58325 Audiences, Users, Publics, Communities

This subject equips students to analyse changing concepts of the media audience and critically evaluate claims about the relationships between media and people individually and collectively. It explores magazines, newspapers, television and online and mobile media, their 'content' (such as programs, as information, as models for defining identity), the various ways they are used (such as memory supports, as agents of virtual travel, as archives, as networking tools), and considers how audiences as active 'readers' increasingly produce their own meanings from the resources the media provide. Students explore developments including 'virtual' communities, virtual publics and political online activism as examples of how audiences are evolving into dynamic meaning-makers and 'producers'. This subject provides an implicitly historical overview of changing theorisations of audiences. It gives students further experience in formulating and conducting their own research focused on people's actual relationships to diverse media.