Strength in numbers

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This essay discusses the concept of audience as a media commodity and their power as citizens of the digital media age.

For two years running, Australians have ranked politicians higher than journalists in ethics and honesty (Roy Morgan, 2007 & 2008). In 2006, Roy Morgan’s ‘End of Year’ survey found that 59 per cent of respondents “don’t trust journalists to tell the truth”. Based on these results, Roy Morgan’s Executive Chairman, Gary Morgan commented:

“Although there is a heavy reliance on media organisations to inform Australians of what is happening at home and abroad, the fact that 74% agree that ‘media organisations are more interested in making money than informing society’ raises major questions about the integrity of the entire media industry.”

Consumer confidence of the media is down, but the commercial relationship between advertisers, the media and their ‘consumers’ still remains. By classifying their audience as passive commodities, the role of the audience as stakeholders in the economic viability of the media industry was overlooked.

With the rising popularity of digital media, a shift in the ‘public sphere’ occurred. “One of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number,” which Journalism Professor Jay Rosen argues is the cause of media authority erosion.

The growth of citizen journalism websites is an illustration of the public sphere in which civic society fosters communication through an online medium. According to Bowman & Willis (2003), “news media and consumer non-profits no longer have a monopoly on serving as a watchdog on government and private industry. Individuals and citizen groups are stepping in to fill the void they believe has been created by lapses in coverage by big media”.

The argument put forward by the media industry lies in the quality of information disseminated by the citizen journalism movement. “As a bit of a reality check”, The Age Online Community Editor, James Farmer, asks citizens on his blog: “When was the last time you encountered a "citizen doctor", valued a report by a "citizen researcher", took off in a plane flown by a "citizen pilot" or saw justice meted out by "citizen policeman"?

Helium.com is once such website encouraging citizens worldwide to “Learn what you need, share what you know”, by publishing user generated articles as part of an online community. Helium positions its audience through the use of branding strategies containing key messages targeting the citizen in onsite banner ads and copy. Statements such as: “Helium Debates. Civilized Discourse”, and “Helium brings civility back to the Internet” target the citizens’ need for a public sphere where independently sourced information can be published and subjected to open ‘real time’ evaluation.

Through classifying the audience as passive consumers, media credibility has deteriorated along with declining profit margins currently plaguing the global media industry as digital media revenues increase, growing by 17 per cent last year and predicted to rise close to 25 per cent in 2009 (AIMIA, 2008).

Without citizens investing their time and money in the media industry, advertising revenues fall and media production becomes an unviable economic enterprise. It would seem these trends demonstrate that the audience is not just a ‘commodity’ of ‘consumers’ but indeed a driving force behind the existence of the media industry itself.

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Location! Location! Location!

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This essay discusses the bearing 'spaces' have on how audience members are positioned and perceived by media producers.

It’s the phrase real estate agents swear by like some unspoken sales creed of official truth. Although ‘location, location, location’ is advice generally applied in a literal sense when, for example, purchasing the ideal business property to attract customers, the concept behind this capacity to influence certain people by analysing the spaces they occupy, can also be applied to audiences drawn to the media production of intellectual ‘property’ such as magazines, newspapers, TV and radio programs.

By considering spaces as a key factor in audience research, media producers may then generate content to target the “inscribed reader” who O'Shaughnessy and Stadler (2008) defines as “an ideal reader who is constructed by the text or who is imagined or intended by the producers of the text” (p.100) .

When the geographic space where media is consumed is taken into consideration, it creates quantitative and qualitative parameters which can attempt to describe who the audience is. This description of the audience can then be used by the media to produce content which assumes a particular style which may appeal more so to their inscribed reader.

This stylistic approach is evident in the many newspapers available within Sydney which differ in content based on their target demographic. The content in a metropolitan newspaper will vary significantly from a community newspaper based on spatial reach alone without considering audience socio-economic factors.

What news may be deemed significant to local residents in the suburb of Campbelltown such as this week’s front page story, “Bulldozer Cure”, in the Campbelltown Macarthur Advertiser (Marchetta 2009), a follow up news article of recent violence in the local area, is not necessarily news of national interest and was not mentioned in any Sydney metropolitan paper this week.

However, during January, the violent event was reported in national, metropolitan and local print, web and broadcast news for approximately 2 weeks with headlines such as: “Elders called in to calm Sydney 'ghetto'” (ABC News 2009), “Life in a suburban warzone” (The Daily Telegraph 2009), and “Local member won't visit Rosemeadow” (AAP 2009).

The local news coverage of the event titled “Two shot and four stabbed at Rosemeadow” (Campbelltown Macarthur Advertiser 2009) had ongoing follow up articles such as “It’s time to shake off an unfair reputation” and “Is Campbelltown as bad as what the media makes it out to be?” (Macarthur Chronicle 2009). This week’s edition of the Campbelltown Macarthur Advertiser also includes the article “Campbelltonian and proud of it!” by its Editor (McGill 2009).

The style in which this story was presented to the audience by the media is an example of the role spaces play in how messages are positioned to the perceived audience. It also outlines some disadvantage to this spatial analysis of a mass audience by the local community itself declaring misrepresentation in the eyes of the nation.

As highlighted by this example, it seems the resulting content from the spatial perception of a mass audience by media producers is as McQuail describes: ranged from simple prejudice and snobbery to sophisticated exercises in media analysis.

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Life in the clickstream*

Audiences are not just passive consumers brainwashed by media products, but are active participants who make their own meanings (O’Shaughnessy & Stadler, p. 105).

I chose this quote because I think there has been a shift in recent times due to the popularity of digital media.

The contemporary ‘audience’ is no longer passive but interactive.

The audience itself can inexpensively produce its own messages and communicate that globally with minimal technical knowledge in a matter of minutes. The audience can now literally create ‘the media’.

This has the potential to cause many complications in audience research as outlined in the Uses-and-gratifications model. I believe the parameters have widened considerably.

Information is now accessible through more mediums in many different formats. These mediums are also much more portable, widening the scope of distribution contexts.

How can one predict the effects of information communicated to an audience when the audience itself can influence others in the audience by creating their own messages that coincide with the text?

Mass communication is no longer a one sided affair. The ‘Letters to Ed’ have evolved into a global self publishing, user driven, multimedia cooperative.

In light of the recent media job cuts in Australia and around the world I would have to say this is a pertinent issue within the industry. The traditional mediums and technology journalists use to perform their role in communication have changed and are still continuing to evolve.

It would seem the media itself is changing to suit this new perception of the contemporary audience. The media-audience dynamic has become interchangeable in that the audience becomes the media and vice versa.

I believe this is why Fairfax called their recent culling the “business improvement program”. Times have changed, authorship has changed, the ‘audience’ has changed. The MEAA condemn the job cuts yet agree to the changes in their “Future of Journalism” summits. Welcome to life in the clickstream.


*Discussion Forum Activity posted on 11th February, 2009 by Maria Tan

CMNS6060 - eCulture and Audiences, The University of Newcastle

Internet Multimedia Technologies

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This essay explores the current state of multimedia technologies and explains why audio and video streaming is an unreasonable expectation for the internet

Since the advent of the graphical user interface, multimedia has become a popular way to present and exchange information by combining various types of content such as audio, video, text and images onto a specific medium for distribution across the internet.

With the success of multi-user environments providing common platforms for global information access, sharing, and interaction on the internet, the popularity of multimedia technologies in its many forms still continues among internet users today.

The advancement of multimedia technology in the 1990s paved the way for further developments in areas such as audio and video streaming, e-commerce, online gaming, video conferencing, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) among many other technologies which have become commonly utilized over the internet through web browsers, gaming platforms, conferencing applications, media players and other such portals.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the rate of household internet access has quadrupled over the past eight years, from 16% in 1998 to 64% in 2006–07¹, while the number of subscribers to retail VOIP services rose to 83% worldwide in 2005 alone².

The success of VOIP in particular is seeing many users transfer from circuit switching telephony to digital audio communication. VOIP operates in the same manner as other audio streaming technologies where sound is encoded and transmitted as packets of data in half or full duplex connections over fibre optic cables integrated into current telephone network infrastructure.

All of this popularity however, does generate disadvantages.

With the increased demand of multimedia content requiring a barrage of data packets to be transmitted, an increase in traffic congestion can result while data traverses the information superhighway.

This heightened information flow can in turn degrade the overall performance of successful data delivery on the internet by causing packet loss, disproportionate bandwidth distribution and delays in response time.

The underlying causes of these issues lies within the way audio and video content is streamed over the internet, and the increasing number of internet users accessing multimedia technology such as video on demand and VOIP.

Network protocols governing the way data is transmitted for web traffic such as text based and file sharing applications function differently to multimedia protocols³. Developed and governed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the traditional TCP format of transferring data differs in packet structure and resultant behaviour from the transport layer User Datagram Protocol (UDP) commonly used in streaming audio and video.

The fundamental difference between these two protocols is that UDP is primarily concerned with providing high speed data transmission over the internet, while TCP is optimized for accurate delivery rather than timely delivery⁴. This is due to their packet structures differing in design. UDP provides a procedure for application programs to send messages to other programs with a minimum of protocol mechanism⁵ by being stripped down to only 4 fields while TCP fields are divided into 11 segments which provide other functions to guarantee successful data transmission. UDP supplies minimized transmission delay by omitting the connection setup process, flow control, and retransmission⁶.

Because UDP operates on a bare minimum of protocol mechanism, it lacks TCP’s ability to control data flow which in turn causes the problematic “saturation point”⁷ issues previously mentioned. When TCP experiences network congestion it automatically slows its transmission rate through four “congestion control algorithms”⁸ not present in UDP. Both protocols inadvertently affect each other during peak usage times with TCP regulating packets with slower data transmission rates in the face of congestion where UDP begins to use a higher bandwidth allocation while experiencing packet loss during TCP synchronization.

To overcome these congestion issues, current internet technologies must be upgraded to accommodate the increased flood of data from fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet services. As the number of internet users accessing multimedia content continues to increase, the internet backbone which distributes this information must in turn adapt to cope with these changes to support future demands.

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