COMM 398 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Janice Radway, Subliminal Stimuli, Denial-Of-Service Attack
21 Feb 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Tuesday February 21
What is an audience?
• Screen Theory: doesn’t consider audience at all, only interested in what is
happening on the screen symbolically
o Idea is trying to understand cinema- the moving image
▪ What the medium was capable of, what it could do
o What does this symbol represent, what are the meanings behind the
representations are on the screen
o Trying to understand cinema, moving images, story telling
o Relates to psych-analytic methods from Freud
o Interested in what meaning could be conveyed on the screen, only
interested in what is on the screen itself (symbolism, what it
represents)
• Effects Theories- mid 20th century:
o Initially used a lot with propaganda, the government promoting
certain things during the war, messaging campaigns, ideas of
subliminal messaging
o A lot of the research was government funded at first
o Tried to establish what effects mass-media had to their audiences
o Trying to measure the extent of the effect of media on the audience
o Was mostly social scientific methods
o Problem with it was that it universalized the audience as the same
that didn’t account for different perspectives and how media effects
different audiences in different ways
• Ethnographic Theory
o Elaborated how the audience was in a complex world
o mid-80’s
o Earliest example of this method was study called Reading the
Romance by Janice Radway
▪ Goes into small Midwestern town, wanted to know how
romance novels affected the women in this town who was
reading them
▪ Uses sociological perspective methods, lives with the women
for months, talks to them and view what role the romance
novel plays in relationships and kinship, create social spaces
(book clubs-place for local gossip, explore what it means to be
a women in society through their discussion of the narratives
in the plots)
o Tries to map out the role something plays in a larger, complex social
relationship
o More complex understanding of the audience
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
