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 […]

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 Encoding-Decoding-Recoding Model of Media Studies

This blog posts continues the dissection of my dissertation that I began by introducing the topic of gendered media engagings earlier this year. This post focuses on a model I used in my dissertation to understand the array of media studies conducted to investigate the ways in which gender is involved in how people engage […]

Understanding Uses and Gratifications

[The following comes from my Ph.D. candidacy exam in 2007; in this part of the exam, I was asked to consider the uses and gratifications approach to media studies: what it is, how it came to be, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of it.] We are concerned here with explaining the uses-and-gratifications […]

Digital game players’ preferences: Analysis of situation and gender

(The literature review for this paper can be found in this previous post.) Study overview As indicated above, our purpose for this study was to enter the literature on gender differences in game playing with two variations on the extant literature. One of these was to include male and female assessments of game playing gratifications […]

Adolescents, Media Use, and Identity Formation

A long time ago, when I first started graduate school, one of my primary research interests was the role the media plays in forming people’s identities. At the time, I researched everything I could on the psychological and sociological underpinnings of identity formation, to try to understand how the media could be involved in this […]

On Transgressing Audiencehood: Web 2.0, Interactivity, and Becoming What We’ve Always Been

I think I have now determined what my main research trajectory will be, and I wanted to take the opportunity to organize these thoughts to provide the beginning of a structure for how to organize my research, past, present and future. For awhile now, I’ve been convinced that how the new media has affected our […]

Teenagers Using Media Texts for Sexual Identity Exploration

What turns me on, turns me off?: Usage of media texts by adolescents for sexual identity exploration. (A graduate school psychology final paper, edited for posting, with link containing the full paper.) When the audience for the media and its content is children, research into the mass media typically focuses on two mediated “sins”: violence […]

Cultivated Learning Theory: Graduate school, year one

In the theory class of the first semester of my first year as a graduate student, I was in a group with two other MA hopefuls, and we wrote a paper on how we would study the topic of how the media influences adolescents’ and young adults’ sexual behaviors. Always the clever one, I termed […]

So, Why Did the Media Fail You?

[This post comes from a 2005 research proposal studying how the media was perceived as hindering people. The entire proposal, with full citations and references, can be found here.] Broadcasting or traditional media have been studied by the uses and gratifications perspective (UGP) to uncover the reasons people use traditional media (television, radio, newspapers, even film), […]