Audience Theory, Institution, Language, Representation

CSP 9: war of the worlds

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https://archive.org/details/OrsonWellesMrBruns

This is a Targeted Close Study product for which you will need to focus on the following areas of the Theoretical Framework:
> Media Industries
> Media Audiences
You will need to listen to excerpts from the broadcast but the main focus will be the technological development of radio as an institution.

War of the Worlds is an early example of a hybrid radio form, adapting the H.G Welles story using news and documentary conventions. The broadcast and the initial response to it has historical significance as an early, documented, example of the mass media apparently having a direct effect on an audience’s behavior. The academic research carried out into the broadcast (and the ongoing dispute about the extent of the effect) provided some of the early media audience research and the findings have been extremely influential in the media, advertising and political campaigning.
A useful overview and discussion of the context can be found here (not part of the CSP for assessment): https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/war-worlds

Media Institutions

War of the Worlds provides an historical context for broadcasting, being produced at a period when radio was the only form of domestic media; the 1930s and 1940s became known as the ‘golden age’ of radio.

  • War of the Worlds was broadcast by Columbia Broadcasting Company – an institution still in existence (in a very different form) today.
  • Radio broadcasting was seen as direct competition to newspapers which had previously been the only way of receiving news.
  • The broadcast is typical of the way institutions are always looking for new styles in order to attract audiences.
  • Regulation – radio broadcasting was regulated by the Federal Communications Commission and it investigated the broadcast to see if it had broken any laws.
  • The broadcast provides an excellent example to consider the effect of individual producers on media industries (known as ‘auteur theory’) as this is the work of Orson Welles.

Media Audiences

War of the Worlds has become a real-world test case for a variety of audience theories, although the exact nature of the audience response is still disputed.

  • What techniques (ie Media Language) does the broadcast use to convince the audience that what they’re hearing is really happening?
  • Consider the way that external factors – global political context, gender, religion, education etc. – are likely to also affect audience response
  • The ways in which audiences interpret the same media product differently – at the time of broadcast and now (Reception theory including Hall)
  • Cultivation theory including Gerbner

Historical, political, social and cultural contexts

For many, the wider social, political, historical and cultural contexts are not just clearly connected to media studies but they are in some ways more important.

“I’ve always said you can’t understand the world without the media nor the media without the world” (Professor Natalie Fenton, quoted in Fake news vs Media Studies J. McDougall p.17 2019, Palgrave)

“I do spend long periods of time with my gaze turned away from the media, because I’m seeking to understand what’s going on out there, and then the role of the media in that context. I’m always putting the social, the political and the economic (contexts) first.” (ibid)

War of the Worlds can be considered in a historical context as it provides an interesting study of the power and influence of radio as a form during its early days of broadcasting. It is also useful to consider the product in a social, cultural and political context when considering audience responses to the programme. It was first broadcast on the eve of World War II and reflected fears of invasion in the US and concerns about international relations.

Some other thoughts regarding this text center around contemporary ideas of Fake News. In other words, do we / can we trust the media? Where do you get knowledge and information? It also a text that shows the power of the media, to influence vulnerable audiences. Although I wonder if the stories around audiences reacting passively as if it were a true story were exaggerated almost as a marketing exercise, that in itself is a form of made up information? Indeed, isn’t all information made up? How do we know what is truth? What is clear is that the distinction between fact and fiction is often blurred and relies upon audience members recognising and understanding specific codes and conventions that relate to each Media Language. In this instance, the Language of Radio is used creatively to structure a text that could be taken as fact, but is clearly fiction. Recognising the particular social and historical moment that this media text was produced is significant, so was this a comment on the ability of the mass media to create propaganda and manipulate a compliant and vulnerable mass audience? Is that still relevant today? Think about twitter, Trump, Brexit etc. If so, then Chomsky‘s argument that the media is used by powerful groups – ‘Manufacturing Consent‘ – is the most appropriate theory to structure an understanding of media, technology, control, manipulation and power.

Other areas to think about (but unlikely to form part of your assessment)

Media Language

  • War of the Worlds is a good case study for students to understand the way codes and conventions of radio drama (sound, dialogue, SFX, microphone technique, silence, words, accents, dialects etc) are put together to create meaning and construct a recognisable and familiar genre (Steve Neale). War of the Worlds also belongs to the genre of sci-fi and invasion – how are the conventions evident?
  • But can War of the Worlds be considered as an intertextual product? Or pastiches of other genres.
  • Consider how developing technologies affect media language: in 1938 radio was still a relatively new mass media technology, the broadcast could experiment with the form in a way not possible later on.
  • At the time of the broadcast the idea of hybrid genres was unfamiliar, with clear boundaries between fact and fiction, making this a significant development in the form.

Media Representations

While there are representations of social and cultural groups in War of the Worlds, this broadcast is particularly significant for studying how a media product constructs a representation of reality, drawing on issues in society to convince the audience of its reality.

  • How does the use of media language construct the representation of the real?
  • Is this programme an early example of fake news?
  • What signifiers of different groups and social classes are used?
  • The representation of the alien invaders in sci-fi genre.
  • As a broadcast in October 1938, can War of the Worlds be interpreted as representing particular political concerns to US – and international – society?

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