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Audiences and Consumption

In this evaluation, I will be analysing the works of Long and Wall (2012) and Stokes and Maltby (1999). Audience and consumption is developed around the ideology of consumption and the way we consume and media and its meanings. Media plays a crucial part in lives daily, whether we notice or not.
The key themes that were in both chapters were the conjunction between sub cultures and how they are created through media and how the media then portrays it. This however has its downfalls too. The creation of subcultures places pressure on the individuals. Not only does it place pressure on the audience but it also goes against ethics. Is it ethical to be putting an image of something that we know isn’t achievable and making people believe that it is?
Audience consumption affects the online community, having online communities makes people believe that they have a sense of identity, but why do they feel as if they don’t have an identity? Long and Wall suggested that discussion forums, newsgroups and chat rooms give people a sense of being accepted and with Stokes and Maltby discussing how audiences in Hollywood were created it is easy to see that with so many audiences out there and if you don’t fit into one, you would feel left out, in one way or another you would conform to the comfort of seeking approval from other people.
We live in a world where audience consumption has been changing time after time, but what I think media companies seem to focus on is how the can make profit from the audience, therefore the they don’t care about us they just care about themselves and not the impact it has on others. This is my opinion of how I see audience consumption, especially with the uprising of technology (mobile phones, tablets, laptops, smart television) there is no chance that you can live without consuming some form of media.
In my own research I would like to look at a time of which media didn’t have the impact it does in today’s society, to do this I would look further into the history of media and find out why it developed into what it is today.


References
Long, P and Wall, T. (2012). Producing Audiences: What do people do with media. In Media Studies: Text,  Production, Context. 2nd ed. Oxon: Routledge. pp: 300-341
Stokes, M and Maltby, R. (1999) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences; Cultural and The Movies. British Film Institute. Pp 29 – 43

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