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Audience Studies (3P18) Blog Post #2 - Ethan Limsana

Although I spoke a lot about how mass media power and advertising has made rap music an important part of my life, it is one of hundreds of different medias I use to gratify my individual wants and needs for a variety of constantly evolving reasons. After all, modern advertising relies on understanding what I want before I ask for it. Through self-examination, I use movies, tv shows, video games, multiple social medias, and books for all different reasons depending on genre, length of time, level of engagement, etc. This week, for example, I bought a new phone online that I’m very excited for. To deal with my higher than usual amounts of hyperactivity and lack of attention span, I’ve watched countless amounts of YouTube videos about the products in comparison videos, unboxing videos, and reviews. Also, to deal with my energy, I’ve stopped playing slower role-playing video games, and I’ve spent more time playing fighting games where all my thoughts are in the moment and fast paced, where most other times these games are too intense for me to feel comfortable. This also effects my music listening to be faster paced EDM, or rap music as an interesting side-effect. In this way, I’ve used media to gratify my individual, particular needs as an active user. Deeper, is looking at what specific needs each of the medias I used gratified. The comparison and review YouTube videos gratified my cognitive needs by giving me more knowledge about the phone before and after purchasing the product; how to use it and how it performs in comparison to other popular phones people are buying. My affective needs are met by listening to music that accompanies my emotions, making my overall experience more pleasurable. Advertisements of the product make it look extremely clean, and expensive which meets my integrative needs that give me the feeling of higher status for owning this new piece of technology. My social needs are not particularly met by any of these actions, but the phone itself represents the media platforms I will use to become even more social which is at the height of my excitement. Also, my escape needs are met by video games, being able to put off the thoughts of homework, chores, and other responsibilities to allow my mind stay at its’ preferred state.

In these instances, I often have with the media as a tech enthusiast, I act as both a ritualized audience member and an instrumental audience member depending on the context. In this scenario, I am seeking for these specific types of content to fit my needs, but overall, accessing each of these mediums for media is performed most days anyway. The cycle of consumption of media for myself is highly ritualized while the specific motive for interest changes daily. If it were not the excitement of buying a new phone, it may have been the excitement of a new video game, album, movie. The best way to understand why I act in a cycle like this would be to understand the “expectancy value approach”. This looks closely at what my gratifications sought in relation to my gratifications obtained; the higher success of my gratifications obtained over time will increase my dependency on the place (media) that I sought for gratification. Going back as far as I can remember, my gratifications for media were first met with video games by my family. My uncle was extremely influential in my childhood as I grew up without a father and no other siblings, his interests were passed onto me as I spent time with him. He valued video games at that time, and they quickly became a source of family bonding for us and served as a learning space for me when I started playing at around 3 years old. Since then, they were rooted into my childhood, meeting my emotional needs and my proficiency over time has met my own personal fulfillment. Since technology for us today has been evolving and improving at such a rapid pace, video games have always obtained my gratifications and my dependency on them today is very high. As video games have improved, viewing them on online sources like YouTube have become incredibly popular while the medium of television has not aged like this. Most of the online influencers on YouTube who are interested in video games are also interested in tech, and through the grapevine of gratifications obtained, my tech interests have shaped my job choice to Best Buy and opening the opportunity for working in mobility and smartphone enthusiasm. This observation of my life with video games and technology also show me that my individual needs are not static, but constantly shifting and developing over the course of my life. It also shows me that my uses of media are reflected by my society, being influenced and shaped by the people around me who I grew up with and who I currently interact with.

Needless to say, my life has had many times of instability and struggle whether it be for financial issues in my family, or personal emotions during high school, my integration with media has always been stable. Even to the point of having important impacts on my life like determining my interest in tech which is now a vital part to my personality. By examining the uses and dependency approach, it is understandable why I am dependent on these cycles of using multiple outlets of media based on emotion and interest. If I were to look to other sources for gratification like going out to parties, travelling, or working out; although I don’t feel I cannot do these things, I am not guaranteed the same satisfaction, so they are not as addicting as my use of media. In this way, I am acted upon by advertisers in the media, but I also act as an agent of free will. The issue is that the factors that guide my freewill may not be healthy. Even though my interests were originally guided by my family at a young age, the way it has shifted has been a product of addiction and less time spent outside of technology.

Now that I’ve established myself as an agent over someone who is purely acted upon by advertisers, it is important to know how I decode and make meaning of these messages I’m exposed to. Interpretations of semiotics is what determines my understanding of any text I encounter. To best describe how this affects me, for this week’s blog I will closely relate my understanding to media in relation to my parents due to generational gaps changing our understandings of media texts. Since I’ve been using a personal computer daily since getting one for myself in grade 8, I’ve engaged in many different online communities including reddit, 4chan, and video game communities like Minecraft servers. These have been sites of social intertextuality which has cultured me during my developing years, my mother, in her developing years would have been restricted to physical social gatherings and more patriarchal types of media like daytime television and big budget films. To connect with her I sometimes show her funny memes I find online to hopefully make her laugh, but I’ve learned that much of my humor is not understood by her and I choose to share with her. I’ve shown her the popular icon “pepe the frog” in humorous portrayals and she has no clue what it is outside of an amateur drawing of a frog with human-like features. I see the frog as a template that anonymous users add to and alter to share their emotions, or what’s called “reaction pictures”. On the other hand, some political points of view may see the icon as in sighting terrorism or right-wing ideology which may be because of the influence of 4chan’s anonymity and history. Screen theory suggests that films include embedded ideologies from the filmmakers, and that films work to deny their existence as merely text and therefore become normalized to us. Despite each of us interpreting this one picture in different ways, the meanings we create are abstract due to our history with film and media so none of our interpretations are wrong, so each of us are right.

In the encoding/decoding structure, the creator of the version of the picture is encoding a message by his alteration of the picture, the time and place of the post, and the message via text that may accompany it. Due to my prior knowledge of the frog being used as a comedic representation, whether the frog has a birthday hat, is crying, or id holding a gun, I’m heavily influenced to decode the message as a comedic gesture. For a left-wing figure, they most likely have been the receiver pro-gun activism, or anti LGBT communities who use the frog in posts from time to time. As my mother the understanding of having little context to the figure causes her to have a neutral position.

Here, I can see the asymmetry of meanings from the encoder to the decoder. Due to the abstract nature of memes today in our society, I can’t always be too sure of the creator’s true intention, but the fact that decoding is polysemic, means most of us have different outcomes of meaning than what was intended. For this scenario, I’m probably right due to my position in relation to the broadcaster. People posting memes online should be assumed to be within my generation because of the surrounding medias that attract my age demographic to websites like reddit and 4chan. My connotations should therefore include most of the intertextualities of the creator themselves which include video games, older posts on the website, and social media. My mother doesn’t know these same intertextualities, so her reaction is more on the denotative level, taking the message for its literal meaning which holds little value. The left-wing figure brings connotations of real-world issues the online platform, taking an oppositional position to the post.

There are three different positions audience can decode messages; these are described as dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. If the left-wing person is repurposing the encoded message to fit their preferred view that the text exists as a political message, they’re taking an oppositional view to the message. I am younger and have been influenced by this type of media in the way the creator intended with little difference, I am a dominant reader. My mother, taking the information for what it is in reality as a post that has little significance in her life, she has negotiated the meaning of the text.

Intertextuality is what drives my interest for most of the entertainment I consume but I don’t have a strong background in music which separates my understandings of music from my friends. Take Drake’s song “mob ties” for instance. When this song came out, I thought it was enjoyable because it was repetitive and catchy, but my friend Eric liked it for an entirely different reason; the meaning behind the lyrics. Through keeping up with Drake’s social media pages and recent news, he knew that there was drama within the community and that Kanye West had been producing music for other rappers that were making fun of him in their newest music. Avid fans were waiting for Drake to acknowledge this, and to fit their preferred narrative that Drake would come back and release a great song that would solidify his position as a stronger, more influential rapper. Recently I’ve gotten a new coworker who used to be in a rock band, and now does music a hobby. When I’ve asked what he thinks about my music tastes, he usually turns his nose up; not because it is a different genre, but he cares more about the history and culture of the music which is expressed through sampling and remixing of sounds. He finds that they don’t feature enough creativity in sampling, but result to choosing an interesting sound, and repeating it which he thinks is an insult to other artists who put in more effort. Intertextuality has caused us to understand and react to music in very different ways depending on our context. I can see how simple differences of gender, race, and age these same effects with all sorts of media can have, but I have little first-hand knowledge.

Media reception theories give me some more context about uses and gratifications by taking a look at the contexts of my media consumption. In order to understand the contexts of my media viewing, I will examine the rituals of an average school or workday for myself. Studying film, I feel it is my duty to fill as much of my free time with viewing online content in order to be efficient in learning about film while enjoying my leisure activity in the domestic sphere. In the beginning of my day at 7:00am, I spend an hour of my time on YouTube to procrastinate getting up, while keeping myself from falling back asleep; watching esports highlights or tech enthusiasts. This is the least important content as I don’t want to wake up to anything intense. While I am getting ready, my visual attention strays, so I turn on podcasts until my drive to either work or school is done. These podcasts give me the experience of socializing without being present. Once I’ve arrived, I switch to music and space out, attempting to change my mood to either excited or relaxed, until I’ve stepped into my kiosk or my class. Once there, if I have free time, I know I won’t be able to devote much attention, so I either glance through online shopping to ease my mind while doing something productive by planning how to save money. After I’ve made my way back home, I do my homework and play video games simultaneously. Often, I lose my attention because I feel too energetic, so I resort to using fighting video games to temporarily put my brain through intense excitement to calm myself down and work. This process also works as a reward system that for every hour I work, I play half an hour of games. Finally, at the end of my day I try to watch either a TV show or movie depending on how tired I am.

In this examination, just about all of the types of entertainment I consume have been chosen to best fit my social and situational contexts and the amount of attention I have free to give. I am naturally introverted despite being very outgoing and talkative in sales, so my preferred leisure is done with full attention to detail and in isolation. I would way my use of video games as a reward system for homework completion is a gendered dynamic when comparing the ways my girlfriend procrastinates. She is less concerned with violence and gore, but traditional female roles, so she likes to procrastinate by watching cooking videos online. I also prefer to avoid spending time with my parents because my mother has married into very rude male which has extremely changed gender dynamics in the household. In the living room, I have lost the ability to watch my preferred content and, in my room, I’ve lost the ability to have volume on mt TV at night. Fully utilizing my smartphone as a medium for entertainment and communication is the best way for me to deal with these social contexts within the home, which affects my physical context as a result. In order to watch my daily entertainment, it is most beneficial for me to stay in my room for long periods of time, or while I’m on the go. They often get into loud verbal fights which put me out of the mood for longer content like movies, so I will instead view shorter YouTube videos that take less attention. In this examination, the media has dominated my free time by the active choices I make to fit entertainment around the structure of my day.

My generation and younger ones either have more introverts, or introverts are better enabled than ever before with the use of new smartphones and on-demand video platforms with fast internet speed. The text uses the term “time-space distanciation” which is used to explain the phenomenon that individuals are becoming increasingly able to experience social interactions without ever being physically present by the use of social media. Smartphones provide me instant links to speak directly to the most famous people in Hollywood as well as my family members who may just be in the next room. This instant feedback is even faster than walking to that next room, resulting in the technology changing the situational geography of my life; I no longer need to make appointments with people to speak with them, so I no longer need to structure my days with those restrictions in mind. I do not need to attend a seminar to receive guidance from real directors. I do not need to even walk to the Livingroom to speak with my parents.

We do still have positive rituals and interactions in the home during few occasions, one being dinner. We all use our smartphones in similar ways, meaning most of our knowledge and topics are influenced by what we have done on our phones. Often, I bring up a topic of technology, my mother talks about what her friends are doing, and my stepfather talks about prices for things he’s seen online. In this way, smartphones as a transactional system have shaped the conversations, we have with each other. We have each bought our phones from our carriers. The important part of integration has been their objectification; they fit on our persons at all times of the day which makes their incorporation into our lives easily manageable. Once they have been personalized, they serve as the conversion that brings us new information we wouldn’t otherwise have, resulting in giving us topics to speak of that avoid conflict. In the same way they can cause conflict, but we have learned to filter out topics which start conflicts.

The text often relates to the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft when making points about the heights of audience member’s engagement with a online text, building a community and participating in a virtual society. This game was extremely dominant in a time where I would have thought the stereotypical geek would be male, socially awkward, low income, and ugly. Although these stereotypes are still around just like any other, popular opinion has shifted to appreciate fandom and subcultures and to embrace the forming of new communities through meetups, conventions, and media involvement. The most engaged I’ve ever been as a fan was during the 6 years, I played League of Legends, a game that changed the way I saw online games forever, with a peak of 27 million active players at the same time. At first, I was peer pressured to play the game when I didn’t want to, but I eventually started and was exposed to the largest, exciting online community I’d ever seen. What got me hooked initially as a consumer was the prosumers of the game. YouTubers who played were uploading comedy shorts, highlight reels, lowlight reels, professional games, and everything in between. Since these online influencers were using YouTube, the site offered me a comment section to talk with other fans. These Youtubers’ popularity was so high, communities formed around the game and each of these individual personalities which brought in a maximum number of consumers to be part of the community. In this time there were so many active members that nearly every new type of interpretation and reinterpretation of texts within the game were poached and played with: community drawings, fan fiction, sexual repurposing, music that used samples from in-game sounds, etc. The game itself seemed much smaller than the community around it as everyone was distributing their unique works, supporting each other either socially or financially, and playing with imagination gained. Within one year, I became so engaged that I became a prosumer myself, working to make good plays and post them on my own channel for people to comment and post on Reddit. I mainly played a character named ‘Wukong’, which I made guides on how to play, made my username, and criticized other players who didn’t play him the ‘right’ way. This was an act of textual poaching because I inhabited the character and learned everything about him and gained a sense of ownership of this character, I spent countless hours with, resulting in creating a prescribed way for others to play the character. This sense of accomplishment and mastery even made me feel different about my personal life; I felt I was belonging to somewhere better than others after the school bell rang.

Within two years, I enjoyed one of the social aspects by attending my first Fan Expo at the Metro Convention Centre which had huge fan meetups where many fans dressed up as ‘their favorite characters and most booths sold only League of Legends artwork and apparel. Here, I saw the hierarchy of the subculture in person. Popular Youtubers and cosplayers sold their autographs and photos and were chased down and treated like celebrities by fans. Lesser known cosplayers, especially sexualized females, were treated second to the online influencers as many gave them tips and asked for photos. At the bottom was whoever wasn’t visually noticeable like me, not dressed up. Although I was at the bottom of the hierarchy, the culture was socially safe; I could dress like a female character and people would probably be excited about it and I would have a great time away from reality for the day.

As a huge fan by my third year, I played many more characters within the game and was challenging the institutional producers of the game. As I was highly ranked and well experienced, I decided to offer my concerns and wants on a weekly basis on the developer’s forum pages. In many occasions I would directly email them and receive feedback within a day or two. The game was updated every couple weeks and my notes would be about what items and characters I felt needed to be stronger or weaker and provided reasons why. As an activist, it was really rewarding to see how my contribution as a community member had the effect on a multibillion dollar video game company which is a crucial reason of why I was engaged for so long. Though many times I was reminded that as merely a community member, I was powerless when others decided against me. As the game matured, many of the YouTube influencers felt they were entitled to special treatment in the game for the work of creating large fanbases that played the game but again, they were a powerless elite, and one by one, most of the biggest celebrities in the community left for other games, leaving the professional esports as the last of the community and micro-celebrities.

With these big changes in the community, during my final days playing the game the community was still large because of the number of players addicted to the gameplay, but the variety of fans had diminished, leaving only the esports fans left. This showed the dark side of fan identity and group cohesion that made me leave the community. Identity shifted from a hierarchy that valued overall participation, to competitive ranking. If you weren’t in the top 1% of ranking, you didn’t have an opinion. The best players in the world were praised while community members who had been active for years weren’t valued because they weren’t good at winning. The game also became much more about money too; in order to fit these new standards of the community you needed a fast internet connection, expensive computer, and enough wealth to not have a job in order to perform at the top level and become a celebrity. As the second wave fan scholar would find, although I escaped into a virtual world for multiple years, I was not able to escape the systems of hierarchy as they were recreated by the community.

An interesting view of my experience with League of Legends is the profit of productions by the community. The reason for such a large audience, as I mentioned, is because of the online content creators, bloggers, and vloggers. While I gave my thoughts about the game to the company, I was acting as a part of crowdsourcing; an integral part to the way the game is made and its updates. I and countless others avid gamers would specifically tell Riot Games what was too strong and too weak, and they would fix the game on their terms. The community was working every day, putting in collective hours to create a cycle of media entertainment around the game for others to see and join, while the company itself did not sponsor or pay for these activities. Looking back at it, Rot Games for a long time worked to coexist with prosumers; accepting free advertising, in fact, expecting free work from people like me as the audience members became an important part to the structure of maintaining the game’s popularity. When big community members expected special treatment from the company for their free labor, they were not rewarded because they didn’t own any of the product they were remaking and mass distributing. For myself, the same is true and the time I spent contributing to the community was just free labor, giving away my intellectual property.

To examine how these online influencers brought hundreds of millions of fans to play the game, a modern look at the way we’re using technology to our advantages will explain these possibilities. There are many games made from big producers who invest much more into the creation of their games: EA, Activision, and Ubisoft. The reason League of Legends is able to have so much more success is because its style isn’t hardware intensive, allowing for nearly anyone with a computer the access of playing. It is also free to play with online currency structures; removing the only financial barrier from not playing the game. Our society is heavily digitized since tech is becoming cheaper and cheaper to the point, I could have a smartphone and a computer to play games for around $350; less money than a couple weeks of groceries for some. These two technologies allow access to all types of entertainment which transforms us into an engaged community for the game who act across a multitude of online communication mediums, create, remake, and distribute our own work. This is a form of fragmentation; although the video game only exists as one type of entertainment, fan span far and wide across the internet on YouTube, Twitter, Wikis, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, 4chan and others while I have access to each of these within any convenient context, always seconds away from either my phone, iPad, laptop, desktop, and smart TV. These technologies allow for audience autonomy where I can interact by posting a video by using my webcam, or comment on another’s user generated content. These enabling social media platforms include the means to watch the video, give feedback through likes and dislikes, and offer comment sections where the audience can interact with the producer. Early content creators were rewarded for their creativity in a new subculture and placed them higher than developers in the perceived hierarchy of the game. One of my favorite creators, ‘Videogamedunkey’ is an example of a creator who saw early success and even after his departure, is realized by the community as it’s king by many. He was a potentially dangerous figure for the publishers at the time because his content often including remixing of other online content where the game is being compared to any number of copyrighted medias, and his words engaged more fans than the official game’s accounts on social media. When he was filming a new video of him trying to win games and gain a higher rank as opposed to his usual comedy content, his internet fame stopped him. Many times, when he would play, others would recognize him and stop trying to play competitively, starstruck by seeing the youtuber in their game. Videogamedunkey became the target of trolling and in one of his games, verbally abused another player for their actions. The game has strict rules on friendly communication, and certain words and phrases result in automatic bans from playing the game. Videogamedunkey felt entitled to special treatment because of his status and free labor for the company and requested he be unbanned to finish the video. He was denied this treatment and slandered the entire company in a single update video and his departure from the community. This instance showed a crack in the participatory culture around the game; it was a visual-audio representation that community members are nothing more than consumers for the large billion-dollar company. Many who followed the YouTuber across his social medias and creators similar left the community as a sign of protest. This movement showed a new folk culture; players reflected on their efforts and revalued their time spent in order to make the cultural move of finding new games to replace League of Legends. In the “read-write” culture, gamers followed a single person who through interaction with fans, was able to change and influence and small portion of the culture within the community. In the broader context of the success of League of Legends, this instance lost them only a small percentage of fans but was soon replaced as the most popular game in North America by Overwatch, and soon, Fortnite. Videogamedunkey has also kept most of his fans at around 6 million YouTube subscribers, although has not risen in popularity since. League of Legends is still an extremely popular game and that success should be thanked by the participatory culture that is rooted in its beginnings and what still continues today through content creation of professional players across a network of fragmented audience members viewing all mediums of social media.

This effective use of transmedia production has become an expectation of modern participatory audience members. Taking a broader look at the

To conclude what I’ve learned about media audiences and how they operate today and, in the future, I will look at my current favorite content creator Marquez Brownlee and the advertising technology of Google. I’ve explained earlier that I enjoy watching videos based on new technologies and smartphones, and that I use my own smartphone as a tool to structure entertainment viewing and media participation throughout my entire day as a constant ritual. Marquez Brownlee has gained my subscriptions across many different media platforms because of his expertise in transmedia production. My gratifications as a fan are gained through intertextuality and interactivity, rewarding me as a fan for paying attention over the course of time, understanding references and being able to interact with the creators. Marquez does this by his use of different media platforms. On his main YouTube channel, he is a very cinematic smartphone reviewer who occasionally reviews other tech like headphones, smart home products, and tesla. For me, Marquez exists as a paratext; he is able to offer me meanings about new products and I trust his opinions. Based on his review on a phone, I’ve placed it on my shopping list, sold my old phone, and bought the new phone as a discounted black Friday price, effectively making money while getting a new expensive piece of tech which gratifies my needs including my social status and entertainment with a larger screen to body ratio, making movies more vivid on the go. Due to my understanding of buying and selling applications like Kijiji and my use of paratexts, I am able to use this information to become an informed consumer and profit from trade to gratify many of my needs as a consumer.

Marquez’s content is also becoming increasingly important to my daily rituals because he makes content which is able to fit my free time due to his understanding of fragmentation as a creator. He creates content that seamlessly travels with me during my daily activities. I watch his cinematic reviews when I can give visual-audio attention to learn about my new phone. When I’m driving to work, I turn on his podcast to listen where he gives a more in depth talk about the new technologies he’s reviewed over the week. Once I’m home and I want to scroll through some social media before going to sleep, he’s active on Twitter, excited to talk about what upcoming tech he’s going to try out in the near future, so I have something to look forward to in the coming days. The structure that is being used on me is one that fully embraces fragmentation in the new media landscape. I am always seconds away from viewing his work and it offers seamless transitions of entertainment based on my own special, social, and time contexts while offering me intertextuality between the texts by ‘continuing the conversation’ among all of these different media platforms. Even in the last 10 minutes of his podcasts, he dedicates time to mention questions his community has asked and give’s shout outs to other people’s content in the community. This fills my need for interactivity as a community member, which instills the feelings of fandom I previously found in League of Legends. This utilization of medias fits what audience members like me expect and big companies are realizing this and building similar structures; having multiple social media accounts, creating videos, blogs, and interacting with fans. As an agent of my own consumption, this structure works the best for now until my needs evolve again which if anyone can guess what that is, it is Google.

I’ve been selling Google products for a few years and I need to know how they work and their business model. I own a Google smartphone, use Google software in the form of search engine and YouTube. I also own smart thermostats, speakers, TV’s, and Light bulbs. Most importantly, I heavily rely on Google’s voice assistant to perform hands free tasks. Something interesting is that physical Google products, despite dominating software, don’t include great hardware, but this is on purpose. Google’s phones are known for having the best cameras, but they are also much lower in cost to produce. This is because Google has invested in machine learning technologies across all their platforms to fix our issues as consumers. If my photo doesn’t look good, machine learning has look at billions of photos and knows what feature should stand out and offers me a DSLR quality photo without any work or production value. In other words, since I have given Google access to look at my photos, I gain the benefit of better-looking selfies. Similarly, if I give Google consent to my viewing habits, I can watch unlimited on-demand YouTube videos that are catered to me, or if I give my location, I can find the cheapest gas near me while driving if I ask the assistant. Google is an advertising company and all this information that is taken is used to give to machine learning that advertises me things based on my history as an audience member. Since it is a software, this advertising is able to track me through my accounts across the fragmentation of using different devices on different websites. No type of advertisement other than Google’s can be as successful because they have no way of tracking audience members fragmentation like Google can. To explain the cycle of my latest smartphone purchase, Google advertised Marquez’s review of the Oneplus 7 Pro on YouTube, Google gained the information that I viewed the whole video, then went online to do further research on the product, and within a week, my Google news feed that is built into my phone advertised Oneplus 7 Pro black Friday deals as the top story curated for me. As a salesperson, the informed buyer is the hardest person to sell to. Google’s software is able to become a new type of salesperson that is consistently making the right offers and denial of services means the loss of being an active member of the modern media.

References

Sullivan, J. L. (2020). Media audiences: effects, users, institutions, and power. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

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ethan1220world-blog · 5 years

Text

Audience Studies (3P18) Blog Post #1 - Ethan Limsana

During the introduction of our text, we learn many different ways to describe the concept of an audience and how a particular audience has and can function over time. A critical piece in learning about where we are now, is to examine how they began and evolved overtime based on popularity of politics and social needs. In order to relate to these teachings, I will apply them to my modern life with a form of entertainment that I access daily in many different ways and social settings depending on context: music. Whether it be walking through the supermarket with a pair of headphones on, or at a live concert surrounded by crowds of rowdy young adults, music demonstrates a multitude of ways an audience can be affected. I listen to music daily on my phone with the goal of finding melodies that are addicting, and artists that write lyrics that heighten my emotions either by making me feel excited when I’m energized, or depressed when I’m sad. Once I’ve found the right song, I can listen to it many times before I get bored, and look at other works the author has to offer through streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube to choose what else I do and don’t like. This work that I’m doing to curate my music tastes are demonstrating an information based audience by simply listening to the artist and what they have to say about a given topic. It also demonstrates a meaning based view because by choosing I like and don’t like, the artist will see those tracks and adapt future works based on the reviews. Although, these messages would be much different face-to-face by exact knowledge given to one another, I am a part of the mass audience and communicate through my views, likes, and shares. This is my role in obtaining music for low cost, often free, for the large profit organizations that provide me music. Like any other job, I perform these roles when I am the audience member, and when I stop listening, I am no longer an audience member. Although I enjoy listening to 1980s music, my music taste has changed due to shifts in society and me as a demographic. As streaming services kept offering me to listen to rap music for being a young adult male, I eventually tried it, giving into Drake, Young Thug, Tupac, and more. Here, my shift in music taste was a result of the audience-as-outcome model because the media altered my taste. As mentioned before, I filter into the grand scheme of advertising and ratings as an individual on my phone, without a public space to listen or review the music, where most others are listening too. Since this experience is primarily alone, and I have no connection with other listeners, I am part of the audience-as-mass model. Not to say I have no power in this situation, I demonstrate audience-as-agent too by telling social media, and the entertainment providers what I think and ultimately making the final decisions of my interests on my own; in this case I happened to not enjoy older rap music, but enjoy modern rap music because it heightened my excitement. I chose to keep what I enjoyed because it fits me and my lifestyle, as an act of my free will.

A small percentage of the time I spend with music is live because it costs more money, often requires travel, and isn’t nice for time management, but it's the most engaging and memorable musical experiences I’ve ever had because of the nature of crowds. As a practice dating back to ancient Greek and Roman audiences, concerts are the same in essence; hundreds or thousands of people leave their homes to gather in one specific location to listen to a select few. Here, it is entirely dependent on the people on stage to determine the energy of the crowd. At rap concerts, loud music is played, and messages of substance abuse, and violence are in the lyrics. The crowd responds to this content by showing up to the concert dressed in fashionable clothes, drinking, getting high, and most of all, being rowdy by pushing, shoving, crying, and sometimes even fighting. As feared by the end of the 19th century, live concerts often display the potentially destructive qualities of crowds. As an individual listening to music alone, the reality is relatively unchanged from regular society, but when a crowd gets together, it is a temporary change in that particular society as a collective because individual actions have less consequences associated with them and immediate emotions can freely be demonstrated by all. The positives of the crowd are also unchanged; they create a physical setting for me to go, and create a memorable experience for me to worship someone who was already in power, to reinstate my value in enjoying their music, and keep them in power.

This power opens up new opportunities for record labels and artists to scheme new ways to alter our decision making process to make choices that continue their revenue flow and keep them in power for as long as possible. For example, Drake and his label OVO, use advertising and multimedia to keep us thinking about his music and persona even when we’re not listening. The money made from live events and music sales, goes into buying and selling merchandise, buying restaurants, maintaining an entertaining Instagram page, and utilizing television and film for documentary and selling the idea of his rich lifestyle. Although it is our own agency and free will to choose what we enjoy, these power moves are made to trigger appeal and to trick us into a cycle of worship.

It is the complete truth that modern rap music is a gold mine for those in power: it is repetitive, subject matter is relatively the same throughout different artists, and it is insanely popular among young viewers who make up most of the internet’s usage in North America. It can be tough for myself to take a moment to realize all that I see online is not real, but I’m one of millions, with many that don’t have the education to consider that. The effects perspective is a lens I can use to think about how I am affected by these powers in media that influence me now, and over time. In order to be informed, and understand why I’ll be advertised certain types of content in the future, is to study why my demographic reacts so positively to rap music.

As part of mass society, I and others are listening to this music alone, with little to no exposure of the themes suggested aside from movies and tv shows. Mixed with being a young adult, male and naive, this ignorance to the rapper lifestyle is exactly what advertisers capitalize on to gain and keep my attention. We live in a progressive time where racial equality, specifically black, is at the forefront of all media concerns and therefore, our concerns. The issue is that I have no first hand idea what is different in their culture as opposed to mine. There are few popular media that demonstrates African American’s as regular people who do regular daily things; instead the popular discourse uses selective exposure to say they grew up on the street and have become rich and surpassed whites. When music videos and lyrics suggest their lifestyles include endless amounts of money, having sex with multiple women, and killing people they don’t like, there’s actually very little I can actually do to disprove that even though its highly unlikely. Early concerns with mass persuasion worry that even though I have the critical ability to deem what is true and what isn’t, my brain wants to imagine something before it experiences it. I’m only shown stereotypes, so that's all I have the capacity to imagine for the time being. The artists acts as a barrier between me and their affairs; they only let me imagine how rich their lifestyle is for their specific interest of me believing that listening to what they have to say will elevate my life in some way, or keep me racially diverse.

I keep listening to these fake notions of black culture because, well, it's addicting for me. The Payne studies showed some important facts: intense violence and action scenes were more memorable for boys, the more exposure of similar themes created pronounced beliefs within children, and the interest in sexual themes became more engaging in children as they grew older. The themes I’m exposed to represent delinquencies that parents and teachers have taught me to stay away from, so they are exciting for me to see and fantasize about. It is an over-saturated market also, so I have more pronounced internal feelings about the content. Also, it is at a point in my life that I am more gullible to what is shown to me online. If these reasons weren’t enough to argue why I don’t stop listening, the presence of opinion leaders and emotional contagion make it increasingly difficult to leave the genre. Opinion leaders rise within my friend group, and reviewers I find online. Being so close to Toronto, most of my friends fall into the same demographic trap and see Toronto rappers as something to take pride in and constantly keep up with celebrities’ internal drama. Online reviewers, although they have more credibility, often promote the popular opinion in order to keep fans happy, sharing, and make their program more popular, and they might even be incentivised by outside sources to create and artificial opinion. Seemingly everywhere wants me to keep listening to this music, and when it consistently keeps my friends and I in an energized mood through emotional contagion, it at least feels like it's doing more good than bad in the moment.

As an audience member, mass media has treated me like an object whose attention can be persuaded, changed, and sold, but it's too early for me to see long term detrimental effects. I spend about 6-8 hours looking at screens everyday with heights of around 12-14 hours. Some of this is because of work, but more than half is for consuming entertainment and social media. It often gives me a fictionalized perspective of different topics which is why I’ve worked hard in the last two years to improve my lifestyle and create more unique experiences. Most of this leisure time is worse spent than when the media originally pulled me into addiction at the beginning of high-school. I was recommended to watch things I’ve already seen, or are so similar, it offers no unique ideas, so constantly being offered what I already like has put me in a rut. Also, I am weary of gaining emotions because of my viewing habits. Since most of my interests in entertainment are associated with delinquent themes, I recognize that when I’m out, I am not outgoing with strangers because I don’t trust them. Commonly in mob related movies, they give the feeling that you can’t trust anyone, and those feelings lie somewhere within me.

Public opinion is the most powerful information a company use to always have the upper-hand over the consumer when it comes to buying and selling. The information can be private or public depending on if it is beneficial to the company. It can be used to gain honest opinions about what the population thinks about a product, or a survey can be made specifically to trick the public into conforming to a certain ideal by use of question-wording-effects. The information can be used to alienate consumers into bandwagoning onto a perceived public opinion. The potential to mix and match these uses seems like a modern day superpower to me. To examine the ways public opinion is measured and used by large corporations for profit, I’ll relate to myself working in sales at Best Buy and Virgin Mobile to compare and contrast by looking at what I do to earn an individuals’ opinion on a much smaller scale.

When working with a customer, I want to ensure my commission is made whether or not it is in the buyers’ best interests when they walk in. First, I want to find out why they’re in the store. I ask about what issues they have with a current device, and move further to find out important things about their lifestyle: if they have kids, are they in school, where they live, and what hobbies they have. At this stage, I am giving my customer a person-to-person interview where I establish rapport, and my most advantageous position as a salesperson to both learn about the client, and earn a degree of trust so I can be given true answers to my questions. Here, I avoid leading questions because the answers wouldn’t accurately depict the information I want to offer a product that is relevant. The tactics of my survey change depending on what part of the sale we’re at for my benefit. Once we find the right phone for the user, we talk about the price which is where response effects are wildly useful. If the first thing I say is the actual price per month, the customer would be unsatisfied with the number and feel entitled to bargain, or wait for another sale, or go to a different company entirely. Instead, I show the original price for the phone, and their mobile plan separately which is always high, then show them what I can save them by signing up with a new contract; the response is almost always positive. This is because the original price has nothing to contrast except for some kind of number they’ve had before, or seen in a flyer which isn’t obtainable for me. In the second example, I’ve given a realistic, yet unfavourable example for them to contrast instead to get rid of any pre-existing notions of price. Once the customer has decided to buy the service or product, they will be less likely to buy anything else because they either don’t have enough money, or are weary of me taking advantage of them. When defenses are high, question-wording-effects can be used to make the customer think they want more. The last thing I have to sell is extra insurance for your phone, which everyone is accustomed to say no to because of negative connotations of other insurances like car, or life. Once they tell me they don’t want insurance, I proceed with the process and move on to the next topic, but realistically, I’m using this time to include specific words and body language to make them feel unsafe about their new product. I will begin using words in our conversation that have to do with the length of their contract, the price of the phone, specific words like fragile, stuck, lost, regret. My body language also changes to be more loose and clumsy, and often I place my drink uncomfortably close to the new device. When I ask again later in the process, the customer feels they have made the decision for themselves, drop their defense and buy.

Sometimes, other means of gathering opinion are beneficial as well. Although a personal interview offers me the most advantages, a telephone interview is a cheaper and time efficient way of gathering information. There is a possibility I could employ the same tactics into this interview, but that poses a couple problems. I cannot establish rapport as well, so if I ask too many personal questions, the customer will feel uncomfortable and hang up. I generally need to avoid leading questions, and keep the call strictly about the sale. This is a good way to earn information to use in the future, not the present. I can filter their answers to find out what may be a successful offer for the future. For use of large companies, this type of information could be used to find out where and when to sell things, but not as precise to find out what type of product to make. The final type of survey I look for is an email survey. These help me to gain a higher personal rating to gain recognition within my company, but as the text suggests, these are borderline useless way of gathering and asking for information. Just about all ways of surveying have some kind of flaw which skews the data gathered with varied impact, but email has to be the most negative impact. It requires the customer to actively do it during their leisure time, and it holds no benefit to themselves. Out of every ten customers I offer the online survey to, one may actually do it. This means they would have an outstanding reason to do it; either they really liked, or really hated the service. The numbers of completions are low, and the sources are not credible.

After information is acquired, the Government and large corporations use qualitative and quantitative data to use audiences in ways that far exceed the possibilities of an individual. They use this information to operationalize their audience; keep their viewing habits the same, and constantly sell their time to advertisers without suspicion. In order to find examples of political economy today, I will examine myself as an audience member of advertisements specifically through my phone on social media platforms and entertainment streaming services. Now that I can identify how advertisers obtain my personal habits and information, I can assume who is buying it based on what advertisements, or entertainment I’m offered.

As a consumer, I actually pay for many of the streaming services I use which I know isn’t the norm for post-millenials. I pay monthly to access Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, which means I don’t receive advertisements through these entertainment services, which is great for some of my leisure time, but I do not escape advertisements altogether. In fact, each of these streaming services, including the phone I bought, have a mandatory a lengthy multi-page terms of service agreement which states that they are services which I use while I pay for them, and during this time, they can gather as much information about my viewing habits as they want to improve their services. In exchange for signing this contract, I am given thousands of choices of the most popular movies, TV shows, and music of today with a service that knows what I want to watch even before I know what its about. In the meantime, however, all information of my demographic including how much I am paying for streaming is being sold to google, to then sell to advertisers in similar markets. I’m still not rid of the blindspot that advertisers use to steal my leisure time. Often while watching a show, I browse on my phone, and during that time I get ads for tv shows and movies on subscription services I have yet to pay for. The luxury of using Netflix services is paid for by me enduring ads for other similar subscription-based websites, which I am then working for free to review by looking at them and seeing whether or not they are worthwhile, just for it to be advertised again when there's a new incentive for me to consider again. This same operation happens to everyone who uses streaming services, as the audience is a commodity to be bought and sold by advertisers.

I’m treated very well as a subscriber of these services; the servers send the program are reliable with few buffers, the websites don’t have malware or bugs that slow down the speed of my computer, and I even get special features such as the option for subtitles on any show, and even an automatic option to skip opening credits. The same can’t be said for those who can’t afford to pay monthly, or who are using ad blockers. For example, my girlfriend is the daughter of Asain immigrants and she watches Korean TV, but she doesn’t pay for streaming services, and there are no channels for her to watch them for free. She streams these shows from free servers she finds online. These are often filled with malware, regular ads, and pop-up ads that ruin the viewing experience as well as poor servers from outside of the country which buffer and crash often. I am labelled as a priority customer because my viewing consists of popular American TV and I pay for the service, meaning I will most likely respond well to the advertisements that are sent to me and have a higher chance of purchasing, so my leisure time is improved to keep me as a customer. My girlfriend is exactly what advertisers will ignore, she enjoys foreign shows and doesn’t pay for her streaming service, so her leisure time is not cared for or valued, so is less important. This is a slightly different take on what the text has to explains, but it is a similar issue. Racial formation is causing someone close to me to not enjoy their leisure time as much as me because of their background and taste.

Adding market value to certain demographics does show signs of massive potential in new technologies though. Our viewership is measured on any platform we visit through server logs, and cookies. Even now with Google assistant and Google Home and smart home devices and surveillance systems, our voices are being monitored too. I had a conversation with my mother about what Halloween costume I am going to wear this year, and Google offered me advertisements for Halloween costumes the next day. This is the evolution of peoplemeters that tracked TV viewing habits, but on a much smarter and efficient scale that people meters couldn't achieve. Because of psychographics, we are not purely treated as a mass audience in this situation. I am not being offered to listen to Drake because Drake is popular with men my age, I am being offered curated advertisements that are relevant to me based on my demographics, psychology, and my actual web searches and needs described through conversation. This conclusion is very controversial because devices that listen to your voice at all times is creepy, but it is the peak of what target marketing strives to be in its most efficient form. When this form of information gathering and target marketing is perfected, it is hard to say whether our thoughts are truly our own because of the power of suggestion.

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