1. Who would be the audience for your media product?

My target audience for my media product is aimed at the age group of 17-24, as an encoder I aimed to focus on my age group this way I am likely to attract my target audience and have a better understanding of this age group. When the task of creating a music magazine first occurred to me, my first media application involved deciding which individual imaginary entity I would be, the imaginary entity involves the ideal reader/customer of the magazine. To construct the perfect magazine for them I took into consideration the genre of music that will appeal to them.

This is my rate card: This shows my target audience and what types of products my target audience will purchase.
This is my imaginary entity lifestyle questions: This shows what answers my target audience would give to the lifestyle questions.

Semiotics diagram

Photo shoot- Contents Page

When constructing Photos for my contents page I used photos, taken from a club I went too in london. This photo conveys the overall "rave" theme of my music magazine therefore I believed the picture was suitable.

Diary Plan

Social Stratification

Social Stratification

The A B C1 C2 D E is very much an economic form of dividing society up (this is referred to by social scientists as Social Stratification)

There many other ways to stratify the audience

Gender, Age, Ethnicity, Lifestyle, Sexuality, to name but a few.

Using the information above we can see there is a balance of power between Producers and Audiences. Producers cannot survive without audiences but in truth they raise more revenue from advertising than they do from selling their magazines to the public. Therefore they will always be more concerned with producing what the Advertiser wants than they will with what the audience.

 Institution                                        Content                               Audience
Who produces the text.              What it looks like                  Who buys it and why
                                          Forms and conventions
                                          Representation

For example if Maria Claire starting producing articles about laboratories testing cosmetics on animals, their advertisers would soon let them know they didn’t like the content regardless of what the audience thought. Editors simple would run an article like that for fear of losing advertisers. This happens in all platforms; TV, Newspapers etc.

Representation

- An image of an object is a representation of it
- No representation can be completely true
- All representations are a selection – they have been chosen
- All representations go through the process of mediation (the process of change)

- An event or ‘’thing’’ goes through the process of mediation and becomes a representation

- Budget and technology are factors that impact a representation
- Genre of the media text will also affect the mediation process
- Time frame – the length of the programme. Also the time from production to the release date – the time available for the mediation process
- The perception of the producer also affects how the overall media text is produced – different producers will see things differently and therefore create their texts to signify different meanings

- Most media producers are male. This would make their view of the world different to that of a female media producer

- It is important that the media text meets the expectations of the target audience it is aimed at

- Censorship – controlling the amount of e.g. violence, sex in order to be suitable for the specific target audience- You can question a representation if you have a situated reality (experience of the situation)
- Mediated reality – watching whilst having no experience of the situation
- Hyper-reality – more real than the real. The representation is more important and more recognised than the real thing e.g. famous people

- How are women represented in the media?
· Housewife
· Professional, working
· Motherly type
· Sex object

Stereotyping

· Discrimination – an act
· Prejudice – a thought

- Stereotyping is most often referred to when talking about race, social class and gender

Encoder/Decoder Model

Stuart Hall           Encoding Decoding Model

1 Media Studies tends to focus on one of three key areas.

Institution

Who produces the text and why. Questions we might ask are what social background are the producers or what budget do they have.

Content

This is where we study the Media Text itself. We might explore genre or narrative or representation.

Audience

Here we are interested upon who the audience are and what impact the text might have upon them.

2 All those who make media texts can be referred to as encoders. Encoders create meaning. When they produce a media text they do so with an assumption of how the text will be understood.

3 The audience all take meaning out of a text. When we watch a film or listen to music we decode the meaning. We try and understand what the encoder is trying to communicate. We can therefore refer to the audience as decoders.

4 As we know all signs are polysemic, therefore all media texts are polysemic. As we are all individuals we must therefore decode media texts in different ways. Stuart hall suggests there are 4 ways in which Media Texts are decoded. We can say that the audience can read/decode a text in one of the following ways.

4 Decoding possibilities

• Dominant reading: the reader fully shares the text’s code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading.
• Negotiated reading: the reader partly shares the text’s code and broadly accepts the dominant reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way that reflects their own position, experiences, and interests.
• Oppositional reading: the reader is in a social situation that places him or her in direct opposition to the dominant code. The reader understands the dominant reading but does not share the text’s code and rejects the reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference.
• Aberrant reading: the reader is unable to take the meaning that the encoder put into the text. There is a gap (dissonance) between the cultural assumptions of the encoder and the cultural context of the decoder. They just don’t get it.

5 Media Producers (encoders) will often want their audience to take the dominant reading. To ensure a text is less polysemic and less open to multiple meanings they may try and anchor meaning.

6 Encoders need to talk to their audience in the appropriate way. We call this the Mode of Address. Generally encoders will make assumptions about the decoders’ (audience) knowledge, interests and understanding of the world and encode their texts accordingly. Those assumptions are cultural and can have an impact upon the audience.

Consider girls’ magazines.

7  The assumed language and points of reference an encoder uses to connect with an assumed target audience is known as the ‘Public Idiom.’