A large portion of our discussion today was addressing the role of the audience within media production and consumption.  I had a few thoughts about the idea of an audience.

First, I think we never really got to defining what an audience even is – is it an individual, a group of individuals at the same time or place (like in the case of the Balinese theater), or just individuals spread out over time and location that consume some of the same media (i.e. people watching Bandersnatch from their own homes at different times), or does an audience even have to be human for a message to be received (like Rei brought up about transmission)?  Or perhaps does it really not matter what the true audience is in the first place because there lives this separate, imagined audience that is constructed in the minds of the producers? Furthermore, this idea of constructing an audience seems rather counterintuitive in some contexts, as in contexts that aren’t on a national or global scale. For example, when exploring Hmong media, it is precisely because the producers are able to read the text – the wants, needs, culture – of the Hmong Americans, that their films are already successful; there is no need for a construction of an audience.

Furthermore, we acknowledged that a producer cannot distance themselves from their work and is thus part of the consumers and is the audience. However, there seems to be an implicit distinction that we are making between the producer, who is an individual who is part of the audience, and the everyone else, who seems to not to be individuals and are grouped under this label of “mass audience.”

In that vein, I think the portrayal of the audience is particularly interesting the case of Cynthia and Grace’s presentation on Hispanic identity. They mentioned this idea of a creation and erasure of Hispanic identity that comes with targeted advertising. The producers seem to be in the active role, extrapolating information about culture from existing medias in order to shape some message that they hope the audience will receive. And it is only because the audience accepts this message that there is this creation and homogenization of the Hispanic culture that somehow becomes accepted as reality. And it seems implicit that this acceptance is much Shannon’s model where the message is received, without noise, from the transmitter.