ECREA16-Abstract

Saturday, November 12

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ARS16

In front of the Screen: The Audiences of Televisual Media

PP 610

Only Idiots Would Watch That!”: Rethinking Audience Reception to Offensive Television in Britain and Germany

R. Das

, A. Graefer

Univ of Leicester, Media, Leicester, United Kingdom

Birmingham city, Birmingham, United Kingdom

This paper presents selected findings from an on-going qualitative project with 90 British and German audiences as they respond to themes they find ‘of‑

fensive’on television. In this paper we focus on one of the overarching themes that recurred in our fieldwork: the varying degrees of judgment in audience

talk. Members of audience we spoke to almost always adopted a critical position away from the ‘rest of audiences’in society, who were always perceived as

less sophisticated than them. A large amount of time was spent in our fieldwork, discussing the ‘real’(intended) audiences of programmes, especially ones

which involved displays of the private in public, whether private physical matters (for e.g. on Embarrassing Bodies) or private domestic/social matters (e.g.

The Jeremy Kyle Show). Audiences stressed time and again that they weren’t the intended audiences of these shows which offended them, and that there

were these unknown ‘others’– vulnerable, ill-informed, tasteless audiences, for whom these programmes were intended. The paper discusses in particular

themes specific to British and German audiences. Our findings from the UK reveal, for example, that younger audiences judged others less. However, when

they did, like their older counterparts, there was a desire to protect those perceived to be ‘vulnerable’, coexisting with the premise of a gullible intend‑

ed audience. This co-existence of avid viewership of programmes, with a simultaneous disdain towards intended audiences of the programme was one

of the most striking findings in the course of fieldwork. German audiences were keen to stress the ‘ignorance’and ‘stupidity’of these other audience mem‑

bers. The intellectual ability to ‘look through’representations that aim to provoke offense, was often associated with social class: i.e. ‘ignorant’and ‘stupid’

audience members who are intellectually unable to deconstruct representations were portrayed as ‘Hartz-IV-Empfänger’ (recipients of state benefits). We

conclude by locating our work within its broader intellectual context.We note that these findings resonate very well with audience studies done by Beverley

Skeggs and Helen Wood (2012) or Livingstone and Lunt (1994) who all highlight how audience members construct themselves as different and therefore

more valuable, knowing or moral than other members of the audience. What this paper aims to stress however, is what else these affect-laden discourses

of othering do: they function, for instance, to explain the ubiquity of provocative television content as the result of supply and demand:‘These programmes

are produced and distributed because people like this i.e. the masses want to see it!’Such an understanding does not only misperceive the television indus‑

try, and the classist and racist representations that it generates, as‘democratic’, but it also demonstrates how television can function as a‘consensus-making

machinery’(Hall, 1978) for neoliberal politics in which the increasing polarisation between the wealthiest and the poorest social classes is centre stage. As

we demonstrate, television as a machinery is so convincing that audience members from all different backgrounds participate in it by excluding ‘the other’.

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Putting the Active in Noninteractive. Entertainment Experiences and Its Self-Regulatory Consequences in a Cognitively Challenging

Television Format

K. Koban

, N.H. Mueller

Chemnitz University of Technology, Institute for Media Research, Chemnitz, Germany

In times of abundant media offerings, entertainment programs are not only often deemed to be a waste of time, but sometimes also considered dulling its

recipients’ minds (Postman, 1985; Spitzer, 2012). Against these overly alarmist views, current conceptions of entertainment (Vorderer & Reinecke, 2015)

emphasize its importance for recreational purposes (Reinecke et al., 2012). Within this framework, the present study aims to extend the notion of interac‑

tivity in media commonly regarded as noninteractive. Accordingly, existing research on eudaimonic qualities of passive media stimuli mainly focuses on

confrontations with fundamental life-themes (Oliver & Raney, 2011), leaving constructs of need satisfaction to interactive media (Tamborini, Bowman,

Eden, Grizzard, & Organ, 2010). However, a recent study by Bartsch and Hartmann (2015) indicated the capability of noninteractive media to satisfy recipi‑

ents’need for competence by providing a cognitively and affectively challenging story. Our experiment follows this reasoning by manipulating information

given before watching a full episode of a crime series, which is typically considered a cognitively challenging television genre (Knobloch-Westerwick &

Keplinger, 2006; Zillmann, 1991). The total sample consisted of 81 student participants, including 64 women and 17 men. While some of them (n = 56)

only read a short introduction to the series’ background story and main characters, another group of participants (n = 25) additionally received a spoiler

of the plot and conclusion of the story. Both groups were encouraged to investigate the criminal case mentally by themselves during reception. A MANCOVA

was calculated with pre-information (spoiler vs. non-spoiler) as between-subjects factor, enjoyment, narrative engagement, and perceived competence as

dependent variables and crime preference, need for cognition, and basic need for competence as covariates. Multivariate analysis showed overall effects

of pre-information (F (3,74) = 3.66, p = .01) and need for cognition (F (3,74) = 2.97, p = .02), while univariate analyses revealed significant spoiler effects

only on engagement (F (1,76) = 9.13, p < .01) and competence (F (1,76) = 3.25, p = .04) as well as significant effects of crime preference on enjoyment,

need for cognition on engagement, and need for competence on perceived competence (Fs (1,76) = 2.78–3.67, ps = .03-.05). In order to examine relations

between participants’entertainment experience and their subjective well-being after reception, three multiple linear regression analyses were performed

with enjoyment, engagement and competence as predictors in a single block and the aforementioned well-being variables as criteria. Different prediction

patterns were found: While psychological detachment was predicted marginally significant by narrative engagement (t (77) = 1.62, p = .06), both enjoy‑

ment and perceived competence significantly predicted mood state (t (77) = 1.99, p = .03 & t (77) = 2.24, p = .01) as well as subjective well-being (t (77)

= 1.72, p = .05 & t (77) = 1.71, p = .05). Together, these results not only provide evidence for neglected interactive qualities of passive entertainment

programs, but also highlight differential effect patterns regarding its recreational worth.