Audience Studies

4 credits

An overview of the field of audience studies as it relates to film, media and communication.

Audiences are a central concern of the mass media industries, which have developed a number of assessment methods. Despite this, it has proven difficult – if not impossible – for these methods to accurately or consistently measure what it is that they originally set out to measure: how audiences make use of texts. The paper, therefore, considers what is at issue, the main approaches and their presuppositions. We will also explore why the study of audiences has become so problematic by examining different ways in which the audience have been imagined as an object of study and the difficulties of assessing what it is that people think or feel – consciously or unconsciously – about what they read, listen to and see.

Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete the paper will

• Obtain an understanding of the general importance of the study of audiences to media and film studies and be able to contextualise this historically and cross-culturally
• Gain a clear appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the main theories of audiences and media reception
• Learn how to examine the presuppositions of different theoretical approaches and become familiar with handling mutually contradictory arguments
• Have had the opportunity to analyse the relationship between academic writing on audiences and the experience of being a member of an audience