The Audience for Media Language

INGLÉS I - TRABAJO PRÁCTICO Nº 5 – COMUNICACIÓN SOCIAL
TEXTO: BELL, ALLAN (1996). Chapter 5: The Audience for Media Language in: The
Language of News Media. Blackwell. Oxford UK & Cambridge MA., pp. 84-85.
1-Lea los datos bibliográficos, el título y la primera oración de cada uno de los párrafos.
Reflexione sobre el posible contenido del texto.
2-A medida que lea el texto observe el uso de los verbos BE, HAVE y DO. Determine si
son verbos auxiliares o verbos principales.
3-Observe lo expresado en negrita y cursiva. Reflexione sobre su posible traducción
teniendo siempre en cuenta el contexto.
4-El autor afirma que la audiencia es probablemente el componente más investigado en la
comunicación masiva. Desarrolle el planteo.
5-Explique cuáles han sido los diversos enfoques de investigación.
6-Mencione las siete características de comunicación masiva presentadas por McQuail y
los diversos factores que influyen en la configuración del lenguaje mediático.
The Audience for Media Language
The audience are arguably the most important and certainly the most researched
component of mass communication. The overwhelming bulk of ‘research’ on audiences is
carried out for media organizations themselves. Most industry-funded surveys are
concerned simply to count heads and describe them on a few demographic parameters,
principally age, gender and occupation. Media live by the size and composition of their
audiences, and information on these vital statistics is of consuming interest to owners and
managers. Advertising rates are controlled by the number or kind of people who will be
exposed to an advertisement. The very nature of broadcasting is such that research is
required to find out whether there is an audience at all, since at the time communication the
animator cannot know if anyone is actually listening.
Many disciplines have approached audiences from their own perspectives. Sociological
research has gathered information on the size of audiences and their structure. Social
psychology has examined how audiences are affected by media content, or how they use
that content. Cultural studies have considered how different kinds of people get different
meanings from media content. Much early media concerned itself with the effects of mass
communication on the audience – what do media do to people? After decades of
contradictory and inconclusive studies (cf. Howitt 1982), the question was turned around –
what do people do with media? This ‘uses and gratifications’ approach (for instance,
Klapper 1960) waned in its turn, and interest in the power of mass communication has
reasserted itself (McQuail 1987). Research into media effects is of little interest to us here.
But another strand of audience-oriented research focuses on how audiences comprehend
media content, and we shall examine this in chapter 11.
The audience dimension provides the main defining features of mass communication. In
one formulation, six out of seven characteristics of mass communication focus on the
audience (McQuail 1969 a: 7):
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large audience relative to other communication situations
public accessibility of mass media content
heterogeneity of the audience
simultaneous contact with widely separated individuals
one-directional flow and impersonality of mass communication
the mass audience as a creation of modern society
The seventh characteristic McQuail singles out is the complex nature of media
organizations, which we covered in chapter 3. The audience-related characteristics of
mass media and their difference from face-to-face communication are the focus in this
chapter. We shall look at several factors which influence the shape of media language:
feedback and the lack of it, communicators’ stereotyping of the audience, the segmenting
and layering of the audience, and those occasions when communicators and audience
exchange roles.