: PART A
The idea that audiences use media in very specific ways influenced by certain variables,
like age, gender or socio-economic status is fairly new, and certainly still in the progress
of heavy debate. Using dependency theory as base, this essay will compare and contrast
two such influences; gender and socio-economic status and the impact these variables
have on media use. As effects-theory has been divided between theorists, dependency
theory can be useful in this setting because it attempts to investigate the relationship
between different systems and how they affect audiences in how they use media.
Dependency theory was first proposed by Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Melvin DeFleur, and
takes a step towards trying to explain media effects from both a limited-effects and a
powerful-effects point of view.

According to Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, dependency develops when ‘certain kind of

media content are used to gratify specific needs or when certain media forms are
consumed habitually as a ritual, to fill time, or as an escape or distraction (Littlejohn
1996, p. 348)’. Needs, they say, are not necessarily personal, but may be shaped by
‘culture or by various social conditions (ibid, p. 350)’. That means that outside aspects
act as limitations on what and how media can be used and on the availability of
alternatives for non-media. Gender is a good example of this. Since gender is a social
construction, it is constantly in the process of being redefined. Gillespie and Barker in
their own respective research discovered that children and teens from immigrant
backgrounds in Britain used TV to construct an identity as British-Asian. A direct
example of this manifestation in the mainstream could be the teen film ‘Bend It Like
Beckham.’ An important point to conclude from this is that children draw on their social
experiences when constructing meaning from media, but not necessarily reality - rather
verisimilitude, the hybrid understanding of how reality is experienced. Many other
theorists have been onto the same thing, using other concepts; Roland Barthes’ concept of
‘intertextuality,’ which John Fiske built upon in his studies, claims that we make sense of
reality by constantly referring to other texts (Fiske 1987) and that the degree of
intertextuality is what enforces social beliefs in the culture or context we choose to live
in.

The social context of the family home usually directs the media use of children. The
classical stereotype is the Father hogging the remote while Mother finds other activities
for the children than watching TV. While men like sitting down and watching a program
the whole way through, women’s watching is filled with guilt, therefore being sporadic
and fragmented. From another point of view, this can be seen as an example of a socially
constructed myth about gender. Catharine Lumby disputes what she sees as circular logic
in gender and technology: ‘My point is that social myths can support amazing
contradictions quite effortlessly and that gender and technology is an area suffused with
mythology (Lumby 1997 p. 141)’. If that is so, how do we go about studying how gender
influences media use? As implicated above, looking at the socio-economic context might
be helpful. Socio-economic factors, personality traits and communication behaviour
influence awareness of technology and subsequently the way in which media is used. But
it is part of a greater picture, and that’s where a systems-perspective like dependency
theory can be very helpful. One central notion is that ‘people depend on media
information to meet needs and attain goals…(Littlejohn 1996, p. 348)’. What’s relevant
to this discussion, is Littlejohn’s point that ‘the more alternatives an individual has for
gratifying needs, the less dependent he\she will become on any single medium (ibid,
1996 p. 350)’. Consequently, The lower the socio-economic status, the more dependent
an individual is on one segment or medium, and the more they will be affected
cognitively, affectively and behaviourally by that segment.

Even McQuail, a noted researcher of uses-and-gratifications theory (of the limited effects
tradition) recognises that a lot of research indicates that people misjudge the causes of
their own behaviour, and suggests that ‘although individuals do use media for guidance,
surveillance and information, they also have a generalised arousal need that comes from
and is informed by the culture (McQuail in Littlejohn 1996, p. 353)’. Therefore,
dependency theory can be very useful when studying the relationships between variables
in media use. What dependency theory doesn’t do on the other hand, is explain wether
media is powerful in influencing any of the other segments other than individuals, such as
culture or communities. This is where the discussion on gender is important. Tom
O’Regan and Stephen Cox argue in Mobilising The Audience: Towards An Ecology of
Cultural Attendance (Balnaves et al. 2002, p. 156) that ‘a consistent finding in
ethnographically oriented studies of the television audience is the importance of gender to
understanding processes of audienceship.’ They also site Ann Gray when recognising that
feminism has been instrumental in getting gender on the audience agenda. Lumby argues
that with the arrival of new technology, it allows women to access new information
without restrictions like gender and consequently outside factors lose their impact: ‘On
the net, women (and men) can choose to conceal their gender and play at being the
opposite sex. And there’s widespread anecdotal evidence that many do (Lumby 1997, p.
144)’. In this way individuals confront constructions of gender and translate new
meanings. New technology isn’t only redefining the way women see themselves, but also
helps challenge socio-economic structures. Availability of computers enables people with
limited alternatives the opportunity to access mind-boggling amounts of information, and
with that, the very foundations of dependency theory among others are on shaky ground.

The difficulty of discussing how media use is dependent on certain variables is easier said
than done when these structures are changing on a dynamic scale. At least there exists for
the moment a model that incorporates and recognizes that change occurs all the time. To
summarise, this essay has explored how gender and socio-economic status is related to
media use seen from a combined limited- powerful-effects point of view. People will
always depend on information, but the ways in which individuals go about attaining and
negotiating this information is constantly challenged, so is the degree of dependence on a
specific medium. Lumby argues that an analysis is required, ‘of how new media
reorganises existing avenues of communication and ultimately our social relations and
notions of self (Lumby 1997, p. 143)’. The challenge that exists is how well literacy
within different media segments will evolve, and the unavoidable clash between the
effects tradition and critical theories towards a nuanced analysis of the type Lumby was
advocating.
Bibliography ESSAY A:
O’Regan, T. and Cox, S. (2002), “Towards An Ecology of Cultural Attendance,” In
Balnaves, M. O’Regan, T. & Sternberg, J. (2002), Mobilising the Audience, pp. 131 - 167

Fiske, J. (1987), “Intertextuality” in Fiske, J, Television culture, Methuen, pp.108-

127

Littlejohn, Stephen W. (1996), Theories of Human Communication (5th Edn),

Wadsworth

Lumby, Catharine (1997), Bad Girls: The Media, Sex & Feminism in the 90s, Allen &
Unwin

ESSAY B: 1:
The strangest thing about audiences is that they don’t exist. Even stranger is that until
fairly recently, with the development of audience research, there has always been the
assumption that it is there; the mass, the public. Of course there are people who use
media, people that watch TV, read newspapers, but an audience isn’t something that just
exists, it has to be created. Then maintained and managed. This salient shift in thinking is
eloquently expressed by John Hartley, as he says that audiences are created and
maintained institutionally in order to ‘take charge of the mechanisms of their own
survival.’ This essay will look at how the view of audiences has changed, and then
illustrate this by analysing how power discourses are upheld by creating audiences using
the governance cycle approach. An obvious reason why the view of audiences has
changed is because media technology is advancing and media use is becoming more and
more fragmented.

It was perhaps a very arrogant view, but the assumption was earlier on that the audience
was just there, ready to consume. This view is very clear if one looks at how audience
research has developed. Magic bullet theory for example, has never been seriously held
by theorists, the exceptions are the Frankfurter school of sociologists, who used it to back
up their theories of how the mass media is related to dominant ideology. In this context, it
is useful in illustrating how power discourses has developed from a focus on the message
to the audience. Katz and Lazarsfeld in Personal influence (1964) introduced the
influence of group membership and the concept of the two-step flow. Combined with
Carl Hovland, who identified a variety of psychological factors, they principally killed
off the myth of the bullet, and focused on what the audience does with the media: Katz
explained in McQuail that ‘The 'uses' approach assumes that people's…interests… are
pre-potent and that people selectively 'fashion' what they see and hear to these interests
(McQuail 1969).’ What uses-and-gratifications theory does is very directly shift the
power-balance from message to spectator. This means audience members do definitely
make conscious and motivated choices when negotiating different media. However, later
research has shown that people’s choices about media use are more complex than what
was originally thought, and has included a systems-theory approach. Dependency theory
builds on a lot from uses-and-gratifications, but includes that people are influenced in
their media use by other elements and outside factors, such as culture and socio-economic
factors.

The new economy is fragmented, and because of this, how actively the audience engages
in a medium is more important, and consequently, how one targets such a market, is very
important. This means that audiences are created; they are defined according to the
economic and political/ideological goals of those who are defining. Balnaves and
O’Regan recognise this when they argue that ‘knowledge about media audiences is
integrally tied up with the strategies and plans of action of industry players, campaigners,
professional bodies and interest groups who take up and apply this knowledge to
prosecute their own agendas (Balnaves et al. 2002, p. 10).’ What they propose, is a
governance cycle that enables theorists to analyse institutions, but also to include a
socially productive and ethical character:

According to Balnaves’ and O’Regan’s model, institutions are managers and provide or
regulate services. They become audience-minded when they define their audiences in the
form of media typologies. They then switch to research-modality in order to find out how
to reach their audiences in the most effective way. The institutions become campaign-
minded when they execute their tactics in order to reach the audience. They then evaluate
the campaign, and the audience recognises itself as a citizen, a governed and self-
governing subject. The governance-cycle bears striking resemblance to the models that
are utilised in marketing, but especially in PR. Returning to discourses of power,
Balnaves and O’Regan recognise that power lies in numbers, siting Hannah Arendt:
‘Power is never the property of an individual, it belongs to a group and remains in
existence only so long as the group keeps together. (Balnaves et al. 2002, p. 27).’
The more readers a newspaper has, the more powerful it is perceived to be. Kerry
Green’s text Mobilising Readers: Newspapers, Copy-tasters and Readerships (in
Balnaves et al. 2002) is a good example to illustrate and apply the governance cycle. It
concerns how newspapers must deal with declining readership, and since Green is an
academic and in certain ways must provide a service; writing papers and conducting
research in order to survive, he is a representative for an institution when he argues that
the decline in readerships ‘when coupled with stagnant levels of television viewing,
threatens the survival of news as an institution around the world (Green in Balnaves et al.
2002, p. 213).’ Green becomes audience minded when he goes into how journalists see
themselves in relation to newspaper readers, saying the research on readers calls for
‘nothing less than a thoroughgoing application of readership research to both journalism
practice and its organisational culture (Green in Balnaves et al. 2002, p. 214).’ Then
follows a detailed account of research into ‘audience engagement with news institutions
(Green in Balnaves et al. 2002, p. 215-225).’ When Green has decided to influence his
audience; journalists and the organisational culture, he becomes campaign minded, his
text becomes the campaign. He then evaluates how Australian news people work,
stressing how they must use his research to change: ‘the need for change goes beyond a
mere rapport between market researchers and copy-tasters. Both structural and newsroom
leadership style changes are required (Green in Balnaves et al. 2002, p. 233).’
When the text is used to train the audience, it becomes a citizen – given the opportunity
to govern itself, but also being governed.

The way the view on audience has changed is evident in everything from research to how
institutions create, maintain and govern audiences in order to accumulate power. Sue
Turnbull in her text Figuring the Audience (Cunningham & Turner, 2000) acknowledges
that the concept of audience-ship is truly post-modern. The most important feature of
post-modernism is the refusal to believe in a centralization of power and grand narratives.
Foucalt explains that knowledge is power, and therefore, those who control the
knowledge, have the power. With fragmentation comes a cluster of small institutions that
know that power lies in numbers, their very survival depends upon it.
Bibliography: ESSAY B

Balnaves, M. and O’Regan, T. (2002), “Governing Audiences,” In Balnaves, M.

O’Regan, T. & Sternberg, J. (2002), Mobilising the Audience, pp. 10 – 28

Green, K. (2002), “Mobilising Readers: Newspapers, Copy-tasters and Readerships,” In

Balnaves, M. O’Regan, T. & Sternberg, J. (2002), Mobilising the Audience, pp. 213 –
234

Katz, E. and Lazarsfeld, P. (1964), Personal Influence: the part played by people in
the flow of mass communications, New York

McQuail, D. (1969), Towards a Sociology of Mass Communications, London

Turnbull, S. (2000), “Figuring the Audience,” In Cunningham, S. & Turner, G. (Eds),

The Australian Television Book, Chapter 12

ESSAY 3: (1)
The traditional view of the audience is a one-way communication process. Messages are
created, decoded and sent through mass media channels. People then negotiate these
messages using different media and they are then influenced or not influenced by
messages depending on how dependent they are on a specific medium. The placement of
power is usually with the institutions that need audiences to accumulate power.
This essay will argue that the increased interactivity between gamers and game creators is
challenging existing power structures and how they view audiences.
The traditional view of the audience has changed drastically since its conception, starting
from the point of view that the audience is out there; it just needs to be reached through a
message that can get their attention - to a view that audiences don’t exist at all.
Individuals exist, but are defined as a specific typology in order for an institution exploit
that segment and to make a profit.

What describes the current view of the audience could be best described as fragmented.
Sue Turnbull describes the major problem as ‘how to pin the audience down: just how
can an entire range of media practices in which people engage be limited and defined
(Turnbull in Cunningham & Turner, 2000, p. 86)?’ For the industry, audiences are a
means of survival; passing the buck. They create audiences which they can sell to
advertisers, and in the current media environment this is ever more difficult to do. Media
abundance is the very source of audience fragmentation. If that is so, how is it possible to
maintain an audience for a product? Corporations have for a long time thought of fans of
programmes and other media as pathological side effects, but have now realised that it is
with this segment they must establish relationships with. John Banks sites Virginia
Nightingale when pointing out the opportunities that lie in fan building: ‘the fan has…
become the target of ‘renewed managerial activity to contain the quixotic preoccupations
which become pretexts for the development of new and commercially exploitable fan
communities (Banks in Balnaves et al. 2002, p. 188).’ Looking at series such as ‘X-Files’
and ‘Buffy: The Vampire Slayer,’ this is more than evident, but when conglomerates
attempt the same community building on the net, something goes terribly wrong, as
Banks argues: ‘The audience – at least as it is understood for traditional media – has
escaped the net and resists delivery (Banks in Balnaves et al. 2002, p. 189).’

He continues to argue that online communities use totally different ways of constructing
‘practices, expectations, materials, tools and technologies (Banks is Balnaves 2002, p.
189).’ He speculates that the reason for the failure of online community building can be
because of the paradigm of one-way communication in order to influence and create
audiences. The implicit argument is therefore that one has to develop larger degrees of
interactivity with audiences. The question is, are institutions ready for this? One thing
seems sure, the development of a more interactive and dialogue-based approach is
unavoidable. This is especially evident in the development of games. When looking at
how the game Grand Theft Auto 3 was released, one can assume that the game
developers were interested in developing a two-way dialogue with the gamers from the
start. Firstly, it was released on PS2, then on PC 6 months later. What’s striking about the
release for PC is that it’s designed to be tampered with. The official site, GTA3.com, is
maintained by a fan of the game, and it features several downloads, like cars, skins and
other ways to personalise the game. It also features links to the game developers,
Rockstar games, where patches and technical support is available. Other games that
include the same approach, is the Sims, as Bank also has noted: ‘The Sims game provides
an excellent case study of the computer game industry enlisting and leveraging the online
community fans into a commercially successful network (Banks in Balnaves et al. 2002,
p. 198).’

Hard-core gamers increasingly expect that companies will listen to, engage with and
support the fans that build around titles. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the
computer literacy of many fans\gamers is almost equal to the game designers in many
cases. Secondly, games are counter intuitively very social. To sell a commercially
successful game nowadays, the game must include multiplayer capability. This cannot be
done without including the audience that are going to use the product. Thirdly, the main
point of the net is interactivity. This new gamer audience follows the logic of the
discourse of power. The larger the audience, the more power, except there’s no institution
there to accumulate the power, and so the gamers themselves have realised that they have
the capability to influence the existing power structures. This poses an interesting
dilemma for corporations: how close to you let the audience come to you? The paradox is
that as conglomerates create audiences, they cannot manage them, because the services
that they provide have been partially taken over by the audience itself! The gamer
audience feels that they own the product as well, and consequently they get to call the
shots. The interesting part is that this can lead to two different outcomes. One,
corporations must redefine the way the see audiences on a massive scale, or two;
corporations will give up trying to venture into this territory.

To summarise, for corporations to be successful, there must be a certain balance of

power. In order for these organizations to be successful, they have to: one, deliver
something of value that can breed relationships with their audiences and two, be able to
manage them. The Sims and GTA3 are examples of games that are successful because
the game developers let the audience take part a period of time after the game was
released. This change from one-way to two-way communication in the organization-
customer relationship is a great challenge to existing power structures, and will perhaps
be too much to handle after a while.
Bibliography:

Turnbull, S. (2000), “Figuring the Audience,” In Cunningham, S. & Turner, G. (Eds),

The Australian Television Book, Chapter 12

Banks, J. (2002), “Gamers as Co-Creators: enlisting the virtual audience – a report from
the net face,” In Balnaves, M. O’Regan, T. & Sternberg, J. (2002), Mobilising the
Audience, pp. 213 – 234
KCB349: Media Audiences
Take-home exam marking criteria

Non- Poor Fair

existent

Attempt is made to answer question, rather simply present material associated with topic.

Ability to integrate lecture and tutorial materials.

Ability to integrate required and recommended readings.

Well-structured argument.

Ability to summarise and synthesise key points in a clear, coherent fashion.

Demonstrated knowledge of key theoretical issues associated with the question.

Use of examples to illustrate key points of argument.

Clarity of expression, grammar and presentation of report.

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