Updating the Obstinate Audience

[This post comes from my candidacy exam, in which I was asked to respond to a classic article: Bauer, Raymond. 1964. “The obstinate audience: The influence process from the point of view of social communication.” American Psychologist 19: 319-328] Which, if any, issues have been dealt with and/or resolved within the field of communication? Bauer’s […]

Making Sense of Cinema Anthology

Edited by Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and myself, Bloomsbury Academic will release Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship on February 25, 2016. Making Sense of Cinema is an anthology collecting empirical studies that display different methods for studying real film spectators engaging with real films. Film studies has […]

My Philosophy of Media Reception Studies

Along with my thoughts on the encoding-decoding-recoding model, what follows comes from my dissertation on gendered media engagings and describes how I consider the fundamental elements of media reception and audience studies. What are media products? Media products are the technologies, channels and contents that constitute our understanding of what is ‘the media’. They are […]

An Autoethnography of Collegium – Day Two

Day 2: Sunday, June 22nd On the topic of mass… I am still uncomfortable joining in on the spiritual sessions and Catholic Eucharist ceremonies that are scheduled for this colloquium. I feel like an intruder, an interloper, a negative presence. There is nothing that anyone here has said or done that has made me feel […]

Minutia reception analysis

Methods for understanding the moment-by-moment reception of interactive media Oftentimes in media studies that focus on understanding media reception by the audience or the user, there is a focus on reception writ large and post-hoc. That is, there is a tendency to consider the reactions to a media product by the audience/user after the engagement […]