Postmodern Audiences

- have audiences become accustomed to the stimulation and excitement of spectacular films/games and a sense of spectacle has become something that (young?) audiences increasingly demand from cultural experiences?

• Has narrative coherence become less important for audiences?
Battleships, Transformers, Hobo With a Shotgun

• In terms of ideas, has cultural material become more simplistic and superficial, and audiences are no longer so concerned with the process of understanding a text. Think here about a film like Moulin Rouge where the plot is in some sense irrelevant to the overall impact of the film.
Depthlessness memes. Nothing is good or bad, everything is equal
• has the attention span of audiences reduced as they become increasingly accustomed to the spectacle-driven and episodic nature of postmodern texts


• in its ‘waning of affect’, has postmodernism contributed to audiences become emotionally detached from what they see. They are desensitised and unable to respond ‘properly’ to suffering and joy.
When people film concerts when they're there or watch the big screens when the band is right in front of them. The world can only experience things second hand.
• has postmodernism contributed to a feeling among audiences that arts and culture does not really have anything to tell us about our own lives and instead simply provides us with somewhere we can escape or retreat to.

Alain J-J Cohen - 'Hyper spectator'. A viewer with deep knowledge of cinema and can pick up the intertextual references.

Anne Friedberg- We have control over what we watch and where we watch it. "Films have helped contribute to the postmodern quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional understanding of time and space."

Ethnographic model

When the researcher enters into the culture of a group and uses questions and interviews to try and understand media engagement from he perspective of that group.

1) Engagement with media is often structured on domestic environment due to the domestication of entertainment and leisure.
2) Some texts seem to belong to a genre that has gender appeal. E.g. Soaps are seen as 'female texts' as they look at matriarchal power and nature of character relationships. The news is seen as a 'male' text as this is more factual; men need wider cultural understanding due to spending less time at home (domestic space) and more time in public (cultural space)
3) Our society is in danger of divided information-rich and information-poor. Schools and TV programs aim to present positive gender representations. Real-life programs use females in less traditional roles to equal the balance that often divides between men and women.

Audience Theory

How you chose a target audience in relation to the genre and form you selected

• UK Tribes
• Questionnaires to potential target audience
• Audience chosen based on existing audience for our genre

Whether you targeted an existing audience which already enjoys specific existing products like yous

• Yes as there is then a guaranteed audience

How you made creative choices to appeal to this target audience

• Focus on star image (90% of shots contain the main star)
• Frequent close up shots
• Narrative that is relatable to our audience

How you think your target audience will use your text

• Uses and gratifications model - Diversion. Easy-to-watch, entertaining
• Uses and gratifications model - Identity. The female star is a potential role model and the narrative is perhaps relatable to our target audience.

How you media text could be marketed to the target audience

• Social networking - The use of Facebook and Twitter to share videos and promote products
• YouTube - Easy access, world-wide accessible
• Advertising poster (anciallry product) - use star image to create sense of branding.

Under Stuart Hall's theory of 'Preferred Readings', what type of 'reading' might this target audience give to your text?

• Dominant reading - feel pathos towards the female character and sympathise with her situation. Side with the female character.
• Negotiated reading - understand the emotions conveyed in the narrative but cannot personally relate to them.
• Oppositional reading - Break-up situation is exaggerated and unrealistic.

"Products will never be successful unless they are carefully constructed to meet pre-established audience needs and desires"
- I agree, I feel that products must meet at least one aspect from the uses and gratifications model (Information, identity, social interaction, diversion) in order to satisfy audience needs.

Applying audience theories to your product

Me and my partner, Charlotte, created a music video to Taylor Swift's song 'Forever and Always'. Our target audience was girls aged between 13-21 as we felt the themes and issues we were highlighting in our video, would be relatable for them. For example, we have used an 18 year old female to play the role of the main star; her look would potentially be idolised by the younger target audience and seen as admiral to the higher end of our audience.
The uses and gratifications model is a relevant theory for our video. The area of identification is relevant in that young girls can find aspects of their own personalities in the main character and potentially view her as a role model in how to deal with broken relationships since she acts as a sign of hope; an area we highlighted with the lit candle at the end of our video. The area of diversion can also be applied; our video provides the opportunity to temporarily escape into a different lifestyle and be entertained; therefore distracting us from worries and problems surrounding our own lives. Our audience is not passive, but active and feel sympathetic towards the relationship break up and feel pathos towards the girl. We have conveyed the female character as innocent and vulnerable which heightens the sense of sympathy from the audience.

Morley's theory of an active audience can be applied to our video. The audience view the text and then formulate an opinion based on what they see. A preferred reading of our text could be that the themes we raise are relatable and the audience share the reaction of the break up with the main star. An oppositional reading could be that our narrative is unrealistic and exaggerated and the audience think that we have created a hyper-real situation. A negotiated reading of our text could be that the audience recognise the break up as sad, however they cannot relate to it and therefore don't connect with the narrative on an emotional level.

Our audience feedback was extremely useful as it allowed us to collect feedback from our target audience and see their initial response to what we had produced. A lot of issues that arose from our first draft video were based around problems with mise-en-scene and camera angles therefore we were able to go back and correct these to improve the experience for our target audience.

Overall, I feel that our product appealed to our target audience because we used a narrative that is relatable and perhaps a major issue within the age bracket we aimed to target. The simplicity of the narrative makes it easy to watch and understand, again linking to the diversion section of the uses and gratifications model, making it entertaining to watch.