Attitude Online: Pandemic 2, audience and fandom

Audience theory on Attitude

1. Albert Bandura: Media effects
1. Suggests media can implant ideas in the mind of the audience directly
2. With the constant immersive gay nature of the website could probably enforce the ideology that all gay men like to read magazines only about gay people and their lives
3. Bandura would have believed that if a straight man was constantly browsing this website, it would make him gay or rather act in a more stereotypical feminine way
2. George Gerbner: Cultivation
1. Being exposed to repeated patterns of representation over long periods of time can influence people and how they perceive others and things
3. Stuart Hall: Reception Theory
1. To view a media product is a process involving encoding by producers and decoded by audiences (audiences can interpret the media product different ways)
1. the preferred reading for Attitude is to accept gay rights  and that for a gay audience, it is to be received as a informational and leisure guide for gay people?
2. The negotiated reading could possibly be different peoples way they perceive gay men, some people believe that they very feminine and camp but others would so that they would be as masculine and your average stereotypical man
3. oppositional reading is that gay people have terrible lives and that its not ok to be gay, the magazine displays evidence that shows this etc etc
4. Abberrant reading can be that this is just a magazine for gay men and women to gawk at
4. Henry Jenkins: Fandom
1. Group of people devoted to a media product
2. 
   
5. Clay Shirky: 'End of audience' theories
1. Media consumers have now become producers such as youtube

• Audiences are likely to be influenced by an ideology after being exposed to it over time
• Audiences can form an intense bond with a media product, and use it to define their life
• Audiences can increasingly 'speak back' to a media product, and are more of a producer than an audience member
• Media products can easily manipulate the ideology of an audience member
• Audiences can chose many different ways to how they respond to the ideology of the producer

Attitude Online: Pandemic 1

Stream

1. Stream publishes such magazines as car companies/ mechanic companies like vauxhall, Hertz, P&O cruises and CityJet. Additionally other clients include McColls and Spar, both corner shops of some kind. So it can be said that Stream publishes magazines which are aimed to basic jobs supposedly creating a wider range of audiences
2. Between this and Attitude, Both have received awards, both are aimed to wide range of audience, Attitude is aimed to all gay men and Stream is aimed to customers.  Each display the supposed hegeomonically norms of the average customer/gay person. Such article of Stream includes 'A perfect marriage' and 'Getting away', both which have links to Stream's clients. Whilst Attitude has a 'boys tab' which gives the target audience hyper sexualised representation photos of men.
3. Stream target a very diverse set of ranges. They received best award for customers, suggesting that most of what they talk about is aimed to people who go shopping for certain things. With the 'getting away' article and CityJet as a client. It could suggest that one audience could be people wanting to go abroad.

Why did Stream buy Attitude? Apply Hesmondhalgh and Curran & Seaton's theories.

• For one it could be to get a more diverse audience for a higher profit
• For Curran and Seaton they state that 'the media is controlled by an increasingly small number of companies who are driven by profit'
• This could be due to wanting power in the magazine industries
• Cultural Industries
• For hesmondhalgh, he states that producers try to minimise risk and maximise audience through vertical and horizontal integration. Stream acquiring Attitude was a vertical intergration, making Attitude have wider access an able to publish more broader and more diverse content for gay people.
• By Vertical integration means Stream can acquire more profit as their target audience is now covering a more wider, more diverse area.