Learning objective:
Look at the relatively new ways of measuring the modern, sophisticated, fragmented audience. (social networking).
Fragmentation is a broad term used to describe the transition of a population from one comprised of few large audiences for any one media product to another comprised of more numerous smaller audiences.
In general, the number of people in the population attending to products need not change. Rather, fragmentation is assumed to result from a substantial increase in the number of options from which people can choose.
Media producers typically find such audiences desirable for the purposes of grouping people for advertisers. As a result, market segmentation is often a term used to describe media outlet strategy.
Media outlets are able to segment the audience when (1) they specialize their products to meet the demands of the desired audience and (2) people specialize their outlet and content selection purposefully.
Some observers have decided that successful segmentation of a populace results in polarization, the division of people into like-minded groups who share similar knowledge, opinion, or value profiles.
David Morley’s Study of
Extended writing:
Research the Rebecca Black story and summarise how she became a viral hit.
Look at the relatively new ways of measuring the modern, sophisticated, fragmented audience. (social networking).
Fragmentation is a broad term used to describe the transition of a population from one comprised of few large audiences for any one media product to another comprised of more numerous smaller audiences.
In general, the number of people in the population attending to products need not change. Rather, fragmentation is assumed to result from a substantial increase in the number of options from which people can choose.
Media producers typically find such audiences desirable for the purposes of grouping people for advertisers. As a result, market segmentation is often a term used to describe media outlet strategy.
Media outlets are able to segment the audience when (1) they specialize their products to meet the demands of the desired audience and (2) people specialize their outlet and content selection purposefully.
Some observers have decided that successful segmentation of a populace results in polarization, the division of people into like-minded groups who share similar knowledge, opinion, or value profiles.
_________________________________________________________________
David Morley’s Study of
the Nationwide Audience (1980)
The Nationwide Project was an influential media audience research project conducted by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its principal researchers were David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon.
Initial stage
The Media Group at the CCCS selected the BBC television current affairs programme Nationwide to study the encoding/decoding model, a part of reception theory, developed by Stuart Hall. This study was concerned with "the programme's distinctive ideological themes and with the particular ways in which Nationwide addressed the viewer". This first part of the study was published by Brunsdon and Morley in 1978.
Stage two
Morley conducted qualitative research with various participants from different educational and occupational backgrounds. He observed different responses to a clip of its budget special to see whether they would construct dominant, oppositional or negotiated readings (the three categories of readings proposed by Hall).
Management groups produced dominant readings, while teacher training students and university arts students produced negotiated readings. Trade union groups characteristically produced oppositional or negotiated readings. Black college students, however, "fail[ed] to engage with the discourse of the programme enough to reconstruct or redefine it".
The initial conclusion was that decodings cannot be traced solely to socioeconomic position, since members of the sample occupying the same class location produced different readings. However, Sujeong Kim's statistical re-analysis of the project's findings suggests that this may be an underinterpretation: according to Kim, the results show that 'audience's social positions ... structure their understandings and evaluations of television programmes in quite consistent directions and patterns.' For example, Kim observes that middle class viewers produced negotiated readings of one particular programme, while working class viewers produced dominant or oppositional readings dependent on their gender and race.
A more thorough breakdown of Morley's findings can be found here:
Task 1:
How might the social background of audience members effect their interpretation of the texts within your research investigation? Orange books. Discuss:
Extended writing:
Research the Rebecca Black story and summarise how she became a viral hit.
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