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[jakekosty]

Audience Studies Week #10

This week’s blog is about digital audiences. In the online, interactive, digital media world… audiences have power. Sullivan offers up some examples that lead us into 2018, these examples are that the majority of Americans use Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, and WhatsApp. The amount of people that use these apps have been growing for the past couple of years and will continue to grow as time goes on. New apps will also continue to be created and will get just as popular as any of the apps listed. An app that is being used a lot today is the app called Tik Tok. Tik Tok was one of the most used social media apps of 2020, especially by the younger generation. Personally, I think Tik Tok is a great app and I use it often. It brings a whole new concept into the social media world. People post videos of any genre on there and based off what a single person likes, comments, or shares on their own feed, will determine what kind of content shows up for them everyday. For me, I tend to enjoy watching what people like to call, “redneck” videos. Not all of these videos are necessarily all people who live in the southern United States or live on a farm. But these videos are of people doing somewhat dangerous things on motorized vehicles and funny things while drinking alcohol. These kinds of Tik Tok videos are the most entertaining for me so whenever I like a video like this, the app remembers and will continue to put more of this content on my feed when I am currently using the app. Professor Good gets into the topic of YouTube in the highlight video, explaining it as a coordinating mechanism between individual and collective creativity and meaning production, as well as a mediator between various competing industry oriented discourses and ideologies and as various audience or user oriented ones. YouTube has become a digital age example of prosumers and big data. I am someone who will not necessarily go on YouTube everyday to watch a series a videos, but I do tend to search up specific videos on Google and when I click on the link to watch the video it will automatically bring me to YouTube.  YouTube, along with mostly all social media sites, are ran by user-generated content. Users also create, store, and distribute content. With these social media sites, the product is the content that is being created by the users themselves. People may not think about social media like this often, but after learning about this concept I have no realized that all social media sites are, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are just users creating their own content and posting it. All Instagram is, is people that upload pictures for other people to see. I have an Instagram account and I post pictures mostly of me hanging out with friends, participating in sports, and doing fun activities at my cottage. What determines if an account on social media is popular is based on how many followers the account has. Usually, famous people that set up social media account automatically will get thousands or millions of followers right away just because of who they are away from social media. Other people that are extremely popular on social media are social media influencers. These people started on social media as nobody, and then continued to grow and fan base and followers based of the content that they post. For example, one of the biggest Tik Tok stars in the world is a 16-year-old girl named Charli D’Amelio. D’Amelio posts videos on Tik Tok of her dancing and creating or continuing current trends that are circulating around the social media world. D’Amelio has 102.2 million followers on Tik Tok along with 8.1 billion total likes. Those number are unbelievable, and she is one of the most popular social media influencers to ever live. The fan base that she grew is mostly the younger generation of girls and they all idolize her. This is only one example of a popular social media influencer. I myself, do not follow these young Tik Tok stars. I follow influencers that often make videos about sports, motorized vehicles, or country fun. Professor Good mentions in the highlight video that the CEO of Twitter says that transparency will get even more challenging as social media companies shift more of their content moderation decisions from humans to algorithms. Companies need to be able to explain why those decisions are made and had that capacity to overrule them. Lawmakers have been in disagreement over whether Facebook, Twitter, and Google take tough enough actions against misinformation and hate speech. I believe that these companies do not do enough to prevent these actions. I recently watched the film “The Social Dilemma” and actually got taught about this exact issue. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google) is the reason why this misinformation and hate speech occurs. The social media companies did nothing about this, and it got out of hand extremely quickly. Unfortunately, there are little to no laws about social media accounts allowing this to happen so nothing was done to stop it. Watching “The Social Dilemma” was very informational for me and it opened up my eyes about digital media and how it is affecting the audience.

[jakekosty]

Audience Studies Week #9

This week’s blog focuses on media fandom and audience subcultures. Media fandom is based on how fan communities extended their interactions with media texts by logging on to discussions on the internet, collecting artifacts associated with their media interests, and even by participating in fan conventions and other related social activities. I find that there is so many different groups of media fandom today. Any single genre and most movies have their own set of fans. In the textbook it is explained how ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ became extremely popular un the United States, grossing over $100 million. The movie became a cult phenomenon through midnight showings across the country and around the world. There was even a website that was made for fans of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’. Fans could log on to the website and check showtimes for the film at each location it was playing. There were even options for people who had never seen the movie before to have a guide going into the movie, a prop list, an Amazon store, custom costuming ideas, a fan club link, etc. People were so invested in this movie that they would go see it over and over again, and people that had never seen it before seemed to become immediate fans of the film. I personally had never heard about this film before reading about it in the textbook but after doing some research I have become interested in watching this film myself. Even though it is an older movie, the amount of people that went crazy for it must mean that the movie has something to offer for fans and it definitely proved itself to have potential. A movie series now a days that I believe has some of the largest media fandom groups is Marvel’s “The Avengers”. This series has a highest grossing movie every year a new film is released. I can personally say that I have seen all of these films and they are amazing. I cannot exactly put myself in the category of media fandom for this film. I definitely loved every movie, but other people definitely loved it way more than I did based on their obsessions and fandom for this movie. During opening night of each movie, the people that attend often dress up in their favourite character’s costume and are waiting in line hours before the movie even starts. There are also conventions for movies where everybody gets together at a set location and dresses up to mingle, play movie related games, and eat food. Something that I believe I am definitely more of a fan of is sports. I am mostly a fan of hockey and football. I have absurd amounts of Toronto Maple Leafs gear, including jerseys, pictures, beer mugs, and even flags. I am also a big Buffalo Bills football fan and have the same kinds of merchandise. Sports to me are much more thrilling than movies, and I enjoy going to games whenever I can despite COVID-19. My family has season tickets for the Toronto Maple Leafs so we often go to the games and a lot of the time meet players after the game at the Harbour 60 Bar across the street from the Scotiabank centre. Talking about fan stereotypes, I agree and disagree with some of the content that is provided to us. I agree with the fact that fans are often portrayed as consumers willing to buy anything with a logo or image of their favourite media program or star. I do not exactly agree with Jenkins saying that media fans were often tagged as social misfits, intellectually immature, and feminized. I think that those words can be hurtful to people who are just minding their own business following the things that they love. Everybody has a passion for something in this world and regardless of what that passion is, I do not agree with bashing people because of their passion. I believe that if someone enjoys or loves something that they should pursue whatever they would like to do to be involved with that certain thing. The topic in the textbook “Fan Activism: Challenging Institutional Producers” discusses how the well-known show Star Trek was going to be cancelled. When word of the impending cancellation if the series leaked in 1967, a group of science fiction fans began to organize an extensive letter-writing campaign to help save the program. Fans even wrote an advice sheet for other fans called “How to Write Effective Letters to Save Star Trek”. Unfortunately for Star Trek fans, all the work that they had put in was not good enough. Star Trek was still cancelled. Even after it was cancelled fans were still hosting conventions to try to get the show to air again with the original actors playing their parts. But it was still not good enough and the television series was not continued. The closest thing that Star Trek fans got to continuing the series was a few movies that were released in the 21st century. This leads into the topic of protecting continuity and canon. When fans connect to other enthusiasts through face-to-face or online interactions, they immediately share a common bond of fascination with, and knowledge of, a particular media text. This is relatable to my life and my fandom of the Toronto Maple Leafs. For example, if I am walking around a mall with a Leafs jersey on and I pass by another person with a Leafs jersey on, often what happens is we will lock eyes and then say something like “Go Leafs Go”, and either high five or fist bump. That has happened to me so many times I have lost count. It shows that between Leafs fans, and any fan in sports, there is that immediate bond and connection that we have with each other.

[jakekosty]

Audience Studies Week #8

This week’s blog is based of reception context and media rituals. In today’s day and age, there are screens and technology everywhere. There are screens at your house, in restaurants, hospitals, sporting arenas, etc. Screens and technology are so popular that you carry a phone around with you everywhere, everyday. Living in a global pandemic, it is harder to get out and go places. One of the videos Professor Good shows us in the highlight video for this week is for a Netflix party. Netflix party allows you watch movies and shows online with friends so that you do not feel as alone. I have never heard of this Netflix feature before seeing it in the highlight video, and I find it extremely cool. Since people cannot physically be together right now, this gives people the opportunity to watch movies and shows with their friends online. I have ever tried this, but I am intrigued and now interested in trying this out. This is such a great idea to help people not feel as alone anymore. I feel that it can bring a little bit more structure into people’s social lives now a days. You can set up movie dates online with friends, be able to talk about the film afterwards, etc. “Television continues to be the most important and widely used media technology in the domestic context. The introduction of new media technologies has not fundamentally altered the amount of television use in the home” (Sullivan, p. 171). Not including schoolwork, teens use screens more than seven hours a day. Now with COVID-19, the use of screens has gone even higher and the weekly screen time usage on iPhones are through the roof as of right now. I know for me personally, since the pandemic has started, I have used screens a lot more than I would if we were living in a normal world. I find that because I cannot go out and do as many activities or hangout with as many friends anymore, I use technology and screens to occupy my time. This is a bad habit, but I find that there is really nothing else to do right now other than schoolwork and going to the gym once a day. I have been investing my time in watching shows on Netflix and other movies/TV show platforms, and I am also on my phone more than ever. Professor Good then gets into the topic of watching sports in a movie theater compared to watching sports at home. “Despite such a rapid surge in watching sports in the movies theaters, there is no academic research to date that directly compares the audiences’ experiences of watching sports in theaters vs in a home” (Kim et al., 2016). Watching sports in movie theaters has become a popular thing for sports fans. The reasoning that I believe is the reason for this is because watching a sports game in a movie theater gives the viewers a much different experience. The screen is obviously bigger, image quality is better, the speakers are louder, and it gets people out of the house. If going to the actual game is out of the question this an alternative that people seem to love rather than being at home. “In the theater, fans get dressed up in their team’s gear and act as they would if they were at the game – cheering, cursing, screaming – this adds realism to the viewing experience” (Molon, 2013). I find that when watching a sports game at home with my family, I am often interrupted. I also find the atmosphere is not as good unless watch the game in our theater room in the basement. It seems to be proposed that audiences’ sense of presence is the primary factor driven by sports viewing conditions, while attractiveness of the game is the content-driven factor. A few of the variables that play a factor in the atmosphere of watching sports is presence, realism, and immersion. Presence is the perceptual illusion of nonmediation. Realism refers to how an individual perceives the naturalness of media content as if that person is experiencing the content directly as part of their environment. Lastly, immersion refers to the degree to which an individual feels involved in a particular experience and is caught up in the presentation of the media. All of these variables are things that I had never thought of before. I agree with the concepts of all of them and I can relate it to my everyday life of watching sports. The biggest variable in my opinion though, is suspense (game attractiveness). This is when the audience develops a strong disposition towards a player or a team, which then leads the viewers to hope for a positive outcome, and a negative outcome for the opponents. A real-life example I have of all these variables and the attractiveness of watching a game at a movie theater is when I went with a group of my friends, and our fathers. We are all Toronto Raptors fans and when they were in the middle of their huge playoff run, which they ended up winning, we all went to the movie theaters to watch the game. The theater we went to was in Markham, Ontario, and had reclining seats, waiters/waitresses serving food and alcohol, and an even bigger screen than most theaters. Going to this theater gave me a whole new perspective on watching a sports game. Everyone in the theater was cheering for the raptors, screaming, and yelling at the screen. All of the factors and variables that were previously discussed had a big part in why that experience was so much fun. The game attractiveness was the biggest variable for everyone at that time too. The Raptors were playing the Milwaukee Bucks in the semi finals and one of the best players in the league played for the Bucks. Watching the Raptors beat legendary player made it that much better. Obviously, we got the positive outcome that we wanted, and the opponents got a negative outcome.

[jakekosty]

Audience Studies Week #7

This week’s blog is about interpreting and decoding mass media texts. What distinguishes media interpretation from other uses-oriented theories of audiences is that the main concern shifts here to the content of the media rather than asking what motivates audiences to select media content. Scholars and media interpretation look even more closely to how audiences respond to specific aspects of media content. Looking at the Granelli and Zenor article, Decoding “The Code”: Reception Theory and Moral Judgment of Dexter, the question arises asking, why dexter? “For many decades, media psychologists have also been interested in how audiences interpret texts, especially media that contains behaviour that is considered to be morally reprehensible” (Granelli & Zenor, p. 5058). Dexter is a show based on situational ethics and the revenge and punishment to the people that deserve it. I believe that the reason shows like Dexter (House, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, etc.) are so popular considering the protagonist’s actions seem to be in conflict with the viewer’s moral code because the audience could either potentially wish that they could break moral codes in the real worlds, or just because they feel a sense of enjoyment when watching bad people go down by violence. I watch certain shows like this because for me personally, I enjoy watching violent shows that involves justice and revenge. I think that because these kinds of situations and the story lines of these shows do not happen as much in real life, it gives me a sense of enjoyment to imagine an unrealistic view of what is not currently happening in the real world. I also think that knowing the protagonist is doing something that is morally wrong gives a sense of excitement. I believe everybody at times in their lives wants to have a little bit of “badass” in them. I think that it is thrilling for people and gives them a rush that they don’t usually get to feel, and by watching these kinds of shows or movies it helps people feel a little bit more emotion in the direction of being a “badass”. Granelli and Zenor create these types of respondents to the show. Factor 1 is Justified Vigilante, Factor 2 is Psychological Puzzle, Factor 3 Gratuitous Murder, Factor 4 is Deviant Escapism. Each factor is people that are broken up based on their beliefs on the show. Based off the four factors I believe I would categorize myself in Factor 4 deviant Escapism. This factor labels Dexter as an anti-hero and they believe he is a crazy sociopath, and he knows what he is doing is wrong. They believe that the message of the show is on the deviance of the character and it shows that we never know what someone is capable of and there is no pleasure taken in the murder of criminals, but they admit to having a sick sense of humor. It is not hard for people in this factor to watch the show, and they enjoy watching the show because it is stirring and emotional.  I do not find myself admiring Dexter, but I also do not find myself hating him. I can basically understand that there is so much violence and revenge because this is a show and it is meant for entertainment, but in real life this would not necessarily happen nor is it okay to believe that murder is the only/best revenge. Looking at negotiated meaning, this is a turning point in audience reception studies, the first study to look empirically and systematically at audience interpretations of television. Secondly, audiences are capable of producing their own meanings. Another term that I find extremely interesting is intertextuality. Intertextuality is “the process of connecting our media experiences together, this can be defined as the fundamental and inescapable interdependence of all textual meaning upon the structures of meaning proposed by other texts” (Gray, 2006). Basically, intertextuality is the experiences in our lives that help us decode and interact with content we receive as audience members, as well as the content of media that we receive that helps us decode content. The reason this term is so intriguing to me is that you can base intertextuality off of anything really. Interests that you have, movies and TV shows that you watch, YouTube frequently viewed, what you choose to follow on your social media accounts, etc. The experiences in your life can really affect a person in the future, along with the media that they come across. These experiences can help you decode content in certain ways that shape how your life will go. For example, a life experience that I have had that I believe has shaped the content that I receive is during tubing at my cottage. I was on a three-person tube with two of my friends while getting pulled off the back of the boat. While the boat was turning, we hit a wave that sent all three of us flying. I ended up smacking my head against the water really hard and sustaining a concussion. Ever since then I have never been on a tube again, nor can I even watch content of other people tubing. This may seem like a very pointless problem but because of my personal experience and even seeing other people wipe out on tubes through the media, I have a serious fear of tubing now. I still enjoy participating in every other water sport including skiing, wakeboarding, barefoot skiing, etc. but never will I ever get back on a tube again. I am sure everybody has their own experiences that are either major or minor but regardless of what they are it will affect out that person decodes content as an audience member throughout their lifetime. At the end of the highlight video, Professor Good begins to talk about semiotics, which is the sign, signified, and signifier. I have always found these terms interesting. When looking at a logo you can identify what it is physically, but you can also identify what it stands for, or means. You can determine if they are desirable, not desirable, if they are cool, not cool, if you want it or would not want it, etc. People view certain symbols with a lot of meaning that help people communicate.

[jakekosty]

Audience Studies Week #6

This week’s blog is about audiences as agents, which is people that have agency. Uses and gratifications sees the audience as active, selective, discriminating, self-aware. Uses and gratifications purposes that the audience members actively choose media channels and content to suit their own needs at a particular moment. It takes an essentially functional perspective on audience activity. When using the term functional, that is explaining the terms that were previously listed about uses and gratifications and making functional choices about what the audience members want to achieve in their audience activity. There five criteria that can further help with understanding uses and gratifications. One of those five criteria is that mass media compete with other sources of need satisfaction. For example, if you were looking to relax you could watch TV, play a video game, or have a conversation with a friend. Uses and gratifications is about conscious choice. Unconscious effects are often researched separately, but it is important to point out that conscious choice and unconscious effects are not necessarily two separate things and they can go together. The example used in the highlight video about Blumer: choice and effect is about a boy who was using movies to gain insight very consciously about romance. A real-life example that I have about this subject is watching NHL games to further improve my own hockey skills. As a hockey player I always wanted to get better and would train for hours everyday to improve my skill, endurance, and strength. One thing that you cannot learn from training though, is certain things that the professionals do. The professionals are in the NHL for a reason and so I began watching games extremely attentively so that I could learn little aspects of the game that I did not know. These little aspects can include things like certain movements the players make when they skate, with their arms, head, stick, and legs. Another thing could be how players move around to open areas of the ice so that the player on their own team with the puck can have available options to pass the puck. These are all things that I payed close attention too and was determined to do so that I could take what I learned and apply it to my own game. Herzog’s research asked women who listened to serial radio, why they listen. The three answers that were listed were “as emotional release”, “to engage in wishful thinking – fantasize – draw on the successes of the radio characters”, and “as a source of advice”. This is showing that consciousness of seeking out certain kind of content and learning from that content. “The shift from questions of widespread media influence to those regarding the utility of the media for individual viewers heralded an early shift toward a uses-oriented view of audience experience” (Sullivan). Another real-life example that I have connected to this is the certain accounts that I follow on Instagram. I am someone who is very invested in fitness and healthy living. So, rather than choosing to follow meme accounts and certain profiles that will provide no knowledgeable information, I choose to follow workout accounts, healthy eating accounts, and body rehabbing accounts. All of these accounts will provide a different aspect of information which will all intertwine into the idea of healthy living. The workout videos will motivate me to workout, and a lot of the time I find new workouts that I can do myself when at the gym or even at home. The healthy eating accounts post recipes for healthy and delicious meals that I can easily make myself. Eating healthy is one of the most important aspects to living a healthy lifestyle. The body rehabbing accounts help me learn new ways that I can stretch, massage, and rehab my body when I am feeling sore or after I injure something. Without these accounts I would probably still be in pain in certain areas that I have injured in the past. Thankfully, I have mastered taking care of my body and I have to give a lot of the credit to these Instagram accounts that I follow. This real-life example is connected to media as functional. Media as functional includes things like gratification sought, gratification obtained, instrumental, ritualized, structural, and relational. These are all aspects of using media to fulfill needs such as surveillance (watching the world around us in what we are consuming), correlation (the content we are consuming helps us to understand what goes with what), entertainment, and the opportunity to socialize. “Our needs usually emerge only when more prepotent needs have been gratified” (Maslow, p.115). A concept that I found interesting from this week’s lessons was the MAIN acronym. The ‘M’ stands for modality-based gratification, which refers to the different methods of presentation (audio or pictures) of media content, appealing to different aspects of the human perceptual system (hearing and seeing). The ‘A’ stands for agency-based gratifications, which is the gratification of being agents or sources of information. The ‘I’ stands for interactivity-based gratifications which allows the user to make real-time changes to the content in the medium and allows users to interact with and through the medium. The last letter of the acronym is ‘N’ which stands for navigability-based gratifications. Navigability-based gratifications are the ability to freely move around online, fine one’s way, do what one wants to do, and find one’s way back.

[jakekosty]

Audience Studies Week #5

Audience ratings are extremely important to companies producing content, they want to know when, where, and what people are watching. Nielsen is the company that is in charge of all the ratings. Nielsen's Total Audience Ratings is the best representative measurement of media consumption across platforms and devices. Nielsen provides metrics that enable comparability between traditional viewing on a television set and media consumption that occurs on other devices and platforms. Generally, the audience ratings seemed to be tracked at nighttime. The reason for this is because in the morning and during the day it was evident that most people would be at work or doing something somewhat productive. Once people got home from work is when they would usually turn the TV and have free time to browse social media and be on the internet. Due to COVID, this changed the ratings drastically. Since people are now working from their homes, it is harder to get accurate results of when people are actually watching TV. People also have more time to be on social media while in the comfort of their homes. For example, my mother is someone who has always worked from home. I would often see her doing work in her office, but also notice that the TV in the living room would be on all day long. This kind of situation can really give off false ratings because she was not actually watching television. Now, the fact that most people are working from home as of right now is really putting a spin on Nielsen’s ratings. The importance of audience demographics is something that is interesting and important to talk about. The three most important demographics for advertisers are age, gender, and income. Age is important because they often try to attract a younger audience. Advertising to people in their teens and twenties is what companies want because that age group, especially in the present day, is all over television and social media. Advertisers are no t that interested in advertising to anyone that is above the age of 50. They want to younger generation because they know that that age group are the ones that are more interested in social media and television. Gender is also a critical form of demographic segmentation that affects the value of audiences to advertisers. Advertisers value men more highly than women, but the type of product being advertised also plays a large role. The reason that men are valued higher to advertisers is because women typically consume more media than men and are easier to reach with advertising messages. The same pattern occurs for income. People with lower income consume more media than people with a higher income. I agree with these statistics because I see a resemblance with my own family. My mom is typically on social media way more than my dad is, in fact my dad is rarely even on social media at all. The only times you would ever see my father on social media is to go look at what other family members are posting on Facebook. I can see why advertisers would rather target somebody like him in order to get new business and a larger audience. I also have a 18 year old sister who is constantly on social media and watching television/Netflix. She is already giving all the advertisers business and if they ever needed to target her it would be easy for them. I on the other hand, rarely goes on social media unless its to check recent sporting news or watch highlights of the most previous sporting events. Audience engagement in television, in my opinion, is extremely hard to gather correct information on because of the day and age that we are living in. As I said before, many televisions in households are left on during the day and in the evenings. Nielsen realistically as no idea if people are actually watching the television or paying attention to it. Companies like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crave, etc. also play a big factor in why regular television is not as popular, especially with younger people. An example with me, supporting that statement, is that I rarely ever watch television unless it is a sporting event… but even with sporting events, I often stream them online. If I want to watch a show or a movie I immediately go to Netflix or Amazon Prime. I know that I am not the only one that does this because all of my roommates here at school do the exact same thing that I do. Monitoring social media is a lot easier for a company like Nielsen to keep track of because of how often people use them. Nielsen being able to monitor Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram is extremely important because those are three of the biggest social media sites. It would be important for Nielsen to keep up with the development of social media apps though. For example, Tik Tok has had a massive incline in popularity. It is currently one of the biggest social media apps and the younger generation spends a crazy amount of time on that app.

[jakekosty]

Audience Studies Week #4

Something that I found interesting from this week was the power of the audience and the difference between knowledge and an opinion. I thought hard about the slide that said ‘Plato was respectful of the powers of the public to make decisions… but he was generally skeptical about the wisdom of the common people to make decisions in their own best interest or to strive toward the creation of a morally sound state”. This is where the terms “doxa” and “episteme” connect to the slide. Doxa is considered a popular opinion, and episteme means knowledge. The distinction between these two terms could be more complicated then some may think. To me, popular opinion is an opinion that is popular among an audience. Most of the audience believes in the same thing or has the same thoughts about a certain situation, scenario, event, etc. Knowledge is different because it can either be a popular opinion or information about something that only minimal people know. I believe people get knowledge from becoming experienced at something or having inside information about something. A real-life example that I have that connects with these terms is from a couple years back while I was in Tampa Bay with my family. My cousin plays for the Tampa Bay Lighting hockey team in the NHL, and we were in Tampa to attend a game and watch him play. Unfortunately, he had sustained an injury a few weeks before the game that we attended so we did not get to see him on the ice. When I was scrolling through Twitter, I saw people posting their opinions on when my cousin would return the ice. Many people’s opinions were that he would be back playing in only a couple weeks, but after talking to him at the arena that day I had direct information from him that he would not be able to play for another two months. The reason this was not released to the media or fans is because the team did not want to show people how serious his injury was. So, as you can see from this story, I had knowledge of when he would return, while most fans had no idea and just had an opinion. As discussed in the highlight video, in the 18th century the press began to play a big role in enabling people to more knowledge. The press would provide information to people, in mostly newspapers, about anything important. This was the only way people got information about things, they had no other way of knowing. It is the same thing now a days except we have many ways of knowing anything we want too. I believe people are much more knowledgeable in the present day because of all the options we have to get information. Obviously, back in the 18th century there were minimal ways to receive information, but back then a newspaper was enough to give people more knowledge than they would have had without it. As time goes on, technology will continue to develop, and people will be even more knowledgeable then they are now. It is important to keep popular opinion in mind though, just because we are fed with all this information that will bring potential knowledge does not mean that it will always be correct. Popular opinion will always be a factor. People believe in different things and have different opinions about everything. Also discussed this week, was the role that social media played in the 2016 election. Social media in my opinion is where most people go to get information, talk about their opinions, and try to project their knowledge with others. An article came out about how social media affected the election. Facebook and Twitter were to key factors and was the reason the outcome was what it was. When I go on Twitter to find out information about politics, I often check the comment section of certain tweets to see what people’s opinions are. Usually, when Trump makes a Tweet, I find that most people that comment on his page are people that do not like him. You often see audience members bashing him and giving their opinion on why they think he is wrong. The same thing goes for Biden. I find that the people that often comment are not people that agree with the certain politician, it is only negative comments. While reading all of these comments, I find that it can sometimes sway my opinion about things. I keep in mind that most of these comments are uneducated opinions but still consider what people say. What I am trying to get at here is that just by reading the comments and going on social media it can have an affect of what people think, and that is why social media is such a big factor now a days in popular opinion and knowledge. A question that needs to be brought up when talking about this is “who’s opinion is it”? This can be important because the opinions of people that have more inside knowledge than most could be more worth thinking about. If somebody who has experience and more knowledge in a certain situation gave their opinion, I would listen to them any day over someone who really does not know that much about the scenario. I find the idea of a pseudo environment remarkable and true. A pseudo environment is created by the press/media (only some stories, vales, beliefs, etc. are shared). People that pay more attention to the media are more likely to have the same opinions and information on what the press is releasing. In this pseudo environment, I think that a lot of the time it can be bias and only share information that they want to share. For example, if you are looking at something like politics, there are different media channels that will portray different opinions and only information that they want people to agree with. CNN is a news site that is heavily democratic. While watching CNN they often talk about how much of an idiot Trump is and they try to make people hate him. If you are watching Fox News, it is the complete opposite because they are more of a republican site. The interesting thing about this kind of situation is that people seem to only watch what they want to believe. These news channels create a pseudo environment for their audience and people do not realize that there is a whole other side that they have not listened too. As an audience member or a viewer, I think it is important to try to understand both sides, especially on a topic as big as American politics.

[jakekosty]

Audience Studies Week #3

Starting off week 3’s blog I want to talk about how stars have quit social media because of the negativity that was being produced online by the audience. Social media can be a very hurtful and savage place for audience members to produce content. Lizzo was the example used to the highlight video. Lizzo decided to get off social media because of the trolling and negativity that was being directed at her. People on the internet tend to cyber bully famous people for their looks, past, profession, etc. The reason these people can be so mean is because they are sitting safely behind a digital device and could not care less if they broadcast an opinion or negative comment to the world. What audiences often do not understand while using social media is how hurtful their words can be to even people that are famous. A story of mine that relates to this is about one of my best friends. As Tik Tok got more popular he started creating content on the app. He ended up getting surprisingly Tik Tok famous and tens of thousands of people follow him. On his videos that he shares he gets many positive comments from people around the world, but he also gets a lot of negative comments. It is a good thing he is not a sensitive person, because going through the comment section could be extremely hurtful to some people. He for the most part just disregards the comments and ignores the haters. Tik Tok can show you analytics. It shows you exactly what the percentage of where your audience is located in the world, and roughly their age. This shows people what kind of audience they roughly have. Anybody that follows somebody on a social media app has the power to comment whatever they desire, positive or negative, and that is one of the biggest problems of social media and why stars choose to quit. Talking about our old brains, I found it remarkably interesting how when people looked at worldviews and psyches before cell phones, how different they saw things. People were more aware of all of their surroundings and not so focused on a device that influences their brains. Social media and technology are becoming the way the world works now, but it is not often talked about how bad these things are for humans. For me personally, I am guilty of being active on social media and my cell phone throughout the day. I often think about how different of a person I would be, and how different I would view the world if I did not have technology. Sometimes I even wish that I lived in a world without technology, just for the simplicity of things. From these weeks lesson, I found the mass media and two step flow part extremely interesting where the opinion leader and the people that were in contact with the opinion leader were talked about. I agree and believe in this theory, and I have seen it in my life before without even noticing. I have even been in the situation where I was in contact with an opinion leader and my opinion was swayed. Talking to someone in person about a topic that has more experience then anyone else can be quite influencing on your own opinion. You start looking at the topic differently, or overthinking certain concepts, or doubting your previous beliefs. I can admit I am a very susceptible person and am easily persuaded if not completely confident with a topic. I feel like this theory could also be connected with social media and online interaction instead of just in person interaction. If people look up to certain famous stars, or influential people in their lives, they can be easily persuaded by those certain people. For example, I look up Dave Portnoy, who is the founder of Barstool Sports. He is a very opinionated person, and he makes that clear over social media. On topics that I am not to familiar with, I will often agree with what he is saying based on the information and knowledge that he has on the situation. Even on topics where I am somewhat knowledgeable in, like football, if he has an opinion different to mine, I will often think about his opinion and how it could be more accurate. Another theory I found interesting from this week was what cultivation theory proposed about television. It said that when people watch a lot of television or are exposed to a lot of television stories our understanding of the real world becomes more like television’s understanding of the world. This theory is relevant to speak about now a day because in 2009-2010, a study was done that recorded that the American household watched 8 hours and 55 minutes of television per day. In the present day, even with all the new non-television things – social media, smart phones, YouTube, Netflix – Americans have only cut about an hour of television per day. After displaying all this information during the lesson, Professor Good then goes on to explain the questions about violence that people would be asked. It clearly shows in the answers to these questions how much television people watch. People have an altered opinion on violence because of watching television. They view the world as a much more violent and bad place then it really is. This theory makes total sense to me and it really shows how bad television is swaying our opinions on the real world. A personal experience I can explain with television and the real world is watching shows about police officers. In television, police officers are made out to be more violent then they are in real life. Television often just shows graphic gun scenes, police car chases, and action filled content in order to get the audiences attention. I notice in real life, this stuff still happens, but definitely not as much as it is shown on television. For children growing up now a day, I think this is bad for their knowledge. There are so many video games that kids play to also have a part in how they view the real world. These video games include games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Grand Theft Auto, etc. Now putting these video games and television together, it must be a big misconception to the kids of what the real world is like. These kids are the audience, and because of television and video games, they are getting fed with false information and exaggerated thoughts.

[jakekosty]

Audience Studies Week #2

This week’s blog is about audiences throughout history, which goes back all the way to 3000 B.C. A very talked about audience in this chapter was Greek audiences. Greek audiences were extremely talkative and unruly, and a lot of the time they would disrupt performances by shouting, jeering, throwing fruit, and things that are a little bit to inappropriate to mention. They also ate, smoked, drank, and engaged in repartee with the actors. Back in ancient Greek times, it was normalized to behave this way, it would have violated social order for aristocratic audiences to defer to performers by keeping silent and paying attention. This brings me back to the time where I attended the Medieval Times performance with my family. Although it was not exactly the same as ancient Greek audiences, there were a lot of similarities that were portrayed. As I sat in the stands with the rest of the audience, I noticed that there were payed actors that were actually part of the play placed in the audience to give it more of a real effect. These audience members were acting the exact same as the audiences in ancient Greece were acting. They were yelling, screaming, acting drunk, and more. This was extremely cool for the directors of the show to add in because it made audience members like my family and I who payed to be there feel more engaged in the show. It essentially added another element of how realistic the show felt to us. It also made certain people in the audience, who may have actually had too much to drink, start engaging more as well. The whole experience put a thought in my head about how different audiences were back in time. The audience at a hockey game now a days would be different then the audience at an ancient Greek play, asides from some yelling and screaming. As time went on and the 17th and 18th centuries came around there was some shifting towards quieting audiences. Although it was not a huge shift, there was a slight change. When talking about the 19th century, the term “rowdyism” came up. This term explains itself pretty well, but in simple terms, it was a term for how rowdy the crowd got. In the 20th century, we begin to see even more of a shift. “Audience rights” became “poor manners”, which means that there was now a control of how the audiences acted and there wasn’t as much rowdyism. If there was rowdy behaviour in the audience, it came mostly from the lower class. The upper class is where all the money was, and they were more well behaved as an audience. Talking about the lower class and upper class, it reminds of sporting events or performances at the Scotiabank Centre in Toronto. I have been to many different events over the year at this venue and there are to different sections to sit depending on what kind of experience you want. Keep in mind this does not exactly mean that based on where people sit for the games is how wealthy they are or not, but seats closer to the floor are much more expensive then seats in the nose bleeders. I have sat in both sections in the past several years while at the Scotiabank Centre, and this is where the connection to lower class behaviour and upper class behaviour in the 20th century comes in. When sitting in the nose bleeders, you often are surrounded by a crowd that gets rowdier. I often notice people are drinking a lot more in the nose bleeders and are often screaming and yelling a whole lot more. It is an incredibly fun environment if you are interested in buying cheap tickets and still having a fun time. The seating in the lower rows often consist of businessmen and wealthier people with season tickets. It is much easier to pay attention to the game the lower you are sitting and definitely a lot calmer. In this chapter, there is a question that gets brought up asking, “what do powerful audience members look like”? Livingstone referred to powerful audience members as people who are asked about their experiences. Sullivan refers to powerful audience members as people who are interviewed. Based off both of Livingstone and Sullivan’s ideas of powerful audience, I have my own idea of what a powerful audience member could look like. To me a powerful audience member is someone that attends many games and as seen a lot of historic/bigtime moments. For example, the Toronto Raptors super fan Nav Bhatia would be considered a powerful audience member. He is dedicated to his team and goes to every home game. He has also been interviewed many times by the press, and by the team. He has been part of the audience and for historic moments in Toronto Raptors history and is praised as a fan more then any other fan that has attended a Toronto Raptors game. Based off that point, an argument could be brought up that famous people attending the games are more powerful fans then Nav Bhatia, but I disagree. Famous people attending the games may have more power based off their individual selves, but as an actual fan of the Toronto Raptors the only person that you can argue that is even close to Nav Bhatia is Drake. Something that I also found extremely interesting about this chapter is the definition of mass by Sullivan. Mass sees audiences as “a large collection of people scattered across time and space who act autonomously and have little or no knowledge of one another”. When I read this definition, I think about all the audiences I have been apart of. It is crazy to think about how in a crowd of 50,000 people, a person may only know a few people in that audience. The rest of the people in the audience are complete strangers that have their own lives and interests. If you are sitting next to a person in an audience, it is very likely that you will never see that person again, the only memory you will have of that person is in that one moment during an event. This also interests me in the agent aspect of things. This is when the audience is all conceived of free agents choosing what they want to experience, using their own interpretive skills to interpret the texts they encounter, making their own meanings, and generally using media to suit themselves. What this means to me is people in an audience all have a different meaning of why they choose to be a part of that particular audience, and they choose to believe in what they want to believe in while attending. They may see different things than other audience members and interpret what happens differently.

[jakekosty]

Jake’s 3P18 Blog