2025/26

In this module we will reflect on the nature of media audiences across the world and how they accept, reject, reinterpret, and participate in the messages they receive from producers of visual media content created for TV, film, social media, gaming, music and beyond. We will explore how message makers or producers (artists, broadcasters, filmmakers, advertisers, etc) try, and sometimes fail, to shape and adapt their messages for different social and cultural contexts. In so doing we will pay attention to the relationships between cultural identities and cultural products which help to form them, and reflect on how transformations in the global commercial production of media are related to social identity (national, regional, individual, communal). Taking a holistic view of the audience, we consider the ways in which cultural consumption challenges established regimes of meaning as well as shapes emergent communities.