Media Audiences

Catalog description

Credits 3. 3 Lecture Hours. COURSE OVERVIEW. Explores the study of media audiences across empirical and interpretive research traditions. Examines how audiences are measured, targeted, persuaded, entertained and/or mobilized in effects-based frameworks. Considers how audiences might interpret, resist or rework media. Explores audience engagement with such content as news, entertainment, political communication, health messaging and advertising. Addresses how age, identity, ideology and/or context shape audience reception and response. RELEVANCE AND APPLICATION. Engages practices central to media strategy, public communication, digital analytics, outreach and message design. Builds understanding of how audiences are researched, segmented and addressed in journalism, advertising, public health, politics, entertainment and digital media industries. Supports academic preparation in media effects theory, reception theory and communication research. Enhances awareness of how audience behavior shapes public discourse. DEEPENING UNDERSTANDINGS. Complicates everyday assumptions that audiences passively receive media or predictably react to it. Highlights how persuasion and interpretation emerge through interaction between media content, audience predispositions and/or social contexts. Emphasizes that the study of mass media audiences requires attention to both influence and agency, data, and context. TOPICS AND THEMES. Study of audience behavior across news, entertainment, advertising and/or digital platforms; examination of media effects models, interpretive reception theories and audience participation logics; analysis of how audiences attend, interpret, resist or repurpose media content; consideration of political messaging, health campaigns, consumer persuasion, fandom and/or public controversy as sites for audience analysis. Examples may include media involving politics, public health, identity or moral debate when relevant to understanding media audiences. Course material may reference real-world cases or contested media environments for the purpose of analysis. Prerequisite: Junior or senior classification or approval of instructor.