INTRODUCTION - Institutions and Audiences
For this part of the media studies course you will learn how the film industry operates and explore how audiences are formed and use media.
The first two keywords you need to learn definitions for are – unsurprisingly – institution & audience.
Audience - Collective group of people reading any media text.
Institution – An established organization or company, e.g. the BBC, that provides media content, whether for profit, public service or another motive. This involves you understanding how the media works as a business, the relationship between institutions and the public and media as a form of power.
Q. Think about the number of ways you can ‘read’ something produced by the BBC?
TASK - Go to the Doctor Who website.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/
Q. How can you, as a member of an audience, 'engage with' or 'view' Doctor Who...? How many different forms of ‘media’ are offered?
The name we give to this coming together of different ‘media’ is your third keyword:
Convergence - Hardware and software coming together across media, and companies coming together across similar boundaries. This makes the distinction between different types of media and different media industries increasingly dubious.
Q. How would you usually watch an episode of Doctor Who? TV, perhaps? Now think of the other ways you can watch an episode...
Q. What links these formats?
A. They’re all digital, your fourth keyword...
Digital technology has led to increasing uncertainty over how we define an audience, with general agreement that the notion of a large group of people, brought together by time, responding to a single text, is outdated and that audiences now are ‘fragmented’.
Key Points to remember...
In media studies we focus on ‘the contemporary’.
Q. What does this mean if, for example, we are to study the film industry in Britain?
We are also keen to focus on convergence as a key agent of change.
Q. Why is it so important?
A. Because it’s one of the most important things that’s happening now.
Q. How does the film industry 'converge' with the internet?
Finally, we are interested in how things are changing.
Within the context of not only convergence, but also ownership, technologies and globalisation.
More key words – ownership and technologies are pretty straightforward however…
Globalisation means - The shift in media distribution from local or national to international and the whole world at once. Culturally, describes the process of ‘sameness’ over the world, typified by the availability of McDonalds in most nations.
