Add Andrew Crisell – ‘radio is a blind medium’

Broadcast near start of WW2 and spread panic to US of invasion – More important events happening in the wrold

WofW reinforced the‘dangerous power of media’ for Welles

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?

The Language of Radio is used creatively to structure a text that could be taken as fact, but is clearly fiction

• But can War of the Worlds be considered as an intertextual product? Or pastiches of other genres.
• 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.

REPRESENTATION

• 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?

INDUSTRY

• War of the Worlds was broadcast by Columbia Broadcasting Company – an institution still in existence (in a very different form) today – CBS
• 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.

Link between radio and newspapers are significant – stealing audiences from newspapers

AUDIENCE

• 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
• 12 million listeners – only 2% of 5000 house were listening to CBS

Facts

FDR’s approved the broadcast

In 1935, there were twice as many radios in American households as telephones

Created fake news being old as used in WotW – links to changes in tech

October 30th 1938 first broadcast

‘Moral Panic’ –

History – The owner of the Daily Mail, DMGT, has bought the i newspaper and website for £49.6m from JPI Media

Format – Compact ( broadsheet-quality newspaper printed in a tabloid format)

Editors – Oliver Duff

Political stance – Liberalism, slightly left

Target Audience – Middle Class with the average age of 57 years old

Cost – At the start of September 2017, the price rose once again, to 60p for the weekday edition and 80p for the relaunched i weekend beginning later that month.

Circulation – 265,949 (as of September 2017). Published in London by Daily Mail and General Trust and distributed across the United Kingdom

Profit – The owners of the i, Johnston Press, announced the newspaper was bringing in a monthly profit of around £1 million

Facts

The i launched to pose a challenge to existing ‘quality’ newspapers with low cover price and tabloid format.

· In the context of declining newspaper sales it made a bold statement: “condense, re-format, repurpose – and produce a terse, intelligent summation of the day’s news that busy commuters can enjoy” (Peter Preston).

· It has battled to remain ‘cheap’ or at least ‘cheaper’: the weekday edition rising from 20p to 50p.

· Historical lineage going back to a much-missed ‘parent’ paper, the Independent, now defunct in print form: A significant number of staff joined the team from The Independent.

· It has maintained a reputation: named National Newspaper of the Year in 2015.

· Actually this link was broken when it was purchased by regional publisher Johnston Press (this has not affected its identity).

· It has a distinct ‘independent’ register, crisply edited: aimed at “readers and lapsed readers” of all ages and commuters with limited time: you don’t have to ‘identify’ yourself as a reader of a newspaper.

· Appearance is vital: USP: inside and out: compact, “matrices” for news, business and sports— small paragraphs of information which are expanded upon in full articles further on in the paper”.

· Its title reaches back to ‘independence’ but also forward to internet: i-pad, i-phone, i-player, i!

· The paper is active on social media, reinforcing its youthful feel: there is also a discounted student subscription that lasts for one academic year

Your Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -2.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.36

• Habermas argues the public sphere is an ‘autonomous area of public debate’
• ‘popular supervision of government was established

Watchdog journalism informs the public about goings-on in institutions and society, especially in circumstances where a significant portion of the public would demand changes in response

The media should work for the public interest. This should be regulated between the free market (people) or the state.

“a public space between the private domain and the state in which public opinion was formed and ‘popular’ supervision of government was established”

The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action, especially government

Initially Public Sphere was good as people in the same social class (horizontally) would communicate together however as large companies take over the media, they control the info to make economic profit who collaborate with the government (vertical) – very authoritarian.

This happens to both Old and New Media as newspaper and magazine can be taken over by large conglomerates, new media is taken over by companies that own Facebook, YouTube and others.

‘The media can be held accountable for what they do and do not do’

‘public control’ ‘deregulation’

Technology and Newspapers

Production	Distribution	Consumption
pen / pencil / paper word processor / printer telephone camera microphone license computer	(large scale) printing press lorries / vans / cars stacks / shelves / display cases / boxes social media platforms company / organisation / individual to deliver product storage billboards postman / paperboys	paper (the ability to read? & understand?) a digital device (ipad / phone, computer) reading glasses / eyes / braille / audio provision (headphones)

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky propose that the mass communication media of the U.S. “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”

Consent is manufactured by:

Structures of ownership –

Only stories that will benefit the conglomerates

The role of advertising –

Advertising paints the picture and propaganda to control people. This sells the people to the advertising

Links with ‘The Establishment’ –

The stories that benefit other companies and organisations with the people who own the businesses

Diversionary tactics – ‘flack’ –

Whistle-blowers and bad journalists are discredited and crushed. They also change the stories to control the audience for what they want to hear.

Uniting against a ‘common enemy’ –

The media proposes a enemy for the people to rally against

Manipulation

AGENDA SETTING –

FRAMING – Influences the individual’s perception of something not real

MYTH MAKING –

CONDITIONS OF CONSUMPTION –

Exam Question: To what extent is Teen Vogue constructed to respond to the demands of various interested groups?

In the response, should consider groups which have influence online such as consumers, advertisers and competitors

Key Words associated with New Media

share	active	creative	host
story	re-connect	personalise	stream
experience	store	scale	immerse
interface	live	adapt	binge
conversation	re-perform	circulate	endless

Table to contrast ‘New’ vs ‘Old’ Media: Do you agree?

NEW MEDIA	OLD MEDIA
Active involvement	Passive involvement
Two-way conversation	One-way conversation
Open system	Closed system
Transparent	Opaque
One-on-one marketing	Mass marketing
About Me	About You
Brand and User-generated Content	Professional content
Authentic content	Polished content
FREE platform	Paid platform
Metric: Engagement	Metric: Reach/ frequency
Actors: Users / Influencers	Actors/ Celebrities
Community decision-making	Economic decision-making
Unstructured communication	Controlled communication
Real time creation	Pre-produced/ scheduled
Bottom-up strategy	Top-down strategy
Informal language	Formal language

Positives	Negatives
Can be tailored to fit the user For companies, can fit their products individually for each person	Private data can be used which people may not want shared

Zuboff

‘The ability to infer a user’s personality, social media websites … can be tailored to reflect the user’s personality traits such that users will be most receptive to it’

‘micro behavioural targeting’

MARTIN MCLUHAN

Technological Determinism – The belief that technological development determines cultural and social change.

McLuhan coined the expression “the medium is the message” and the term global village, and predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented

Teen Vogue personalise their website with the stories they want to post. Stories can be shared and distributed to audiences that may not see it before new technology was introduced. A conversation can emerge on Teen Vogues other social medias. Teen Vogue creates an endless stream of content to be consumed by the audience.

What is the network effect (Theodore Vale)?

Whereby increased numbers of people or participants improve the value of a good or service such as having one telephone is useless whereas having multiple phones gives the phones value

What is ‘loop theory’? (Norbert Weiner)

The viral expansion loop is a marketing theory where users of a product are its primary marketers

What is the Dunbar number? (Robin Dunbar)

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships – 150

Who really benefits from a digitally networked society? Big business or individuals? Refer to ‘loop theory’ and the ‘Dunbar number’

Q: How does big business benefit? What commodity do they trade in? Answer: predictive human behaviour. Write out an answer in your own words.

Big Businesses benefit due to loop theory as they gather data on individuals predictability and so can predict what the individual wants to satisfy the consumer. However they don’t only monitor behaviour but control it to some extent. It also benefits individuals as it predicts what they consumer want and so consumes more media of what product and info they want.

INDUSTRY

• Owned by Condé Nast (who is owned by Advanced Publication) who owns GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired and Architectural Digest (AD)
• Teen Vogue cut their newspapers in favor for online content
• Teen Vogue has a website, instagram, tumblr, twitter, pinterest, youtube and others
• Teen Vogue had 8,341,000 unique visitors in May 2017 and 4,476,000 in 2018
• Vogue pays its employees an average of $50,969 a year

AUDIENCE

• Targeted at female teenagers between ages of twelve to seventeen
• Uses and Gratifications (= AUDIENCE)

REPRESENTATION

• Messages sent (encoded/decoded) ie the values, attitudes and opinions of this CSP (or ideology / political & social bias) (= REPRESENTATION)
• Mainly reactionary text

LANGUAGE

• Use of new technology / relationship to old technology (= LANGUAGE)
• Layout, language, style, design, words, images, symbols, connectivity (=LANGUAGE)

Social – Reactionary Text as it talks about pop music artists having disputes. This is quite reactionary as it focuses o issues that aren’t important at the current day compared to war, fired and death happening. This creates a more superficial problem.

Political – Reactionary and Radical text as it supports the ideology that Trump is bad which is the dominant ideology in America. It also shows that women can be interested and a part of politics as these TeenVogue articles are popular, therefore being a radical text that tries to change the dominant ideology.

NEW TECHNOLOGY

Production	Distribution	Consumption
Digital audio recorders and cameras Photoshop Website Creating Microsoft Publisher	The internet Social Media Broadcasts	Phones Televisions DAB’s