Media Audiences as a Tricky Subject - Essay Example

177329 Media audiences are a tricky for research mainly due to the creation of erratic impressions of a shallow nature. In media research, audience is perhaps the most important concept. Media has to target the user group, market their products and get their income from the audience and hence, it is important to know how the user group thinks or feels about their products and this is where the research comes handy because constructing or creating the audience is important for the media for its very survival. When a product is being planned, it is important to know its audience creating capability and only after confirming the audience availability the production will move forward. For the production media, it is important to conduct research with online surveys, questionnaires, comparisons, interviews, voting, calculation of viewer capacity etc. Media research problems are many and some of them are connected with the ethnography. Meeting people, observing them, participating in their activities, experiencing, reflecting, and understanding are considered to be the real ethnography. Media ethnography is virtual, proper, accumulated experiences, matters of every day life, some important and the rest unimportant. There should be a tradition, or continuity in it because the field or object should have existed for at least a certain amount of time, media ethnographies are about the end users, here, they are the audience. It is important to know how ethnography could be contextualised. While researching on the key issue of ethnography, mostly it is done on the constraints placed on the media. Media ethnography studies various fields of media and how it could be used in understanding the audience. "Audiences are not blank sheets of paper on which media messages can be written; members of an audience will have prior attitudes and beliefs which will determine how effective media messages are," Abercrombie (1996, p. 140). Media ethnography is a new methodology, and one of the best methods in which communication research is done through anthropological modes of research, through which media research is becoming broader and technical. Research participants usually have to create a dialogue about media ethnography with will envelope finished and unfinished projects, their progress, demands and adjusting to audience needs. In wireless research communication poses methodological challenges where cell phone usage is concerned. It is interesting to find out the social rules, adherence and breakage from them, and how new rules and new cell phone etiquette are formulated all the time. It maps the cell phone's capacity of fast becoming the social topography markers and it analyses the trend. Researchers face the problems of analysing the modifications, innovations, discoveries, new social interactions, violations, discarding of old social behaviours over the phone. New media research is also forced to analyse the usage of codes in social interactions and conversations. There are many challenges that are confronted by media researchers in coding too. If the research is about the internet, researcher has to find the reason, motivation, kinds of information and decision making while researching on internet. It is important to know how it is used for online interviews, how people are found and positioned, in what way it is better than personal interviews, or over telephone and how it is using the updated technology. It is also interesting to find out about the chat rooms that use many topics, political, economical, social, religious, cultural and informational and why, how and how often they use this facility. Researching on use-net and message boards had not been easy either. Researcher faces difficulties in finding people for interview and retaining their interest for the time of his research. Good sampling is an equally difficult task because to create and structure such a group of par excellence again is very difficult. Formatting the interview, deciding its mode and means of conducting such an interview is difficult because they remain semi-structured in whichever way the researcher tries to control the process. Random samples taken by the users from message boards are never dependable, as usually the same writer comes out with diverse view points almost every day. The people who participate in political discussions are neither full of knowledge nor have any insight and merely use the message boards and discussion sites as places to bring out, mostly venomous and ill informed personal view points. Researcher rarely comes across people who really know what they are arguing about and do it in a balanced manner. Only such participators could be the contributory factors to a research in a meaningful way and the rest could just be ignored. They cannot come across as coherent interviewees during a further examination or probing of their viewpoint. Still it is interesting to find out why they use the internet despite being rather hazy about the subject matters. They do so especially to publish their political views and that fact itself is very interesting from a researcher's point of view. The expressed views could be sometimes just foolish and illogical. Still the compulsive desire to use the media to air their views is significant to the claim that media is opening up people's inner needs and views of certain social actions and political happenings and all these questions make research necessary. "So research is not some abstract process that is irrelevant to work and to life. It plays an important part in both, whether one does research on what automobile to buy, on the best way to get people to purchase some product or service or on how to get a particular job," Berger (1991, p.12). Research can be conducted from an ethnographic angle from the angle of greeting cards and wishing cards communications between the users. They are sentimental, emotional, loving, and in a way, increasing the easy availability of options that defy expense and time. Users resort to this mode of communication, because it is mostly free and quick compared to buying cards and posting them. It is important to know if the present media options are increasing the sentimental communication. Then again, it is not easy to conduct a research from such an illusive angle. But for the people who indulge in sending them, it is very difficult to articulate the reason or compulsion behind the habit. It is difficult to explore this field without being nosy and mostly, this is not taken as a legitimate field of research, even though it can come across as an identifier of cultural background though it might be difficult for the audience to be clear about it. "Finally, it is not always possible for respondents to give meaningful answers in depth interviews. Moving from discussing what they have done to why they did it is not easy for many people, especially, because some people don't always know why they take certain actions," Berger (1998, p.58). Another field of research that poses problems is the group television viewing. It is important for a media researcher to find out the concepts that hold these groups together, issues that influence such group viewing, common factors, cultural backgrounds, region and country, language and its barriers that discourage such group viewing etc. This is a matter of importance in any research that will lead to production, appeasement, attraction and popularity of such programmes. It is necessary to know the inspiration behind such relaxed and voluntary act and the environment leading to it. Can this reunite the social groups that are melting away Once again, though it looks very accessible, it is difficult to get coherent and clear interviews from these groups. The dynamics of media audience is very different from the cinema audience. Media effects cannot be measured and isolated. Its potential influences and the degree of it belong to an uncertain region. The connected uses, disgusts and gratifications cannot be easily measured as they touch the psychological, cultural and social fields of humans combined with impermanency. It also connects with the individual likes and dislikes based upon his own experiences, environment and relationships that he has gone through in life and this makes it hazier. Helplessness of watching if people are homebound, sick or lonely and choice of watching are two different aspects. But focussing on such audience has unsurpassable limitations. Mass media codes offer viewers/readers their social identities and positioning. Conceptualising the process of communication in terms of circuits like production, distribution and consumption complete with symbols and symbolic chains of discourse leads the researcher into the realm of encoding and decoding in media research. Discourse completion depends upon its translation into social practice. According to Hall, (http://www.ucalgary.ca/rseiler/hall.htm) this covers theoretical framework of narrative enquiry, analytical technique of interpretation. The tightly coded rules, the possible means of dominant to subordinate variables, codes displacing the meanings, language and community connected codes that signify power and ideology are definitely useful in the research. but the positions and strategies may not always apply to all situations and factors. Dominant, negotiated or oppositional codes have a limited concept of functioning and these do not make them universal. Encoding and decoding no doubt solve the researching problem to some extent, but they have stringent limitations. In spite of the limitations, coding has its own pride of place in media research. "'Encoding/decoding' is the text that marks the opening up in Britain of study of the media to a Marxism informed by the context developed in structuralism and semiology," Marris and Thornham (1996, p.10). Codes have given signs and symbols to the media research and if interpreted patiently and carefully, they could be very useful. This does not deny their lack of universality. "These codes or secret structures in our minds affect the way we interpret signs and symbols found in the media and the way we live. From this perspective, cultures are codification systems that play an important (though often unperceived) role in our lives" Berger (1991, p.23). Researcher has a relationship to sources and an ethical duty towards them, which should never be forgotten. Divulging the sources without permission is unethical research, even though this might make the research incoherent. "Whether your sources are real people, or just the documents and other evidence they leave behind, relationships with sources produce more ethical dilemmas than other relationships. You need to decide both how far you wish to protect your sources and how strictly you will implement your policy," says Bertrand (2005, p.16). Research could be done by adapting either quantitative or qualitative approaches. In the first category, surveys (postal, telephonic, personal interviews, group interviews, trend studies, cohort analysis, various kinds of experiments could be conducted. In the second category, focus groups have to be formed with effective application or observational research, direct and indirect both could be conducted. But methods cannot remain very firm and rigid and have to shift from time to time. "The history of media audience research has been characterized by a number of shifts in methodological fashions that can be mapped onto changing patterns of theoretical modelling and explanation of audience involvement with media and media effects upon audiences," Gunter (2000, p.53). Understanding the audience, underpinning specific research field, planning, regulating research against fluid opinions and behaviours, finding specific results out of abstract material, finding target group, perceptions of time/trend/change, getting specific and clear opinions on new and ever-changing technology, probing programming style/quality/evaluation, contents of the programmes, style of presentation, and the way in which the presenters work all create huge problems for the researcher. This happens mainly because of lack of earlier research, abstract form of opinions, and very frequent change of mind amongst the viewers all of which pose problems for the any researching technique. But without audience research the programmes cannot reach their full potential. BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Abercrombie, Nicholas (1996), Television and Society, Polity Press, Cambridge. 2. Bertrand, Ina and Hughes, Peter (2005), Media Research Methods, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire. 3. Berger, Arthur Asa (1991), Media Analysis Techniques, Sage Publications, London. 4. Berger, Arthur Asa (1998), Media Research Techniques, Sage Publications, London. 5. Berger, Arthur Asa (1991), Media Research Techniques, Sage Publications, London. 6. Gunter, Barrie (2000), Media Research Methods, Sage Publications, London. 7. Marris, Paul and Thornham, Sue (1996), Media Studies, A Reader, Edinburgh University Press. ONLINE SOURCES: 1. http://www.ucalgary.ca/rseiler/hall.htm 2. Read More