Group 2C
Sarah Myers, Ryan Powell, Carley Bartlett, Antoniya Petkova, Jordan Muckley, Bashir Yusuf and Katherine Tysoe.
What the seminar session began with was Spencer asking us about our cabinets of curiosities with examples from them and the social grade system we've assigned them, as part of our individual task. What became obvious from that was that most people had trouble associating a specific social class with most of their "items". For instance, with commercials it might be easier, given that we can research the price of the product and generally the prices of all company's products and thus presume whether they are produced for people with bigger income or not. But it was notable that with music or movies it was far more difficult to assign a social class, rather than gender, age or ethnicity as a target audience. Spencer explained that it WAS difficult, it wasn't something we could do easily without having any previous knowledge or experience, but getting us to try it was the important part.
One thing that became obvious while different people were discussing the issue, was that most of us don't think of the audience, based on ourselves. Probably because we like to think that we are all individuals with different taste (we talked about taste later as well) and we can't assume that everyone likes what we like. However, no one ever thought of "me" as the audience, basing our research on that. We were trying to understand the audience, which is a random group of people out there, who would or would not like a certain product. Then Spencer explained that once we become producers, we're going to move on from the idea of each and every one of us being a individual with taste to generalizing the audience, because this is how marketing strategies are designed. We can't produce something and hope that some people are going to like it or buy it, we need to invent a strategy that is based on stereotyping the audience, so that we could have a target audience in mind and can target consumers.
We then moved to the idea that sometimes a product might seem as targeting "everyone", but if we think about it carefully, it is not true. One example was "EastEnders", who someone said aimed at everyone. But I had never heard of it before coming to the UK, so it is not exactly everyone, is it? Of course, we would need a deeper knowledge to be able to find out exactly which target audience it has been produced for, but we need to start from the understanding that NO PRODUCT is produced for everyone without a specific imaginary person in mind.
The question of taste rose and the question "Is media manipulating our likes and dislikes and is there really such a thing as taste?". It was a hard question to answer, specifically because we don't like to think that media is manipulating us into anything, we like to think we are individuals with own choices and tastes. But if we think about it, there are many occasions, on which media has twisted a certain story or shown a certain individual in a certain way so that the audience was left with the wrong impression. Isn't that manipulating? And how can we say afterwards "We like him" or "We don't like him", if all we've seen out of this person was only media stunt and not reality? The question of taste is a delicate one, as people are known to hide behind other people's opinions and tastes, just not to be embarrassed. For instance, if all of your friends hate something and make fun of everyone who likes it, you wouldn't be bragging about liking it, now, would you? And if someone approached the whole group of you to make an enquiry, would you tell them the truth? And this is not even the deeper issue, given that your taste might still be individual, just hidden. Sometimes it happens, though, that we just don't like something, because everyone else around us doesn't.
Then we moved on to my favourite subject - "high" and "mass" culture (Spencer preferred the word "low", but I can't seem to apply it) and the difference between them. We discussed different music, movies, art, trying to assign them one of the two categories. Both cultures actually depend on content - like hip-hop, for example, which is obviously not high culture because of its content and the idea behind it, because of how and why it was invented in the first place. Mass culture is not something bad, which is why I personally avoid the word low, as it implies low intelligence or low cultured mind, it is just what has been produced to appeal to the masses and the content of which is not for a small group of intellectuals, but rather for the general public. It is hard for me to be objective on that topic, given that I've studied mass culture before and was always under the opinion that as much as it is not low culture, it is still lower than high culture and we should strive to make it more intellectual and meaningful, rather than just entertaining. But that is a totally other issue, which I'm not going to get into now.
Then we went back to the idea of social class and how a lot of the mass culture was specifically invented to be rebellious against "the system" or in other words it was produced by people with low social grades who were unsatisfied with their cultural status. From the music, that is hip-hop, punk, rock&roll - these were products of rebellious minds, protesting against that social differentiation, which put them into a very low social class or in general protesting against the system, the order of things, which actually put them in that position, gave them a low status.
We discussed stereotypes a little further, coming to the conclusion that we are all programmed to believe in them. We meet someone and we presume something about them, before knowing them. We discussed that in the light of women and first the difference between being female and feminine, as a woman is born female, but it is culturally shaped to be feminine, which can prove to be very different in different cultures (in Japan - the binding of their feet, in Europe - heels). Media shapes the stereotype of a "woman" in society and everyone who is not "obedient" to those requirements, let's say, it considered ugly or ill-kept, etc. Media controls people to such extent, that so many companies make money off of something completely natural by selling feminine products, for instance. This is how wide media reach is and how much it manipulates us, even if we don't like to think of it that way.
Spencer gave us the explanation that all those stereotypes and preconceptions change by people looking into them and seeing how ridiculous they are. If we look at Japanese women and how they tried to make their feet smaller to be more attractive, we think it is completely ridiculous. But if we look at ourselves and the image of a woman in heels, we consider it something completely normal and everyone beside that is considered too masculine or too different, at the least. But this is exactly what they are trying to get us doing, to look beyond what we're used to and study the reasons behind everything, so that we could understand the role of media and analyse it objectively.
We ended the seminar with a brief discussion of our group tasks and the delicacy of an audience research, as people are not always truthful in their answers (as I mentioned above, how sometimes we don't say what we think in front of other people). So asking people on the street or creating a Facebook group, might not be the best ways to find out what the audience thinks of certain products/events. It is as well crucial to start with "me", as we are the audience, and not necessarily avoid our own group in the research, because we are the ones doing it. It is always the "I" to begin with and then move onto the imaginary whole group of people "out there".Labels: tasks |
