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reaching out to media audiences online because they have failed to see the
Internet as a mass medium with its own genres of discourse. The main reason is
a problematic definition of what an audience is and how these differences apply
online. Symptoms could include underestimating how much gamer fans expect to
be involved in the development of games and software, and the use of the
Internet to illegally copy and download music and film.
Audiences exist where media texts meet with people’s social experiences and
knowledges and are used as a cultural resource. John Hartley claims it’s silly
audiences exist, but rather that of invisible fictions - a construct produced
institutionally in order to justify their existence (Hartley 1992). Previous
discussions have resolved around a focus upon audience research as a form of
social \ ideological control, ergo an assumption that the media is bad. Mark
Balnaves and Tom O’Regan suggest a ‘governance-cycle approach,’ which
focuses on the strategy, plans of action and the ethical relations of managing
audiences. It turns out audience research techniques are rarely analysed or
understood. Much policy is based on assumptions on effects of the media. These
assumptions enable groups to make claims about what an audience is or how it
functions. Balnaves and O’Regan claim that ‘[k]nowledge about media audiences
is integrally tied up with the strategies and plans of action of industry players,
professional campaigners and interest groups who take up and apply this
knowledge to prosecute their own agendas (Balnaves in Balnaves et. al 2002, p.
10)’. One example of this might be the trend for government agencies to
commission private media agencies to participate in the development of social
marketing campaigns, like the ‘Quit’ campaign of 1997-98 in Australia or the
‘Every k over is a killer’ campaign of 2001-02. What Balnaves and O’Regan
propose, is a governance cycle that enables theorists to analyse this process,
that includes a socially productive and ethical character:
So far, there are certain things that are comprehensible about audiences:
Audiences only exist after being defined according to a certain ideology or
motive.
Audience members are made up of individuals, but one thing that the
governance approach implies is that individuals exist, but are defined as a
specific typology in order for an institution exploit that segment and to
make a profit.
Since there is a correlation between certain strategic motives of media
producers and audience research, the governance cycle approach is
helpful because it creates distance and allows for empirical analysis.
This second section will briefly discuss virtual communities and suggest a
framework of genre, proposed by Thomas Erickson will be helpful in
understanding the cyber-audience.
Terry Flew, in his chapter on virtual cultures, uses a quaint definition of virtual
community by Howard Rheingold (Flew 2002, p. 76), but this project will limit
itself to define virtual community as long term, text-based, computer-mediated
communication amongst large groups on the Internet. Flew traces the
relationship between this project’s discussion about audiences and the
assumptions ‘about the virtues of community, or of the ‘online’ and ‘offline’ worlds
(Flew 2002 p. 94)’ claiming that Internet research is very much empirical. If that is
so, this means that scholars researching the Internet are much more aware of
ideology and how it is manifested online, which is exactly what the governance
cycle tries to deal with. Implicitly, Flew argues that because the Internet is a
highly interactive medium with the option for users to be anonymous, political and
commercial ideologies are lucid in these communities. Flew’s conclusion to his
chapter on virtual cultures is proof of a point of view that is very much aware of
the ideological problem:
The main motive for Erickson to move away from the notion of virtual community
to what he calls ‘participatory genre,’ is the use of the concept for understanding
the underlying discourse: ‘[g]enre shifts the focus from issues such as the nature
and degree of relationships among ‘community members’, to the purpose of the
communication, its regularities of form and substance, and the institutional,
social, and technological forces which underlie those regularities (Erickson
1997)’. Erickson does, however, recognize that the concept of genre is limited
because ‘whereas most genres have a distinction between producer and
consumer, or author and audience, in on-line discourse the distinction between
the producer and the consumer is blurred (Erickson 1997).’
This section will seek to bring the pointers identified in the two preceding sections
together, and with the additional basis of post-modern theory it will discuss the
notion of a cyber-audience, contrasting with examples from case-studies.
So far, the project has shown that the traditional view of the audience is a one-
way communication process. The placement of power is usually with the
institutions that need audiences to accumulate power. In an online setting, this
view is not sufficient.
To summarise this section, there are some important pointers to bring further:
The contradicting fact that media abundance is the source for the
fragmentation of audiences is important because it implies that on one
hand, it is more likely for an individual to use a specific medium if it is
more available, and on the other hand, does it mean that the same notion
can be transferred when looking at how audiences are manifested online;
is it conceivable that content abundance is the very source of audience
fragmentation online?
It is very likely that very interactive audiences online, like the hard-core
gamer audience, are very involved in the development of content. So
involved, as a matter of fact, that they see themselves as such a group to
be reckoned with, that the success or failure of games or software is
based on how interactive the developer is with its audience.
It is also possible to argue that an audience, which on a basic level of
reality does not exist, can be created by actively produced through certain
discourses.
In this conclusion, this project will bring together the points from the previous
sections and discuss whether it is possible to extract a notion of the nature of the
cyber-audience.
One of the points of the previous section is very important to this discussion: that
media abundance is the very source of audience fragmentation. 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. Sandra Ball-
Rokeach and Melvin DeFleur first proposed dependency theory. Dependency,
they say, 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. 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.
This argument also implies one thing that Terry Flew explores in great detail; the
digital divide (Flew 2002, p. 84). Following the discussion above to this, it is now
possible to ascertain that:
Since audiences online have been identified as being highly interactive and
expect to enter a two-way communication dialogue with media producers it is
possible to say that:
Recommendations
Bibliography:
Cutlip, S., Center, A., Broom, G. (2000), Effective Public Relations (8th Edn),
Prentice Hall
Defert, D., Ewald, F. (1994), Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988 / Michel Foucault; edition
etablie sous la direction de Daniel Defert et Francois Ewald avec la collaboration
de Jacques Lagrange, Paris, Galimard
Sternberg, J. (2002), “I didn’t get it, but I liked the name:” Generational Profiling
through Generation X,” In Balnaves, M. O’Regan, T. & Sternberg, J. (2002),
Mobilising the Audience, pp. 81 - 103
Contents:
0.0 Introduction
1.0 How do institutions define and maintain audiences in cyberspace?
1.1 Governance and participatory genre
1.2 Virtual community as participatory genre
2.0 How are ideologies (or motives) evident in a new media environment?
2.1 Power lies in numbers
2.2 Reality vs. the Imaginary
3.0 The Cyber.Audience
4.0 Recommendations
5.0 Bibliography