Thursday, May 6, 2010

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Theme 1: The early electronic media led to the idea that the audience would be an undifferentiated mass. Trace thinking about audience from mass to "the long tail".Include discussion( And illustration) of how demographics and media genres created media audiences ,and the ways in which social media can create, in theory , an audience of 1 for many media experiences. In early media the audience was viewed as a mass that could be manipulated. But as technology has changed, so has that image. The mass audience works for media business and advertisers who need this theory for marketing and publishing and trying to reach the largest amount of people possible. The dis-agregated audience was the audience that was in all different locations- some at work, some int he suburbs, some in the isolated countryside. This concept was important to advertisers who were trying to sell to the audience. In the 1920's and 1930's the radio was better than the newspaper because the audience didn't need to be literate, didn't need to pay for usage, and they could use celebrity voices to advertise their products. Then the audience became a commodity that could be bought and between networks and advertisers. The audience is separated into demographics in which statistics are used to describe a population of viewers and/or listeners. Now in this digital age, the audience refers to more than just radio and newspaper, and includes the internet and television, as well as any other media that can measure its users. In the concept of Demassification the audience is separated by the long-tail effect. Websites such as Netflix, which rents out movies to users, uses an application to suggest movies to users based on previous rentals. In doing this, users can be separated from the mass audience based on their taste and suggested less mainstream movies and more obscure titles/writers/themes until they develop a very specified taste and become and audience of one. Then there are websites that works to separate users in a negative way. There are niches for people with eating disorders, suicidal tendencies, or those who commit hate crimes, etc. where website users encourage each others damaging behavior. This polarization is protected by the first amendment freedom of speech and can sometimes gain a rather large audience with a common goal. More commonly though, the audience masses together for a good cause such as raising awareness and support for autistic children or a breast cancer walk. The audience can diverge or converge, for good or for bad, and can also be manipulated by advertisers or site hosts. Measuring the audience has proven tricky but with the assistance of Nielson and the internet which can actually measure the number of IP addresses and clicks coming into their site, it has become more strategic and successful.

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