Our talk today about audiences and their role in media consumption and in the Shannon diagram of communication made me wonder what would happen when media is constructed without an audience in mind. Does media created for media sake really fit into Shannon’s communication model if there is no explicit audience that the creator is trying to target? Possibly, this absence of an audience would no longer allow it to fit into Shannon’s model of communication since there is no receiver. Or, possibly, the creator of this audience-less media is both at the informative and receptive ends of the line of communication. If we are rolling with this idea, then the creator is literally making media for themself and no else and is using media to communicate to him/herself. Probably, this type of inward/personal/one-way communication through the use of media could really highlight how exactly media affects/distorts/or doesn’t change the communication of an originally intended message. I could imagine a filmmaker starting a project with a clear purpose or message that he/she wants to prove or communicate to him/herself, but through the thorough process of production and actual filmmaking, they end up communicating an entirely different message. This is leading me to a question that is certainly an overarching theme in this class: Does the use of media affect or distort an originally intended message by the creator? And if so, to what degree is the message distorted or changed–how is it changed? Possibly an audience-less study of a “media for media’s sake” project can help answer this question.