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Media Entertainment: Lecture summary
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Lecture summary of all the lectures from the course Media Entertainment.
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Lecture 1: Introduction to ME. What is entertainment?Enjoyment is at the heart of M&E.
Enjoyment -> According to Anne Bartsch, enjoyment is a meta-emotion, meaning that during
media entertainment we experience many different positive and negative emotions that we
evaluate as enjoyable when we reflect on the experience.
Media use in the US in 2019 -> In 2019, the average daily time spent with major media
including TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, and digital formats of each amounted to 750
minutes (12 hours and 30 minutes), 3.5 hours of which are spent with entertainment.
Media entertainment
- “Media content designed to be consumed for purposes of leisure rather than specifically
for information gain, learning, or persuasion” (Oliver, 2009).
- A form of playing, i.e., a form of coping with reality. An activity that is most often
characterized by different forms of pleasure, but - in certain situations - also by
unpleasant aspects. It is an intrinsically motivated action that usually leads to a
temporary change in perceived reality and that is repeated quite often by people who
are, during this process, less intellectually vivid and attentive than they could be
(Vordered, 2001).
Oliver (2009). Entertainment
Uses and gratifications -> Conceive of audience members as “active” media users, with
individuals choosing to consume media on the basis of their felt needs and the degree to which
the media can successfully address these needs.
Mood management -> It argues that one factor influencing entertainment selection is
individuals’ tendencies to arrange their environment to manage their moods or affective states.
Insofar, as this theory presumes that hedonistic concerns are important motivations for many
behaviors, individuals are predicted to select media entertainment that is successful in
prolonging or intensifying positive moods, and diminishing or terminating negative moods. This
theory does not assume that individuals are necessarily aware of the motivations for their
behaviors, but rather that they act in accordance with behaviors that were successful in the
past. Sometimes rather than using media to necessarily engage in mood management,
individuals may use media as a means of adjusting their moods to be appropriate for the context
or situation, even if those moods are not necessarily positive.
Disposition theory -> Dispositional approaches suggest that viewers typically use moral
considerations in forming judgments about the “goodness” or “badness” of characters. Once
these dispositional judgments are formed, viewers’ enjoyment is predicted to be maximized
when good characters experience positive outcomes and bad characters experience negative
outcomes.
Hedonic happiness -> Associated with positive affect.
Eudaimonic happiness -> Associated with greater meaningfulness, insight, and purpose.
Lecture 2: Entertainment selection: Uses and gratifications
What is Media Selection?
- People don’t consume all the content that is available. They make a selection.
, - Media Selection is a goal-oriented decision process through which people consciously
or subconsciously select from the available mediated messages or avoid certain
mediated messages.
- Human - media interaction: Media Selection Behavior (before) -> Psychological
Processes in Users (during) -> Media Effects (After).
- Theories of understanding media selection behavior:
● User - centered theories -> What is it in the user that influences what media
type she consumes? (Uses and Gratifications; Mood management: Habit models;
Cognitive decisions models)
● Media- centered theories -> What is it in the medium that influences what
media type the user consumes? (certain features in the new media attract
audiences)
- Phases of Media Selection
1. Before media use
● Selection of a media-driven (or non-media driven) activity.
● Selection of a medium and a platform.
● Selection of a mediated message provided by the medium.
Early understanding: agency, escapism
- Agency of the Audience -> Do audiences passively receive mediated messages or are
they active participants at all stages of the interaction?
- 1950 - 60’s theories:
● TV in households.
● Audience is lacking agency, a passive receptor of mediated messages.
● No independent thinking of the mass audience.
● Primary question: What are the media doing to us?
- Lazarsfeld and Katz (1940):
● In contrast to assumptions about powerful media effects, empirical studies from
the 1940’s started to show that audience members were: active, not passive;
selective, not a captive audience; obstinate, not gullible. People’s
predispositions affect their media choices. People make strategic use of the
media to meet their needs. Media are primarily influential via interpersonal talk.
● Focus on one particular need: Escapism -> “People are deprived and alienated,
it is suggested, and so they turn to the dreamlike world of the mass media for
substitute gratifications, the consequence of which is still further withdrawal from
the arena of social and political action.”
● Worries about escapism -> Further withdrawal from the arena of social and
political action.
- Katz and Foulkes (1962): What exactly do we mean by consuming “escapist” media? A
process...
● Of consuming distracting content.
● Driven by motivation or “drive”.
● Psychological escapism.
● Comes with high levels of exposure.
● Social context of exposure is important.
, ● Dysfunctional consequences.
Uses and Gratifications Theory (Katz, Blumbler and Gurevitch, 1973)
- One of the most prolific mass communication theories.
- Based on a functional model: Media use serves a psychological function to gratify a
need.
- Media selection is goal- oriented and motivated.
- People are active participants who select media that best fulfill their needs.
- Media compete with “functional alternatives to satisfy a need”.
- People are more influential than the meia in the effects process (social factors play a role
in media effects).
- But the gratifications obtained don’t always match the gratifications sought.
- People are able to report what media they use, and why (conscious process).
- Types of needs/motivations: There are several different typologies of needs by
different authors:
● Cognitive needs -> Need for knowledge, information, orientation, curiosity, etc.
● Affective needs -> Mood management, recreation, entertainment, escapism,
stress release, etc.
● Social - interaction needs -> Sense of belonging, social contact,
connectedness, parasocial relationships.
● Integrative - habitual needs -> Need for regularity, stability, security, habits, etc.
- The U&G approach has been especially important for studying new technologies.
- Limitations of the U&G:
● Media use is often not a conscious and rational decision.
● People are not always purposive and active: Ritualized (habitual) VS instrumental
media use.
● “Typologies” are often inductive and very specific to the particular medium, time
period, or study.
● Studies often rely on cross- sectional surveys: No causal evidence.
● Surveys typically can’t dig deep into particular message features or psychological
responses.
, ● Many studies don’t distinguish between motives, selections, uses, reponses,
effects.
Krcmar (2017). Uses and Gratifications: Basic Concepts
Uses and gratifications research focuses on media use, asking what motivates various kinds
of media use. Specifically, the uses and gratifications approach seeks to understand “the social
and psychological origins of needs which generate expectations of the mass media and other
sources which lead to differential patterns of media exposure (or engagement in other activities)
resulting in needs gratifications and other consequences, perhaps mostly unintended ones”.
Rubin (1983) identified nine basic motives of TV use -> relaxation, companionship, habit,
passing time, entertainment, social interaction, information, arousal, and escape.
Lin (1999) identified three motives of TV use -> surveillance, escape/companionship, and
personal identity.
Abelman and Atkin (2000) confirmed five -> passing time or habit, entertainment, information,
companionship, and escape.
Ritualized viewing is defined as “a more or less habitualized use of a medium to gratify
diversionary needs or motives”. A habitual viewer would typically watch more television overall,
would display a definite affinity with the medium, and would watch television to fill time and for
companionship, relaxation, arousal, and escape.
Instrumental media use is defined as “a goal-directed use of media content to gratify
informational needs or motives”. Instrumental viewers would seek information and would watch
less television overall.
Gratifications sought -> Viewing motives. Those that we bring to a media use situation (we
want to pass time; we want to feel a sense of social companionship, we want to learn
something).
Gratifications obtained -> Viewing outcomes. Those that result from a media use situation (we
experienced psychological arousal, we alleviated boredom, or we exacerbated it).
Lecture 3: Entertainment selection: Mood management
The concepts of mood and mood regulation
Mood:
- Emotional experience over a more prolonged period of time.
- Frame of mind.
- No specific direct cause in consciousness.
- Gradually developing and longer duration.
- Weak intensity.
- Different from emotions (affects): short, immediate, defined external, cause, strong
intensity.
- Mood influences:
● Self - image, self- efficacy
● Thinking, memory
● Decision making
● Future
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