Professor Yuan discussed her research on audiences, regarding television broadcasting. She was interested in how users take advantage of media sources. There are two ways to approach this by studying the audience as individuals or studying the group as a whole. These days people have more than 100 channels to watch on the television. This number has greatly increased due to specialty channels. We can look at audience loyalty to certain programs and compare it to perception. These specialty programs are organized in a way that stimuli draws in audience members and they are likely to maintain loyalty to these programs. This loyalty is something to look at when understanding audiences. In the past people have relied on this scary world theory, in which people perceived television shows as scary and applied what they saw on TV to real life. This created a false perception of the real world, because the real world wasn't nearly as dangerous as the television made the world appear. This shows that the media may not have an immediate impact, however people will be biased in the way they perceive the world.
Professor Yuan looked at the shifting of audiences, when audiences stop watching one show, where do they go after? Originally television consisted of 3 main channels, however, with the growth of specialty channels we see these other shows gaining prominence. This channels once again attach meaning to the viewer as well as use stimuli, people and language to draw in viewers. Audiences are then likely to seek out more specialty channels that will draw them in based on their perceptions of certain topics.
Professor Yuan ‘s research focused on the cultural differences of audiences, she focused on a town near Hong Kong. The sample consisted of 300 families and 900 individuals. Professor Yuan used devices similar to a cable box to track what each family member in each family was watching and how long they had watched it for. The use of this sample is representative of the whole community and it showed that the audiences showed polarization in what they watched, and most focused on specialty channels rather than the main channels.
Jocelyn,
ReplyDeleteI as well listened to Professor Yuan's lecture and I think it is so interesting how some of the "specialty shows" are capable of capturing the viewers attention enough to win over their loyalty yet there are so many shows that are taken off the air due to the lack of viewers. That just goes to show how much work goes into creating a successful program in order to be able to win over the audience.