Audience - Essay.

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relations to the concept of audience. 

Plan:
1. theorists: Ien Ang, (audience becoming too diversified?) Theodore Adorno's Hypodermic Theory (social learning theory), Frank Parkin, (dominant, negotiated, oppositional meaning)
2. our target audience, meaning, and identifying with ?
3. point - (in Ien Ang's theory...)example (such as in our music video, this and this happened), explain (therefore Ien Ang's...is applicable because of this and this...)???

The coursework production I am going to analyse in terms of audience theory is my music video production, as we have put a lot of thought and research into the audience for our product. Our target audience for our music video was 16-20 year old, middle class, males and females. Our starting point was an older age group however we presented our rough cut to some audiences and found greater positive feedback from the younger viewers rather than the older ones who found it confusing and not clear on what was going on. The 16-20 age group found it more entertaining and exciting because they could identify with the characters and the locations & story-line rather than the older audience.

The problem with establishing our audience could be explained by Ien Ang's theory, which explains that audiences are becoming too diversified. There are so many different types of audiences these days and they are not set in stone either, audiences float between different genres of videos, films and music and different entertainment types and it is becoming unpredictable and hard to establish. There are so many varieties in the audiences that we found problems with establishing the ethnicity of our audience and are unsure of our social class because it varies from day to day.

Our middle class, aged 16-20 audience of both genders meant that we could involve a lot o meanings and symbolism in our video as it would attract young, ideally open-minded people. However, the problem with young people is they are very suggestible and naive to the images they see. Theodore Adorno's Hypodermic Needle Theory describes how the direct stimulus-response effect occurs in a relationship between audiences reactions and consumption of media texts. In other words, how the audience is "injected" (with the"hypodermic needle") with ideas about the world or society and they start to think and behave in the way presented in the video. In our music we show a lot of violence, intimate scenes, drug and alcohol abuse and unhealthy emotional behaviour. Following the Hypodermic Needle Theory, our music video would have a negative behavioural influence on the young, easily persuaded and suggestible target audience.

However, the Hypodermic Needle theory is ignoring the fact that audiences have the ability to resist the images they are being shown and form their own opinions and choices. This is something that Frank Parkin suggests. There are three types of reading a text: dominant reading, negotiated reading and oppositional meaning. This means that dominant reading is where the message is generally accepted by the audience, the negotiated reading is where the audience find their own meaning and may reject or accept some ideas, and the oppositional reading is where the audience rejects the meaning/message entirely and all together. Our music video was targeted at audience who would apply negotiated reading to the video. This means that they would see the symbolism and the deeper message in the video but would reject the rather explicit and unhealthy images of drug and alcohol abuse and leave them as part of hyper-reality as they are.

There is not much of a great meaning that an audience could extract from our video as it was purely just a story of an unhealthy relationship with a complicated narrative. Our music video is quite post-modern in that way is does not create a greater meaning that could be sent out to the targeted audience, even though it follows main modernist ideology.