2. Audience responses: participatory.
• Audiences are often invited to engage with media on a more active level, often having
their say on news stories, debates and TV programs. This is often done through social
media and even Youtube. Participatory media includes blogs, wikis, tagging and social
bookmarking. It is a direct creation or interaction of media by the audience.
• An example of a participatory media audience is Star Wars, more specifically the Star
Wars Youtube channels. These are good examples of participatory media audiences as
they create content about the content they see in star wars. Not only are they part of the
Star Wars audience, but they have a loyal audience of their own on their channel. You
could say that these are the more hardcore star wars fans, as not only are they fans of
the actually Star Wars content, but they are willing to watch extra content that is all
about the world of Star Wars.
• One of the biggest fan channels is Star Wars Theory, with over a million subscribers. The
audience of this channel is participatory as they choose to watch the videos and they
interact with the channel by liking and subscribing or even commenting on the videos.
3. Cultural competance.
• Texts in the media require us to have some sort of cultural
understanding in order to be able to get the message that they are
putting out. This could be something as simple as reading the
language the language that a magazine is written in, or being able to
understand the language that a song is written in. on a more deep
level, this could mean that we are able to interpret signs and symbols
that we use as a shorthand to get across ideas. We recognise these
signs as they are engrained within our culture.
• Something that can be difficult or sometimes impossible to get is
language, for example, I cannot speak or read Japanese, so if I went to
Japan there would be loads of things that I would not be able to
understand , for example simple things such as road signs or speech.
4. Fan Culture
• Fan culture describes an audience that takes an active role in the
production or creation of media, that is based on an already existing
product.
• Fan fiction is a great example of fan culture. Fan fiction is where the
fans of an existing product, take Star Wars as an example, will write
stories or create artwork based off the stories and characters already
presented to them in the existing products, such as the films.
