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1. Critical Approaches

2. Audience Response:
There are many different ways that an audience can respond to a piece of
media.
Stuart Hall suggested that audiences respond with either a Preferred,
Negotiated or Oppositional reading of the text but there are other ways an
audience can respond:
• Participatory
• Cultural Competence
• Fan Culture

3. Participatory:
Now more than ever audiences are able to participate and interact with the
media they are consuming.
Audiences are invited to ‘have their say’ on news stories, debates and even
TV programmes.
Social media has enabled this move towards participatory media. People
join Facebook pages, they comment on blogs or write their own. They
tweet about TV programs while they are happening.
Participatory media can include blogs, wikis, tagging and social
bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, podcasts and video blogs.
It is direct interaction or creation of media by it’s audience. The audience is
this case is not at all passive but very active.

4. Twitter Case Study:
Twitter understands it’s role as a participatory media tool and
includes lots of advice on it’s website for developers and
producers to help them use it’s services.
https://dev.twitter.com/media/twitter-tv
Here is data from the 2011 MTV Video
Music Awards. You can see how the sharp
spikes correspond directly to major moments
in the show:
D Adele performs
E Beyonce's performance begins...
F ...and ends with the big reveal of her
"baby bump

5. Cultural competence:
Media texts require us to have a certain level of cultural understanding to
be able to interpret them.
At a basic level, this could mean being able to read the language that a
magazine is written in.
At a deeper level, it means being able to interpret signs and symbols that
we use a visual shorthand to communicate ideas.
We recognise these signs in our own culture but find it harder to
understand when looking at others.
We create and attach meaning to signs and symbols in many different
forms.

6. Language is often the hardest symbol to understand if you are from another
culture.
This series of lines and shapes means nothing to most people who only
speak or read Western languages.
मोटर-गाड़ी

7. Language is often the hardest symbol to understand if you are from another
culture.
This series of lines and shapes means nothing to most people who only
speak or read Western languages.
मोटर-गाड़ी
When the meaning is put to us in a series of shapes and lines that we can
interpret, the meaning becomes clear.
Car

8. Cultures create their own language. This can be written, verbal and visual.
Members of the culture have a shared understanding; a competence with
the culture.

9. x

10. Fan culture:
Fan culture describes an audience taking an active role in the creation of
media based on an existing product.
This is particularly prevalent in the Sci-Fi genre of media.
(http://trekfanfiction.net)
Fans will write additional stories, TV episodes and alternative endings to
their favourite films, TV shows and books.
Henry Jenkins has researched extensively this participation of fans with a
media text and their interaction with each other.
Facebook, YouTube, blogs and Twitter have helped groups of fans find
each other more easily.
They used these networks to share their own work and comment on the
work of each other

11. http://www.fanfiction.net contains millions of pieces of fan fiction based
on books, comics, anime, games, TV shows, films and plays.
It contains communities and forums where fans share their stories.
It has come under pressure in recent years to remove some of the content
as it is based on their copyrighted work and intellectual property of others.
It has also removed stories of an adult nature.
Some authors of fan fiction have even broken in to main stream publishing.
50 shades of Grey started out as a piece of fan fiction based on the Twilight
franchise.
Events like Comic con allow fans to get together, often dressed as their
favourite superheroes.

12. Artist sites like RedBubble.com offer another outlet for fan culture. Often fans
design more interesting merchandise than media producers themselves.

13. YouTube:
YouTube offers another outlet for fan culture with many different videos
from covers of peoples to favourite songs to instructional videos on
making superhero costumes or doing cosplay make-up.

14. Task 4
Pick at least one media text and investigate how its audience responds to it.
You can pick a different product for each response or try and stick with just
one.
For each response, participatory, cultural competence and fan culture,
explain the response and then use examples to show it working in practice.
It can be any text or any producer you like. This allows you to look at a
franchise of films or a band or a series of books or a TV series as a whole.

15. Great British Bake Off:
Using the official hashtag #GBBO
as well as a range of others, fans and
viewers enter in to a participatory
experience, sharing comments and
reactions with others.
GBBO generated 161,516 tweets
between 7.30pm and 9.30pm. That
works out a whopping 1,346 tweets
per minute or, to be even more
specific, 22.4 tweets per second.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/
There is an element of cultural competence
with a text like this. Not only are there
specific baking terms but knowing the
names of contestants, past and present, helps
fans take part in the debate.
GBBO is an example of cultural
competence.

16. Fans can attempt recipes and challenges seen on the show and often use
social media to share their success (or failure).
A whole range of books and kitchen items are available for fans to buy and
the judges often appear live at events that fans can attend.