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they want (and what do we mean by what audiences want)? Since 1930s media institutions are facing the problem of finding the content that attract audiences. And in my opinion within every step that technology develops, this problem and fear of losing audience grows. For instance since video games, DVRs, online streaming become a common part of our lives, the mass media industries are working harder, more organized and systematic to find the right content that audiences will be interested. In her article Desperately Seeking the Audience, Ien Ang gave a detailed information about how the producers are worried on keeping their audience alive, increasing their percentage of audience in society and what kind of systems are created for measuring rate of return from a production. In my opinion, one of the main problems that media industries have is that they have to take risk for what they produce. Because when you look over technically in media sector, there is a huge competition and technically there is no way to manipulate your target audience directly to increase your ratings. This problem takes us to another one, most of the media corporations are commercial broadcasting institutions, which means low ratings cause a media institution to lose its budget from the advertisers and its impossible to create new productions or even broadcast without this budget. These two related problems locate audiences as commodities for media sector. But there is even more of this commodification process of audiences. Although there is a commercial broadcasting system, another broadcasting system exists which behaves audience-as-public. Those broadcast institutions serve to public, not consumer targets and their context is mostly about national contexts, manifested in historical particularities in institutional structure and socio-political and ideological grounding like an authotorian act for educating the audience. With this broadcasting concept, public broadcasting institutions cannot give the audience what they want but in my opinion indirectly they can force the audience to ask for what they give. After a while even the audiences are not interested in the concept that public broadcasting institutions are serving, they get used to it and the given content before by public broadcasting institutions become a part of their lives. Same thing happens in commercial broadcasting institutions too. Commercial broadcasting institutions are working really hard to find out what their audience want within this process there are many created risk reducing concepts like trying to create networks, series or systems
measuring ratings but no matter how they are close to what audiences want, their contents are influenced by the advertisers supplying the needed budget for the media institutions. So after all research methods to find the right content that audience demand, managers approvals and advertisers influences, broadcasting institutions had to create a content equilibrium to survive in the sector. They dont give audiences what they want directly, but to survive; they make audiences ask for what they give. The best example of this situation can be given via TV shows that Acun Ilcal produces. Acun Ilcal pays effort to find the interesting concepts that Turkish society may like. He does not create new concepts, he monitors the produces all around the world and he tries to choose the ones fits for Turkish society. In my opinion fear factor is one of his fails, because Turkish society is a domestic, traditional society, staying away from extreme actions as we can understand by taking shoes off before getting into the house habit, which is a conflict to the concept of Fear Factor. Even Fear Factor was seriously conflicting with taste of Turkish audience, it produced for two periods because with a kind of prejudice; Turkish society used to think that Acun Ilcal produces great shows. It is an example of creating a content equilibrium in media sector and manipulating the audience to ask for traditional things that media institutions produce for them. The second example of the audiences commodification and advertisers influencing the content is again about one of Acun Ilcals shows, Survivor. In this show competitors attend games and they win a prize, audience expect the prizes to be wondrous things since the competitors are a bad living standard and the offered prize was a set of creams of the cosmetics brand that is sponsor for the TV show. At this point audiences are secretly exposed to advertisement and commodification. Though the TV show, Survivor is being produced for many years. So, as those two example shows, producers does not always give audiences what they want but they nearly force them to ask for what they produce due to dependent content creations and audiences being commodified.