UPDATE: Audience Fragmentation and Media Content: Understanding Appeal in the New Media Environment

This past weekend, I was invited to give a short presentation at the 2012 Southern States Communication Association conference on a line of research looking at the role of morality in understanding the appeal of media entertainment to different audience segments. Much of this research should be credited to my contemporaries Dr. Ron Tamborini (Michigan State U) and Dr. Dana Mastro (U of Arizona) as well as my eternal co-authors Dr. Allison Eden (Frije University of Amsterdam) and Dr. Sven Joeckel (Universitat Erfurt - Germany).

The lecture notes might lose a bit of their context without having the dialogue - in fact, our panel was incredibly interactive (Ed. Note: panelist and lovable Dr. Bryce McNeil, Georgia State University, is working to load a podcast of our discussion soon) - but the abstract and slides below should provide a cursory context for the discussion. All emerging concepts, but I'm eager to engage more discussion!

Abstract (from SSCA 2012 program):Popular entertainment media is often lambasted by some for its portrayal of anti-social and immoral content, yet the typical Hollywood blockbuster often serves to reinforce rather than violate social mores (cf. Klapper, 1960). For better or worse, popular tends to serve as a mirror of the culture from which it stems, and producers craft message to appease the needs and tastes of that culture (Gans, 1954; Straabhaur, 1991). Indeed, newer theorizing on media production (Tamborini, 2011) has suggested that aggregate audience moral foundations can influence the production process, and early research has found morally-based content differences between content designed for specific cultures (Mastro et al., 2011). At the same time, if we consider the increased fragmentation of today’s media audience in which media content is produced to appeal to smaller, more well-defined fan bases, we wonder about the portability of this media to other audiences. In short, can increasingly-niche media be expected to survive out of its niche, or will it be seen as at least distasteful or at most immoral?

UPDATE: Dr. McNeil uploaded an audio file from the presentation: http://brycejmcneil.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/ssca-2012-full-panel1.mp3

Immoral, or distasteful?: Audience fragmentation and media content

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