WEEK 7 : What do people do with media?

In this week’s lecture, we learnt about mainly what an audience is, and how people use audience response and studies to further progress their television shows and films. Stuart Hall was mentioned through his belief that different messages could be encoded through different texts and it was also concluded that since the 80’s audience studies have become a more common thing for companies to do.

In this week’s set reading Marie Gillespie speaks mainly about audience response to soaps and uses evidence from her own interviews and focus groups. This evidence backs up a lot of her points of what different audiences feel about western soaps. Gillespie suggest that wester soaps and other television shows bring together an audience over their shared fondness of soaps through discussions and so forth. Gillespie states that ‘Young people’s everyday interpersonal communication is informed in significant ways by their soap viewing’[1] (Marie Gillespie 2003:316), showing to us that she has worked out that a lot of the time teenagers who watch similar television shows communicate better with each other because it gives them a topic to talk about. Gillespie also makes a point that ‘existing audience research strongly supports the notion that the soap talk is a gender specific activity.’[2] (Marie Gillespie 2003:318) By suggesting this is shows us that through her research she has concluded that females tend to discuss television shows with each other about television shows, specifically soaps. Her main reasoning for this is that in soaps there are a lot of female social virtues exemplified and therefore women tend to relate themselves to the characters a lot more.

In my found reading, Joost De Bruin also spoke about audience research and participation apart from theirs was to do with police drama’s instead of soap operas. De Bruin states that ‘While narrative closure seems the one satisfactory solution, this solution can only be temporary as it will be broken when the next police series episode is watched. Crime narratives implicate viewers in a continuous cycle of anxiety, crisis and resolution.’[3] (Joost De Bruin 2011) Suggesting to us that although there may be no closure in the narrative of the show, the majority of the audience watch the second show because they are wanting to find out what happened. The television show boosts their emotions and makes them more exited to watch the next one because of all the excitement going on in the show.

In conclusion, it is clear that audience research can help companies improve their shows and films, as the studies in both readings show that all feedback is taken in to account and therefore any negative feedback can be improved on.

[1] Gillespie, Marie (2003) “Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change” IN Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (eds.) The Audience Studies Reader. London: Routledge.

[2] Gillespie, Marie (2003) “Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change” IN Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (eds.) The Audience Studies Reader. London: Routledge.