One of the many interesting questions that was raised in class today that I am still thinking about is: what is ethnography doing in media studies? Though I do not have a solid answer for this yet (and I wonder if there is an answer), I am thinking that many of the presentations we have seen point to the audience as a significant piece of ethnographic studies of media. Today we discussed how many of the readings implied, and Dornfeld even explicitly stated, that the producers of media anticipate and imagine their audience beforehand. An observation (that I think Maya made) in response to this is that the reactions and responses of the audience can be variable. This is something that is not captured in Claude Shannon’s model of communication which only shows one receiver (yeah, it was definitely Maya who brought that up). What I also began to consider is how Shannon’s model also neglects to account for multiple information sources. I am considering information sources to be the producers of the media. The chapter that Cynthia and I presented on Childhood made it very clear that multiple agents and entities with their own motives and pretexts negotiated throughout the pre-production and production of the series which ultimately shaped the final product. To bring this back to the question of what ethnography does here, it is possible that one of the functions of ethnography in media studies is to look more in depth at these varied reactions to consumption of media and motives for producing media. Possible questions that an ethnographer may ask is: what reaction was the producer anticipating? How do the various producers and funders imagine the goal of their product? What has been compromised on during production and why? Where are the variations in reactions, and what explains them? And if time allows, what is the producer’s or industry’s response to their audience’s feedback?

I am very interested in considering how the issue of audience expectation and feedback arises in social media, which seems to accelerate the feedback loop. Social media posters and influencers can almost instantly see feedback to their post qualitatively through comments and reactionary posts as well as quantitatively through likes, shares, retweets, views, etc.