Just doing some reading

Found this article on sky news , an interesting set of statistics which basically say than people feel more represented and trust social media more than mainstream media. Defiantly worth reading

http://news.sky.com/story/1335468/social-media-more-trusted-than-the-mainstream

Plot vs story

Actually an interesting lesson explaining the difference between the plot and story, before the lesson I believed they were the same thing to be totally honest 

Second lesson in media

Lesson today was alright, all the kids shouting was getting on my nerves but what can you do lol learnt some interesting things, will go over the stuff to get a better understanding of the subject and maybe watch a youtube video on it to improve my knowledge. 

my summer in a minute

my summer in a minute

summer project essay

Got my summer project essay all done :-)

Media as a whole is difficult to define; it covers such a wide range of things to Facebook to music videos and the way new technology has changed the way we view media today will be highlighted throughout this discussion.

Times have changed and with this it has brought new technologies and methods in which to allow the consumer to interact with media products, listening to the radio will mean you will also listen to the advertising, social media also directs advertising at you and even lets your friends spread the advertising by liking certain products and sharing it with their friends, this is the entire advertising model on a wider scale, a scale in which we may never know how vast it actually is. Product placement is also another form of advertising in which the consumer does not directly see the product being advertised, just merely being used; this happens a lot in movies where it will be difficult not to see an apple product or music videos where you will be hard done by if you can’t see a Dr. Dre product somewhere. This is just a few examples of how the industry will force certain things upon the consumer.

In the past the media was the newspapers and magazines, which is where things were advertised and where the news was printed, today news is everywhere, if something happened people will be notified; I personally was notified via the sky news app 3 minutes after Joan Rivers was publically declared dead which is astonishing to say the least. This leads me onto the development of smart phones, the pillar of every owners life, it contains my entire life, all my profiles and contacts, even down to my grammar, with the intelligent spell check and the phone itself has software within it to record my preferences and target advertising at me which fits my profile which I think is amazing but it can be used as a great example of how media has changed over time due to new technological advances.    

The hypodermic needle theory was one of the earliest ways to describe how mass media affects the audiences, it was developed after researchers saw how much of affect propaganda had in world war one. The theory itself suggests a linear communication in which media messages are injected into the brain of the audiences and the theory works on the basis that we are all the same and respond the in the same way as others after witnessing a form of media, the theory is often said to drip feed information to the public. This suggests that the media is extremely powerful in relation to the passive audience. The theory is not used much anymore as it was considered inadequate and not fit for purpose. Examples of its use are Red Bulls advertising on extreme sports where it has now become associated with the amazing stunts. Levi jeans had an advert in the mid-80s where the sales rose 800% because the man took his clothes off in the laundrette and people wanted to buy the jeans to buy this lifestyle, the sales of boxer shorts even rose because Nick Kamen wore them; this shows the power of the media and also that on occasion this theory does work. Personally I think the whole injecting the message into people’s heads is extreme but it is true; for example I could say three words and you would be able to know what product I was referring to, “washing machines live….”, here is an example of how advertising has branched out into using slogans and catchphrases to harness the audience further, if you have not found the product yet it is “Calgon”.

The uses and gratification theory suggest audiences aren’t passive and not just accept what they see, unlike the hypodermic needle theory which has a linear communication theory. McQuail (1972) describes four types of gratification: Diversion, where the audience is distracted from day to day life by emerging themselves in media; Personal relationships, where the consumption of media makes you feel like a part of the community and it can be used to improve personal relationships by discussing mass media topics with your peers; Personal identity, where the consumer confirms their identity by interacting with media that is deemed appropriate by society for example a politics teacher would be expected to watch Prime Ministers Question Time on a Wednesday; and the fourth type of gratification is surveillance, in which the audience have a desire to want to know what is going on in the world. Livingston & Bovill found that young people used media for boredom, which is easily seen today with most young people on their social media sites, describing every aspect of their lives. Lull researched the reasons why people use media and found that people have a need for: background knowledge on subjects around the world; for conversational topics in day to day life; to find people to bond with or avoid, called affiliation or avoidance; social learning, which aids peoples problem solving skills and helps with decision making and the final reason was so people can use what they gained from the media to beat people in an argument, called competence and dominance. Overall this theory is not bad; it is considered one of the better audience theories but it ignores things such as dysfunctional media consumption.

With all this amazing technological advances I can access media everywhere, media can notify me to keep me updated with the important news and I wouldn’t even think to pick up a newspaper at all, but that’s from a 17 year olds view, I presume I am not the target audience of many publications so I cannot generalise here; but what I can say is that technology means that the world is now connected, constantly; meaning it has great power, you could call this globalisation.

First post of the blog

Just finished my first draft of the 1000 word essay on audience theories ( only 29 words off a 1,000 !!!!) gonna post it later on tonight with the video about my summer, don't know how I am going to do it all in a minute lol