COMMS 202

Audiences and Users


Please note: this is archived course information from 2018 for COMMS 202.

Description

When you're playing a game, watching a video, or reading, what kind of action are you taking? How are you changed - and by whom? Many university courses, in many departments, address the creation of media as when we study authors, artists, and media production industries. However this course will instead focus on the common but complex behaviours of the audiences and users who watch, listen to, and play with media both old and new. 

In this course you will conduct original research on an audience or community of users, for example, interviewing fans of a particular band or users of a particular app or site. On the way to completing that project, we will examine various ways that audiences have been conceived, addressed, and measured. We will find that members of the audience slip between roles: here a citizen, there a revenue source; here an active participant, there an unwitting target of surveillance and manipulation. 

Learning goals

  • By the end of this course, students should be able to:
  • Conceptualise audiences in different ways
  • Interpret various genres of audience research
  • Conduct small-scale, interview-based research
  • Critically evaluate producers' relationships to audiences and users

View the course syllabus

Availability 2018

Semester 1

Lecturer(s)

Coordinator(s) Dr Ethan Plaut

Points

COMMS 202: 15 points

Prerequisites

60 points at Stage I in BA courses