Media Audiences

Catalog description

Media scholars and practitioners have long been interested in understanding and measuring 'the audience'. Increasing levels of media convergence, fragmentation, and polarization present many new challenges for making sense of media users. The purpose of this course is to explore various assumptions of media audiences and the different methodological attempts to measure them. First, students will explore a 'push' media perspective by examining mass communication media effects research. Students will examine pop culture texts of today and learn more about ratings analysis. Next, students will reflect on critical responses to emergent audiences through 'pull' media research. Here, students will learn more about audience reception research and the many ways in which audiences experience and make sense of media technologies. Finally, students will examine how these different approaches inform the concerns, questions, methods, findings, and implications of audience research today.