Mass Media and Media Ethnography - Essay Example

Media audiences may be defined regarding location, size, consumption, and subjectivity. The location of the media locally will raise questions concerning regulation and control. Audiences are also defined by the consumption that they make as there are those of a particular genre, text, or medium. There is also the importance to differentiate between mass audiences that are broadcast to and the niche audiences involved in narrowcasting. In terms of subjectivity, there is the impact on the audience members by the membership of the pre-existing group including gender, religion, education, and nation.

It may also be defined as a mainstream audience for the narrowcast media. This imagined mainstream is what elite and sub-cultural forms define them. It is a socially constructed phenomenon. In contrast to the critique of mass society, the culture of the mainstream is not addressed to an audience that is homogenized as it is diverse and made of different multiple audiences that come from various demographic groups whose mode of engagement might have. This makes it appealing and also commercially lucrative. It may be hard to define, and its meaning normally shifts by its usage. Appreciating mass audiences will offer that opportunity of resisting the adoption of the media’s terms as our own. Audience size together with commercial profitability is a construction factor in mainstreaming though it should be understood independently. Though mainstream media are known as an object of passionate feelings, it is what moves most consumers to participate (Newman, 1&2).

Mass audience as included in the definition for mass communication has distinguishing factors that include: it is heterogeneous in composition, the composition of individuals is that of those who do not know each other, members of the mass are spatially separated, and the mass has a loose organization and leadership that is not definite (Napoli, 7).
The new mass audience considers the mass audience as both the receiver and the sender of the message. An economist Dallas Smythe 1977 stated that the act of consuming media included a form of labor that is wageless engaged by the audience on behalf of the advertisers. Also, he stated that the audience works to create demand for the advertised goods and to accordingly spend their income.

It is also important that mass audience is a dynamic field since how the audiences are consuming the media are changing as well as the way that the media industries define and make sense of the audiences. These all changes are due to the effects of new technologies which control the relations between the media and the audience by determining when where when and how they consume media. These changes are making the media industries open up other modern and new dimensions to conceptualize audiences other than the traditional conceptual and analytical approaches. Therefore, the media audience is evolving.

Media ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative description of a condition of human society, based on fieldwork and observation(6) The experiences of an individual come from an environment which is the total sum of interactions that take place across and between many individuals. These experiences in the domains that are collective being culture and social phenomena become a set key of information for ethnography.

The ethnographic approach involves a direct immersion by a researcher who is in a certain social setting, getting to learn social norms directly and producing first-hand accounts that are based on participation and personal observation. It, therefore, views media as one grounded in broader social settings and fields that are wider in terms of practice than media production alone. It is interested in getting to know how people receive, use, and respond to the productions of media and how they may create their representations that are mediated. The interest therefore lies in collective representations, understanding of individuals, social relations between people and media as well as cultural meanings derived or inscribed from images and texts that are mediated.

The economic, political, and social agendas that shape social fields of the media are difficult to reconcile in the focus of ethnography (Armbrust, 2). To enable ethnography to conform to the genre conventions, it should provide a convincing sense of putting media more seamlessly within the rich cultural and social context. The frameworks of conventional ethnography that are comforting are normally inapplicable. Consumers of television are very difficult to define as a community that is well-bounded. Also, those groups that are discrete by criteria than orientation to television might share fireworks that are transcending to their communities.

The relationship that exists between producers and consumers also complicates the discrete community’s identification. In their self-imposed terms, the producers of television media tend to standardize identities or impose standard ideals, and yet the audience can interrupt the agendas by facilitating such homogenizing agendas, impede or interpret them by their needs and experiences.
They therefore contain the experiences lived, coherence to the multiplicity of explicitly, and giving form, to simultaneous sensations, feelings, events, and emotions. Understanding the people’s culture tends to expose their normalness when preserving the level of particularity. It renders them accessible by setting them in a frame of their penalties and dissolving their capacity (Geertz, 1973, 14).