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Conceptualising Audiences


It has been proven that an audience is produced as a result of a media being able to influence people. Having an audience is an important factor while starting a media business of any kind, and as Long and Wall (2012) suggested media companies spend a lot of time and effort into researching their audiences because it is how they generate revenue. I will also be looking at the work of Gillespie (2005) to analyse what an audience is and how prudential they are.

Everything is deemed based upon the fundamentals of research. Both works stress the importance of having an audience but what is interesting is how they use interfaces such as, television, cinema, and mobile phones to expand worldwide. I do believe that the researching of an audience is important but what I don’t particularly agree with the way media businesses operate.
In concordance to the previous point, Long and Wall mentioned how businesses, do a various amount of ethnography into developing and creating an audience they don’t care about. They only show ‘interested knowledge’ so rather than caring for the individual they care for the audience, therefore creating a manipulative target group. Gillespie also brought up the theory that new modes and interactivity are being formed every day, and I was thinking about if I had seen any of this in my life. After careful consideration, it came to me, through integrations such as cookies, a lot of companies learn the likes and dislikes of the audience. I have always wondered why they advertisements always knew what I liked, what store I had previously shopped at as well as what TV programmes interested me.
In summary it can be argued that even though the audience is crucial in media, it opens room for cultural and social dynamics. Many key themes were introduced when studying this subject, nevertheless one thing that really stood out to me was how to know when you are the audience against creating one. If I were to conduct research into this topic I would like to know how we were born into an audience, and if it was forced upon us or if it was by choice.

References
Long, P and Wall, T. (2012). Producing Audiences: What do media do to people. In Media Studies: Text,  Production, Context. 2nd ed. Oxon: Routledge. pp: 274-299
Marie Gillespie (2005).   Media Audiences. 2nd Series. The Open University Press pp 223 – 230

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