Interactive Audiences

still from Robbie Cooper, Immersion

Marshall, "Forms of Interactivity: The Disappearance of the Audience"

Jenkins, "Interactive Audiences? The Collective Intelligence of Media Fans"

The Implosion of Meaning: Slackers

Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death.

Jean Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media"

Additional Recommended Baudrillard Readings:

Jean Baudrillard, Requiem for the Media
Jean Baudrillard, The Implosion of Meaning in the Media from Simulacra and Simulation



"A video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event..."

The Sonic Worlds of Afrofuturism

Lecture + Q&A with Beatrice Ferrara on The Sonic Worlds of Afrofuturism
Tuesday April, 9 @ 4.30pm in the Aula Magna, JCU Guarini Campus
Be there.

from John Coney's Space is the Place (1974) featuring Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Arkestra

Burial, "Untrue", images from Peter Tscherkassky's "Outer Space" & "Dreamwork"

Subcultures and More Audience Activity

Dick Hebdige from Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Chapter 6 : Subculture: The Unnatural Break
Chapter 7 : Style as Intentional Communication
Chapter 8 : Style as Homology

Alexander Doty - There's Something Queer Here
Richard Dyer - In Defense of Disco

The Pathology of Fandom

Joli Jenson - Fandom as Pathology
John Fiske - The Cultural Economy of Fandom

Jeffrey A. Brown - Ethnography: Wearing One's Fandom

The Audience Strikes Back

Williams - The Audience Strikes Back: New Audience and Reception Theory

Hall - Encoding/Decoding
Morley - The Nationwide Audience

Fiske - Undertanding Popular Culture
De Certeau - The Practice of Everyday Life

Psychoanalysis and Film

Still from Kathryn Bigelow's Zero-Dark Thirty (USA, 2012). Jessica Chastain as subject and image.

In addition to the Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in the Audience Studies Reader please read this overview of psychoanalytic film theory from Robert Stam's Film Theory: An Introduction.
Stam, "From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis": Part 1 and Part 2

While I have your attention take a look at this chapter by Kevin Williams where he provides a summary of the different normative approaches to audiences in media studies. This is a good overview of the material we have covered in class and it should help you with your review for the midterm. Enjoy.

Williams, "Effects? What Effects?"

TV Is Not Our Fault...

Eileen Meehan on how the media and the rating services blame the victims + some random articles on audience assessment and its problems...

Meehan, The Blame Game
Meehan, Don't Blame The Viewers

Article Compilation


Ang, The Nature of the Audience
Gandy, Tracking the Audience

Welcome to Spring 2013

Interactive Audiences

Final readings on Interactive Audiences. Please refer the Baudrillard to Linklater's Slacker and Marshall to the changed 'nature' of digital media audiences:

Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media"

Marshall, "Forms of Interactivity: The Disappearance of the Audience"

The following readings are not required but if you have not encountered them before I strongly urge you to read them particularly if you are planning on writing about 'new audiences'.

Jenkins, "Interactive Audiences? The Collective Intelligence of Media Fans"

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media"

Psychoanalysis and Spectatorship: Visual Pleasure

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look"

Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here.

The Audience Strikes Back

Williams - The Audience Strikes Back: New Audience and Reception Theory

Adorno - Culture Industry Reconsidered
Hoggart - The Uses of Literacy
Wertham - Seduction of the Innocent

Ang - On the Politics of Audience Research
Hall - Encoding/Decoding
Morley - The Nationwide Audience

Fiske - Undertanding Popular Culture
De Certeau - The Practice of Everyday Life

The Merchants of Cool

Effects, Vulnerability, Reception I

Gandy, "Tracking the Audience"

Ang, "The Nature of the Audience"

Williams, "Effects? What Effects?"

Nussbaum, "What Would Tina Fey Do For A SoyJoy?"

TV Is Not Our Fault...

Eileen Meehan on how the media and the rating services blame the victims + some random articles on audience assessment and its problems...

Meehan Chapter 1
Meehan Chapter 2
Article Compilation

What We Watch and How We Watch It

This week's issue of The New York Times Magazine is their yearly Screens Issue. While usually dedicated to Hollywood, the cinema and theatrical exhibition, they figured that

"when you watch moving pictures these days, a theater is the last place you are likely to be. Cable, YouTube, DVDs, DVR, news briefs in the elevator and cartoons on your cellphone — through a variety of media, we now consume fragmented narratives on multiple screens. From a 16-second panda-sneeze video to 60 straight hours of “The Wire,” this is the way we watch now." Permalink here.

Don't miss the "Immersions" video by photographer Robbie Cooper; pictures in this post are stills taken from it.
Unfortunately The NYTimes is still anchored to an old-media paradigm so no embedding of their videos; at least that I know of. If anyone knows how to do this please email.
Also included: how to sell soap in a post-TV world; the year's most memorable 'clips'; the Netflix algorithm that monitors you while suggesting cool movies and a reflection on the sit-com as a TV-genre in transition.

Readings Recap For Everyone

With the end of the semester fast approaching here is what for most of you will be the last onslaught of readings. To keep things tidy and orderly, given also the number of posts this past week, you can click on the links below if you want to be taken to the reading assignment specifically related to your class. Otherwise just browse below. Enjoy.

Advanced Communication Theory
Race & Gender
Spectatorship
New Media

Spectatorship: Fan Cultures Readings

Michel DeCerteau - The Practice of Everyday Life

Richard Dyer - In Defense of Disco

Joli Jenson - Fandom as Pathology
John Fiske - The Cultural Economy of Fandom

Alexander Doty - There's Something Queer Here

Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Encore

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look"

Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here.

Daydreaming

Be ready to discuss the possible meanings of this video in class.