Slackers, slashers and sticklers : Hollywood films and audience reception /

This thesis examines the processes through which identity is acquired and the processes that Hollywood :films employ to facilitate audience identification in order to determine the extent to which individuality is possible within postmodem society. Opposing views of identity formation are considered: on the one hand, that of the Frankfurt School which envisions the mass audience controlled by the culture industry and on the other, that of John Fiske which places control in the hands of the individual. The thesis takes a mediating approach, conceding that while the mass media do provide and influence identity formation, individuals can and do decode a variety of meanings from the material made available to them in accordance with the text's use-value in relation to the individual's circumstances. The analysis conducted in this thesis operates on the assumption that audiences acquire identity components in exchange for paying to see a particular film. Reality Bites (Ben Stiller 1994) and Scream (Wes Craven 1996) are analyzed as examples of mainstream 1990s films whose material circumstances encourage audience identification and whose popularity suggest that audiences did indeed identify with them. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson 2001) is considered for its art film sensibilities and is examined in order to determine to what extent this film can be considered a counter example. The analysis consists of a combination of textual analysis and reception study in an attempt to avoid the problems associated with each approach when employed alone. My interpretation of the filmmakers' and marketers' messages will be compared with online reviews posted by film viewers to determine how audiences received and made use of the material available to them. Viewer-posted reviews, both unsolicited and unrestricted, as found online, will be consulted and will represent a segment of the popular audience for the three films to be analyzed.

Accents of Chopin anniversaries in territories annexed by Prussia

This article discusses the way in which the Chopin Year of 1910 was celebrated in Wielkopolska. It presents a script prepared in the nineteenth century and shows similarities with celebrations of Mickiewicz and other Polish heroes and artists. Invariably used in such commemorations was a “symbolic capital” that made it easier to create an intergenerational code, thereby disseminating knowledge of national culture and history. A significant role was played in 1910 by a centenary panel, which produced “Guidelines for popular Chopin celebrations” and also many occasional, popular materials. Chopin’s induction into the national pantheon involved the use of audio material (vocal and instrumental concerts), verbal material (articles, poems, lectures and brochures) and also a visual code (anniversary window stickers, tableaux vivants or tableaux illuminés). Illuminated pictures – recommended by a catalogue of slides produced in Poznań – stimulated the imagination of the masses and served as a guide through the composer’s life and work, and their impact was enhanced by a commentary. Most of the living pictures were probably inspired by Henryk Siemiradzki’s canvas Chopin grający na fortepianie w salonie księcia Radziwiłła [Chopin playing the piano in Prince Radziwiłł’s salon] and Józef Męcina Krzesz’s painting Ostatnie akordy Chopina [Chopin’s last chords]. This combination of codes made it possible to create a model adapted to the times and to the expectations of a mass audience. The Chopin anniversary, in which admiration was inseparably intertwined with manipulation, was a pretext for strengthening the national identity.

The creative masses of digital Britain

The present recession has prompted scholarly and journalistic questioning of the contributions of the cultural industries to the economy. The talent-rich metropolitan clusters of London and New York are well-placed to ride out a thoroughgoing shakeup of the media markets if they manage their infrastructure, space and resources strategically, as Richard Florida has recently argued. This seems to be the assumption behind the recent Digital Britain interim report, and Gordon Brown's remarks that a digital revolution "lies at the heart" of Britain's economic recovery and that broadband and the media industry can play a leading role in pulling the UK out of the recession. Focusing on the Digital Britain report and consultation documents, this presentation seeks to unpack some of the fundamental assumptions behind this link between digital infrastructure, creativity and profitability. In particular the implicit notion of an engaged audience of users, generating "content" as well as shaping new media platforms calls into question long-held theoretical constructions of the mass audience of consumers as spectators; instead, the audience emerges as a potential economic powerhouse, an underused resource for tomorrow's cultural industries.

Heavy cultural industries

The present recession has prompted scholarly and journalistic questioning of the contributions of the cultural industries to the economy. The talent-rich metropolitan clusters of London and New York are well-placed to ride out a thoroughgoing shakeup of the media markets if they manage their infrastructure, space and resources strategically, as Richard Florida has recently argued. This seems to be the assumption behind the recent Digital Britain interim report, and Gordon Brown's remarks that a digital revolution "lies at the heart" of Britain's economic recovery and that broadband and the media industry can play a leading role in pulling the UK out of the recession. Focusing on the Digital Britain report and consultation documents, this presentation seeks to unpack some of the fundamental assumptions behind this link between digital infrastructure, creativity and profitability. In particular the implicit notion of an engaged audience of users, generating "content" as well as shaping new media platforms calls into question longheld theoretical constructions of the mass audience of consumers as spectators. [From the Author]

El cinema i la constitució d'un públic popular a Barcelona. El cas del Paral·lel

Between 1895 and 1910 Barcelona saw a whole range of social, political and cultural changes due to the increasingly important emergence of the working masses. At the same time, the cinema arrived in Catalonia, becoming very quickly one of the favorite entertainments of the urban laboring population which was about creating a new culture opposed to the modernist and nineteenth-century elite .This is, broadly speaking, the context that serves as a starting point for a study of the role of cinema in shaping a mass audience in Barcelona, an analysis centered on new urban spaces intended for the leisure of the lower classes emerged with the birth of modern Barcelona, especially the “Paral•lel” avenue, whose opening in 1894 made even more apparent the great social tensions and existing inequalities in Barcelona’s society at the end of the century.

Advertising America: VOA and Italy

With President Truman’s ‘Campaign of Truth’ in the Fifties, Voice of America (VOA) established itself as one of the most important information programmes of the US government. The 20 million dollar budget allocated to VOA in those years enabled it to employ about 1,900 people and to broadcast in 45 different languages. Italy, with its strong and threatening Communist Party, was one of VOA’s main targets. Audience research however (performed by the United States Information Agency’s Italian branch and by the Italian opinion poll company Doxa) shows that the Italians always preferred their own national network RAI. The US government therefore started to target the RAI, with the aim of placing VOA-produced programmes directly on the Italian network in order to reach a mass audience. This article looks into what went on both ‘on’ and ‘off the air’, analyzing how various Italian ‘target groups’ were addressed by VOA. Drawing on documents from the National Archives and Records Administration in both Washington DC and New York City, and from the Doxa archives in Milan, the study examines how the American government prepared itself to conquer the Italian network RAI.

"Per una mappatura della Russia contemporanea". Aleksej Ivanov, il geografo si è bevuto il globo. Proposta di traduzione editoriale.

The purpose of this work is to introduce to the Italian audience one of the best known works written by the Russian novelist Aleksej Ivanov. The title of the book we refer to is Geograf glubus propil, [The geography drank his globe away]. The novel features peculiarities and themes that can be interesting also for non-Russian readers, being also an example of how Russian contemporary literature has evolved through the years. Nevertheless, it has already been translated in French and Serbian. In last years, the author has become increasingly famous in Russia: he has won many prices and has published a large number of books, many of which were awarded with different literature prizes. Moreover, a film based on the plot of the novel analyzed has been released in 2013, carrying the same name of the book. The film received positive feedback from both cinema critics and mass audience. The following work has been divided into two parts: an introductory part where the author and his book are presented, together with the main character and his peculiarities. It is then explained the context in which the book was created, the purpose of the author and how the book was perceived by readers. In addition to that, I listed some of the problems I had to face while translating , and the solutions I found in order to solve them. The second part is fully dedicated to the translation itself.

Escuela de aficionados. Lectores y letras de molde en la cultura emergente de 1900

Desde comienzos del siglo XX se hace evidente el interés por la cultura artística en el público masivo, lo que origina aspiraciones contrastantes con la escasez de capital simbólico de la que partían. La revista rioplatense Caras y Caretas alimentó ese interés, poniendo en circulación multitud de textos e imágenes y dio lugar a un imaginario de visibilidad en el cual era posible pasar del consumo a la producción cultural. El artículo analiza ese fenómeno a partir de textos y dibujos de colaboradores inexpertos.

Escuela de aficionados. Lectores y letras de molde en la cultura emergente de 1900

Desde comienzos del siglo XX se hace evidente el interés por la cultura artística en el público masivo, lo que origina aspiraciones contrastantes con la escasez de capital simbólico de la que partían. La revista rioplatense Caras y Caretas alimentó ese interés, poniendo en circulación multitud de textos e imágenes y dio lugar a un imaginario de visibilidad en el cual era posible pasar del consumo a la producción cultural. El artículo analiza ese fenómeno a partir de textos y dibujos de colaboradores inexpertos.

Escuela de aficionados. Lectores y letras de molde en la cultura emergente de 1900

Desde comienzos del siglo XX se hace evidente el interés por la cultura artística en el público masivo, lo que origina aspiraciones contrastantes con la escasez de capital simbólico de la que partían. La revista rioplatense Caras y Caretas alimentó ese interés, poniendo en circulación multitud de textos e imágenes y dio lugar a un imaginario de visibilidad en el cual era posible pasar del consumo a la producción cultural. El artículo analiza ese fenómeno a partir de textos y dibujos de colaboradores inexpertos.

O AGENDAMENTO DE TELEJORNAIS BRASILEIROS EM SITES NOTICIOSOS DE CONTEÚDO COLABORATIVO

The thesis investigates if with the free news production, people who post information on collaborative content sites, known as interacting, tend to reproduce information that was scheduled for Tv news. This study is a comparison of the collaborative content vehicles Vc reporter, Vc no G1 and Eu reporter with TV news SBT Brasil, Jornal Nacional, Jornal da Record and Jornal da Band. We sought to determine whether those newscasts guide the collaborative platforms. The hypothesis assumes that Brazilian TV news have been building over time a credible relationship with the viewer, so it is possible to think that the interacting use the same criteria for selecting the broadcasts and reproduce similar information in collaborative content sites. The method used was content analysis, based on the study of Laurence Bardin and the type of research used was quantitative. This research concluded that, within a small portion of the universe surveyed, there are schedules of television news across the collaborative content.

A TV DE MASSA E AS NOVAS ESTRATÉGIAS NARRATIVAS Um estudo sobre audiências e programas contemporâneos

Esta tese aborda o declínio da audiência das grandes redes de TV aberta e os recursos narrativos que os produtores de programas adotaram para enfrentar essa tendência mundial. O estudo traz um panorama da situação da audiência no âmbito internacional e foca, particularmente, o caso do Brasil, onde três grandes emissoras mantém, no conjunto, uma das mais altas concentrações de público do mundo. Depois de analisar a fragmentação das audiências televisivas nas duas últimas décadas e os números que indicam a crescente dispersão dos telespectadores entre múltiplas ofertas de mídia disponíveis nos dias atuais, o trabalho discute as estratégias de programação e de construção de conteúdos. Além de teóricos que pesquisaram a chamada semiótica televisiva , servem de base para a investigação depoimentos de produtores e análises de programas de grande audiência. O objetivo é revelar os procedimentos utilizados para atrair e manter a atenção dos telespectadores, os quais começam com as medições de audiência e os estudos sobre o comportamento dos consumidores em relação à TV. A tese discute também como ocorre a exposição dos telespectadores em um ambiente onde existem várias opções de dispositivos para ver atrações televisivas ou para fazer outras atividades comunicacionais. A escolha deste tema de investigação partiu do princípio de que a exposiçao é condição essencial para sustentar o estudo de outras fases e outros aspectos do processo de comunicação, como a influência dos meios sobre a cultura e a sociedade. Em um contexto onde a mídia ocupa tanto tempo de nosso cotidiano, o impacto dos meios de comunicação de massa pode ser diretamente proporcional ao número de pessoas que eles alcançam e aos nossos hábitos de consumo de informação e entretenimento.

A TV DE MASSA E AS NOVAS ESTRATÉGIAS NARRATIVAS - Um estudo sobre audiências e programas contemporâneos

Esta tese aborda o declínio da audiência das grandes redes de TV aberta e os recursos narrativos que os produtores de programas adotaram para enfrentar essa tendência mundial. O estudo traz um panorama da situação da audiência no âmbito internacional e foca, particularmente, o caso do Brasil, onde três grandes emissoras mantém, no conjunto, uma das mais altas concentrações de público do mundo. Depois de analisar a fragmentação das audiências televisivas nas duas últimas décadas e os números que indicam a crescente dispersão dos telespectadores entre múltiplas ofertas de mídia disponíveis nos dias atuais, o trabalho discute as estratégias de programação e de construção de conteúdos. Além de teóricos que pesquisaram a chamada semiótica televisiva , servem de base para a investigação depoimentos de produtores e análises de programas de grande audiência. O objetivo é revelar os procedimentos utilizados para atrair e manter a atenção dos telespectadores, os quais começam com as medições de audiência e os estudos sobre o comportamento dos consumidores em relação à TV. A tese discute também como ocorre a exposição dos telespectadores em um ambiente onde existem várias opções de dispositivos para ver atrações televisivas ou para fazer outras atividades comunicacionais. A escolha deste tema de investigação partiu do princípio de que a exposiçao é condição essencial para sustentar o estudo de outras fases e outros aspectos do processo de comunicação, como a influência dos meios sobre a cultura e a sociedade. Em um contexto onde a mídia ocupa tanto tempo de nosso cotidiano, o impacto dos meios de comunicação de massa pode ser diretamente proporcional ao número de pessoas que eles alcançam e aos nossos hábitos de consumo de informação e entretenimento.

The younger audience : children and broadcasting in New Zealand

The role and influence of media in the lives of children are ongoing sources of public, political and academic debates. These debates move back and forth along a care-control continuum (Cohen, 1997), and reflect a commitment both to educate children and to regulate their media experiences. Rapid advancements in computer technologies have vastly expanded the range of media experiences available to children. The development of Internet information and the rapid expansion of channels as a result of digital television have created increasingly accessible and diverse sources of media for children. These media are instantaneous and, in some circumstances, constantly available. As a result, a substantial body of international research has emerged that examines the influence of media consumption on children. How much time do children spend interacting with media? What sorts of media do they access? Are media harmful or beneficial to children? If so, in which contexts? Do media influence children�s personal development? And what role should governments, broadcasters and independent producers play in the regulation of the media? These questions remain central to contemporary debates about children and the media.

Rating the Audience : the Business of Media

Knowing, measuring and understanding media audiences have become a multi-billion dollar business. But the convention that underpins that business, audience ratings, is in crisis. Rating the Audience is the first book to show why and how audience ratings research became a convention, an agreement, and the first to interrogate the ways that agreement is now under threat. Taking a historical approach, the book looks at the evolution of audience ratings and the survey industry. It goes on to analyse today's media environment, looking at the role of the internet and the increased difficulties it presents for measuring audiences. The book covers all the major players and controversies, such as Facebook's privacy rulings and Google's alliance with Nielsen. Offering the first real comparative study, it will be critical for media students and professionals.