Op. 131 and the Rise of Attentive Listening

This chapter begins with a discussion of Mark Andre’s ensemble work riss 2 (2014) as an alternative window on the modern-day reception of Op. 131—the two works can similarly disrupt our ontological understanding of musical works in terms of structure, sound transformations, and especially sense of time. I then step back to consider the larger context in which Op. 131 was originally heard, setting it within an emerging ideology of “serious listening” in Vienna in the early nineteenth century. I consider the early nineteenth century as an era in which the seeds for silent listening were sown, by key agents of change, who tried to adjust audience behavior at string quartet concerts—influential figures such as Schuppanzigh, Beethoven, and reviewers for the Wiener Theater-Zeitung and Viennese Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in the 1810s and ’20s. Beethoven’s C-sharp minor quartet can be understood as a work that took part in this move to instill silent and serious listening. However, the climate in Vienna was not was not such that Beethoven (and Schuppanzigh) could enjoy much success with this particular listening project. The “romantic listener” does not represent a nineteenth-century norm, and was certainly not the norm in Beethoven’s Vienna. But the compelling ideology of listening and associated habits that started to develop there—especially reverent silence—continue to influence powerfully our concert hall behaviors today.

Racing Rhetoric: A Burkean Analysis of Ecodocumentary Rhetoric

Ecodocumentary films such as The Cove, An Inconvenient Truth, and Sharkwater have demonstrated the power to influence audience behavior, establish public discourses, and inspire social change. This MRP explores promotional videos for a new ecodocumentary, Racing Extinction (Psihoyos, 2015), which explores the possibility of a sixth mass extinction of species, and what humans may be able to do to stop it. As such, this MRP attempts to discover more about the persuasive process, audience engagement, and how ecodocumentaries can work to enact social change. Using the Burkean concepts of dramatism, guilt-purification-redemption, and identification, this research analyzes the rhetoric of three promotional videos by assessing their dramatistic elements, how audiences may identify with the narratives therein and, to make a statement about their motives. The three videos have been selected to both exemplify the language of the filmmakers, and represent their two distinct objectives: to sell tickets, and to create social change. This research provides an examination of the persuasive tools used by the Racing Extinction filmmakers, and an overview of the levels of audience engagement online. For Burkean scholars, this research begins to fill key gaps in analyzed content. Through analyzing the promotional content for Racing Extinction, I seek to improve the scholarly understanding of the persuasive processes associated with ecodocumentary rhetoric.

Racing Rhetoric: A Burkean Analysis of Ecodocumentary Rhetoric

Ecodocumentary films such as The Cove, An Inconvenient Truth, and Sharkwater have demonstrated the power to influence audience behavior, establish public discourses, and inspire social change. This MRP explores promotional videos for a new ecodocumentary, Racing Extinction (Psihoyos, 2015), which explores the possibility of a sixth mass extinction of species, and what humans may be able to do to stop it. As such, this MRP attempts to discover more about the persuasive process, audience engagement, and how ecodocumentaries can work to enact social change. Using the Burkean concepts of dramatism, guilt-purification-redemption, and identification, this research analyzes the rhetoric of three promotional videos by assessing their dramatistic elements, how audiences may identify with the narratives therein and, to make a statement about their motives. The three videos have been selected to both exemplify the language of the filmmakers, and represent their two distinct objectives: to sell tickets, and to create social change. This research provides an examination of the persuasive tools used by the Racing Extinction filmmakers, and an overview of the levels of audience engagement online. For Burkean scholars, this research begins to fill key gaps in analyzed content. Through analyzing the promotional content for Racing Extinction, I seek to improve the scholarly understanding of the persuasive processes associated with ecodocumentary rhetoric.

Environmental Beliefs and Pro-Environmental Behavioral Intention of an Environmentally Themed Exhibition Audience: The Mediation Role of Exhibition Attachment

Many scholars have focused on the role of exhibitions in business promotion, and numerous studies have been conducted. The exhibition may influence the audience’s behaviors through the dissemination of information and ideas, but few researchers have looked into this further. There is a distinct lack of research on the process of exhibition influencing people’s behavioral intentions. Based on the belief–emotion–norm theoretical model, this study integrates environmental beliefs, exhibition attachment, and an audience’s environmental behavior intentions into a research model to explain how the exhibition affects the audience. The Macau International Environmental Cooperation Forum & Exhibition attendees served as the research object in the current empirical study. The study’s findings suggest that audiences’ environmental beliefs may have a significant and positive impact on their attachment to environmentally themed exhibitions as well as their environmental behavioral intentions. This study also confirmed that attachment to exhibitions, a temporary space, can play an important mediating role between environmental beliefs and intentions to engage in pro-environmental behavior. The exhibition dependency, in particular, acts as a mediator between environmental beliefs and pro-environmental behavior intentions. Although the mediating effect of exhibition identity is insignificant, exhibition dependence–exhibition identity as a whole has a partial mediating effect in the process of influencing exhibition audiences’ environmental behavior. This research helps to improve our understanding of how environmentally themed exhibitions influence audience behavior. It also has implications for exhibition organizers in terms of better exhibition planning, more effective information transmission, and influencing audience behavior.

Imagined Audiences

The news industry faces profound financial instability and public distrust. Many believe the solution to these ongoing crises is for journalists to improve their relationship with their audiences. This raises important questions: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences in the first place? What is the connection between what journalists think about their audiences and what they do to reach them? Perhaps most important, how aligned are these “imagined” audiences with the real ones? Imagined Audiences draws on ethnographic case studies of three news organizations to show how journalists’ assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences. In doing so, it examines the role that audiences traditionally have played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public. It concludes by drawing on audience studies research to compare journalism’s “imagined” audiences with actual observations of news audience behavior. The result is a comprehensive study of both news production and reception at a time when the connection between the two has grown more important than ever.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the book’s central findings and explores their implications for journalism research and practice. Many who work in or study journalism are clamoring for solutions to the profession’s challenges. Increasingly, those solutions are more focused on improving journalism’s understanding of and relationship with the news audience than at any other point in the profession’s history. Yet, as the previous chapters have shown, the assumptions underlying attempts to improve the journalist–audience relationship ultimately reveal more about those pursuing them than they do about whom the audience comprises and how the news actually enters into their everyday lives. They also overwhelmingly stem from the reasonable yet inaccurate notion that reshaping journalism’s relationship with the public is firmly within journalists’ control. The author concludes that journalists must embrace journalistic humility. They must accept the limitations they face as they try to change audience behavior if they are to successfully navigate the news industry’s most pressing problems.

Understanding News Audience Behavior

This chapter offers a counter-narrative to the notion that journalists play the primary role in determining how news gets received by the public. Instead, it suggests that the interplay between different forces within the media environment shapes news consumption. News providers cannot alone determine how their content will be received, nor can audiences alone go out and find exactly what will leave them most satisfied. Consequently, even as news publishers make large, bold changes, these strategies are far from guaranteed to affect the way that audiences currently do (or do not) interact with the news. Structures and habits are powerful things and lead to a profound stubbornness when it comes to news audience behavior. In short, making the news better will not necessarily make it more profitable, simply because audience behavior is hard to change and even harder to predict.

When Podcast Met True Crime

This MA thesis examines the connection between the rise of the podcasting medium and the rise of the true crime genre. The ways in which true crime and podcasting have influenced each other reflect the dynamic relationship between media, genre, technology, and audience behavior, which is ultimately useful in better understanding contemporary American popular culture. The true crime genre helped popularize the podcasting medium, and today, true crime podcasts hold a significant place within popular culture. Together, they went from niche to mainstream, and we might refer to this process as genre-medium coevolution. Throughout this thesis, it will become evident that neither genre nor medium is static, and whereas the two might have benefitted from each other at an early stage of development, they might not continue to.

Tasteful Networks of Attention

Many moments in the history of American exhibition illuminate the entanglement of hearing and discipline. But few point as clearly at the intertwining of listening, class, architecture, language, taste, and technology—all of which culminate in a particular dispositif of institutional indoctrination via sensory discipline—as the art house theatre and its promise of aspirational uplift for the price of good audience behavior. This chapter considers the relationship between exhibition, subtitling, sense-making lingual sound, cinephilia, spectatorship, and discipline in the late-1950s and early-1960s art house cinemas across the United States. It argues that spectators were trained for import film watching by the practice of subtitling foreign, especially European, cinema. Listening, watching, and interpreting the balance between the two thus constituted a network of proper attention that helped indoctrinate post-war spectators into post-war American taste and leisure culture.

“We Dissect Stupidity and Respond to It”: Response Videos and Networked Harassment on YouTube

Over the past decade YouTube “response videos” in which a user offers counterarguments to a video uploaded by another user have become popular among political creators. While creators often frame response videos as debates, those targeted assert that they function as vehicles for harassment from the creator and their networked audience. Platform policies, which base moderation decisions on individual pieces of content rather than the relationship between videos and audience behavior, may therefore fail to address networked harassment. We analyze the relationship between amplification and harassment through qualitative content analysis of 15 response videos. We argue that response videos often provide a blueprint for harassment that shows both why the target is wrong and why harassment would be justified. Creators use argumentative tactics to portray themselves as defenders of enlightened public discourse and their targets as irrational and immoral. This positioning is misleading, given that creators interpellate the viewer as part of a networked audience with shared moral values that the target violates. Our analysis also finds that networked audiences act on that blueprint through the social affordances of YouTube, which we frame as harassment affordances. We argue that YouTube’s current policies are insufficient for addressing harassment that relies on amplification and networked audiences.