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[Adapted
from Steve Baker's Media Studies website. Click here for
more - it's well worth a look]
The
audience as mass
The
key ideas about media audiences that you should remember
are these:
- The
media are often experienced by people alone. (Some critics
have talked about media audiences as atomised- cut off
from other people like separate atoms)
- Wherever
they are in the world, the audience for a media text are
all receiving exactly the same thing.
As
you will see from what follows, both of these ideas have
been questioned. These points led some early critics of the
media to come up with the idea of media audiences as masses.
According to many theorists, particularly in the
early history of the subject, when we listen to our CDs or sit in the cinema,
we become part of a mass audience in many ways like a crowd at a football match
or a rock concert but at the same time very different because separated from
all the other members of this mass by space and sometimes time.
If
you look at the early history off the media, it is fairly
easy to see where the idea of a mass audience came from.
Within less than a hundred years photography, Film, radio
and television were all invented. Each one of them allowed
works of art or pieces of entertainment that might once have
been restricted to the number of people who could fit into
an art gallery or a theatre to be transmitted in exactly
the same form to enormous numbers of people in different
parts of the world. It can be very easy, living in this media
saturated world to forget how strange this might once have
seemed. These media quickly became extremely popular and
at the same time there was an important difference between
them and older forms of entertainment. Whereas in the past,
many forms of entertainment were only available to those
who could afford them, now suddenly films and radio particularly
were available to all. Early media theorists struggled to
understand this and found it easiest to compare the media
audiences with the kinds of crowds they were used to from
the world before the media- they came up with the ideas of
the mass audience. Here is how the sociologist Herbert Blumer
described it in 1950:
First,
its membership may come from all walks of life, and from
all distinguishable social strata; it may include people
of different class position, of different vocation, of
different cultural attainment, and of different wealth.
..... Secondly, the mass is an anonymous group, or more
exactly is composed of anonymous individuals [Blumer
means anonymous in the sense that unlike the citizens
of earlier communities, the people who are members of
the mass audience for the media do not know each other].
Third, there exists little interaction or change of experience
between members of the mass. They are usually physically
separated from one another, and, being anonymous, do
not have the opportunity to mill as do members of the
crowd. Fourth, the mass is very loosely organised and
is not able to act with the concertedness or unity of
a crowd.
Blumer
was writing about the media in 1950, five years after the
Second World War. During the war and before it, Hitler in
Germany and Stalin in Russia had attempted to use the media
as propaganda- through films, radio and poster art they had
attempted to persuade mass audiences to follow their policies-
to the critics of the time it is not surprising that the
media must have seemed like a dangerous weapon in the wrong
hands, capable of persuading millions to follow evil men.
In the recent general election, you will have found it difficult
to avoid seeing similar, if less offensive propaganda. How
much influence do you think the posters that covered Britain's
roadsides might have had on the final outcome of the election?
It is impossible to give a certain answer to this, but the
different political parties obviously believe in their power,
if you consider the millions of pounds they spend on them.
Key
Theory 1: The hypodermic syringe
There
have been a number of theories over the years about how exactly
the media work on the mass audience. Perhaps the most simple
to understand is the hypodermic syringe. This has been very
popular down the years with many people who fear the effects
of the media.
According
to the theory the media is like a syringe which injects ideas,
attitudes and beliefs into the audience who as a powerless
mass have little choice but to be influenced- in other words,
you watch something violent, you may go and do something
violent, you see a woman washing up on T.V. and you will
want to do the same yourself if you are a woman and if you
are a man you will expect women to do the washing up for
you.
This
theory has been particularly popular when people have been
considering violence in films. There have been films such
as Straw Dogs and The Evil Dead which have
been banned partly because of a belief that they might encourage
people to copy the crimes within them but on the other hand
no-one has ever really claimed that every-one will be affected
by these texts in the same way. Many people have therefore
seen the theory as simplistic because it doesn't take any
account of people's individuality and yet it is still very
popular in society particularly for politicians looking for
reasons why society has become more violent which can't be
blamed on them. A good example of this is Dumblane- there
has never been a real suggestion that Thomas Hamilton watched
a lot of violent films but a kind of woolly thinking has
allowed newspapers and MPs to link his dreadful crime to
video violence.
Another
interesting example of the theory in action is the serial
killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Before every one of his murders, he
watched a clip from his favourite film in order to get himself
excited. This is the kind of fact that might seem toi prove
the hypodermic syringe theory but the film was Star Wars and
no-one has ever suggested that that should be banned- clearly
the film meant very different things to him to what it means
for us.
Key Theory 2: The Culmination Theory
Because
of the difficulty of proving the effects of individual media
texts on their audience a more refined version of the theory
has been created called the culmination mode. According to
this, while any one media text does not have too much effect,
years and years of watching more violence will make you less
sensitive to violence, years and years of watching women
being mistreated in soaps will make you less bothered about
it in real life.
One difficulty with both of these ways of looking at the media is that they
are very difficult to prove either way. Many people have a general sense that
the media do affect our behaviour and advertisers certainly justify their fees
by working on this assumption, but it can be extraordinarily difficult to actually
prove how much effect if any a text might have on an audience. In fact researchers
have spent enormous amounts of time and effort trying to prove the validity
of the culmination theory with no success- this of course does not mean that
there is no truth in it as an idea.
Criticisms
of mass audience theory
Some
critics of these kinds of theory have argued that the problem
is not just with the idea that the media has such obvious
effects, but about the assumptions that mass audience theory
makes about the members of the audience. Critics of the idea
often claim that it is elitist- in other words that it suggests
a value judgement about these masses- that they are easily
led and not so perceptive and self- aware as the theorists
who are analysing them. Here for example is a 1930's advertising
executive talking about the radio audience of his day:
The
typical listening audience for a radio program is a tired,
bored, middle-aged man and woman whose lives are empty
and who have exhausted their sources of outside amusement
when they have taken a quick look at an evening paper....
Radio provides a vast source of delight and entertainment
for the barren lives of the millions.
The
chances are that you have heard similar comments about the
viewers of soaps or quiz shows or even that you have made
them yourself. The phrase couch potato has this kind of idea
behind it- that watching the television is in some way brain
numbing compared with other possible forms of entertainment.
One problem that people have suggested with mass audience theory is that it
relies on the assumptions of the people analysing the masses. The early theorists
who came up with the idea were generally lovers of classical music and hated
television and so they tended to look down at the viewers of television who
they saw as "the mass." There is obviously a problem with this if
any theory ends up as just being a chance for people to air their prejudices.
To try to make a final judgement about mass audience theory, you really need
to carefully question its main assumptions.
Lets look at these in turn. The first idea seems to be suggesting that because
we often watch the media independently, it has more chance of affecting us.
Certainly many parents think this is true and will make a point of sitting
with their young children while they watch potentially disturbing programmes
so that they can have some influence on the way the children take in the messages
and explain confusing issues, but do you feel adults need to be protected in
the same ways? Some of the critics of the idea of the mass audience have pointed
out the many ways that individuals who watch programmes alone will then share
their experience with others in conversations about what they have seen. One
argument is that these kind of conversations have much more influence on potential
behaviour than the programme from which they may have sprung.
Key
Theory 3: The two step flow
A
theory that springs from this idea is called the two step
flow. The idea of this is that whatever our experience of
the media we will be likely to discuss it with others and
if we respect their opinion, the chances are that we will
be more likely to be affected by it. (The theory calls these
people opinion leaders.)
Further
criticisms of mass audience theory
The
second major idea of the mass audience theory was that the
mass were all watching the same text. This suggests that
a single film will be the same for every person who watches
it.
We
are all individuals with different views and opinions. Our
interpretation of a media text is influenced by our individual
world view. In other words one viewer might interpret Fatal
Attraction as being a sexist film but others have a perfect
right to argue an opposite case- they could experience the
same text in very different ways- so different, in fact that
viewer 1's Fatal Attraction could almost be another
text to the one that viewer 2 saw.
The
Mass Market
Before
going on to look at some more recent approaches to audiences,
it is worth considering one last use of mass audience theory.
The idea of the mass market. It wasn't just academic theorists
who were interested in audiences and their relationship with
the media texts they encountered. The producers of media
texts and the advertisers who used them were if anything
even more interested in these audiences who they could contact
through the new media. To investigate exactly how large their
share of the mass market was, television companies and advertisers
pioneered new techniques of market research which involved
quantitative surveys where they attempted to count how many
people they reached. The most obvious example of this is
the system of television ratings which still has enormous
effect on the workings of TV stations. You may be able to
think of a show that you enjoyed which was taken off because
it did not achieve high enough ratings. If so you may agree
with the thinking of Todd Gitlin:
The
numbers only sample sets tuned in, not necessarily shows
watched, let alone grasped, remembered, loved, learned
from, deeply anticipated, or mildly tolerated
Quantitative
and qualitative research
Many
of the people who use mass audience theory tend to back it
up with quantitative research. This kind of research is based
around counting the number of people who watch certain kinds
of programmes and making simple judgements about these quantities.
The criticisms of mass audience theory are made equally about
quantitative research- that it fails to take into account
the differences in peoples' experiences of the same texts.
The opposite of quantitative research is qualitative research.
This involves the researchers looking not just at the numbers
of people watching a certain programme but also at the ways
that they watch it and what they are doing while it is on.
The idea of this is that it gives them a clearer idea of
what exactly the programme means to its audience and how
important it is to them.
We
will now examine some theories of audiences which have used
qualitative research to look for a more subtle view of the
audience and then look at the ways the advertisers and media
producers themselves have changed their methods to go beyond
the idea of a mass audience.
Key
Theory 4: Uses and Gratifications
This
is probably the most important theory for you to know. According
to uses and gratification theory, we all have different uses
for the media and we make choices over what we want to watch.
In other words, when we encounter a media text, it is not
just some kind of mindless entertainment- we are expecting
to get something from it: some kind of gratification.
But
what does this actually mean? What kinds of gratification
can we be getting? Researchers have found quite a few, but
there are four main ones:
- Information-
we want to find out about society and the world- we want
to satisfy our curiosity. This would fit the news and documentaries
which both give us a sense that we are learning about the
world.
- Personal
Identity- we may watch the television in order to
look for models for our behaviour. So, for example, we
may identify with characters that we see in a soap. The
characters help us to decide what feel about ourselves
and if we agree with their actions and they succeed we
feel better about ourselves- think of the warm feeling
you get when you favourite character triumphs at the
end of a programme.
- Integration
and Social Interaction- we use the media in order
to find out more about the circumstances of other people.
Watching a show helps us to empathise and sympathise
with the lives of others so that we may even end up thinking
of the characters in programme as friends even though
we might feel a bit sad admitting it! At the same time
television may help us to get on with our real friends
as we are able to talk about the media with them.
- Entertainment-
sometimes we simply use the media for enjoyment, relaxation
or just to fill time.
You
can probably recognise yourself in some of these descriptions
and not surprisingly uses and gratification theory has become
quite popular amongst media critics. It is important to remember
with this theory that it is likely that with any media text
you enjoy, you will be getting a number of Gratifications
from it and not just one
However,
despite this popularity amongst critics, there have also
been criticisms made of some features of the theory. First
of all, it ignores the fact that we do not always have complete
choice as to what we receive from the media. Think, for example,
about your family who may end up having to listen to the
same music as you sometimes. Similarly, you don't have that
much choice about the posters that you see on your way to
college however objectionable you may find some of them.
A
second problem relates to this last example. The poster that
you see on a billboard, may be extremely sexist. However,
you clearly cannot choose a different poster that you want
to see that you might find more pleasant. If you think about
it, this problem also affects us in our other encounters
with the media- we are generally having to choose the media
that we consume from what is available. This undermines the
idea of uses and gratifications- we may not all have the
same potential to use and enjoy the media products that we
want. in society there are in fact plenty of minorities who
feel that the media does not provide for them the texts that
they want to use.
One of the difficulties of assessing uses and gratifications like this is that
people won't often be aware of the real uses of a text in their lives- how
many people would admit for example that they watched a certain program because
they were lonely even if that were the truth.
Key
Theory 5: Reception analysis
In
a sense, this is an extension of uses and gratifications
theory. Once you have come up with the idea that people are
using the media in different ways, it is just one stage on
to actually look in more detail at how this happens. Reception
analysis does this and it concentrates on the audience themselves
and how they come to a text.
The
most important thing about this that you should bear in mind
is that reception analysis is based on the idea that no text
has one simple meaning. Instead, reception analysis suggests
that the audience themselves help to create the meaning of
the text. We all decode the texts that we encounter in individual
ways which may be a result of our upbringing, the mood that
we are in, the place where we are at the time or in fact
any combination of these and all kinds of other factors.
So viewer 1 may watch a television programme and enjoy every
minute of it and viewer 2 may hate the same show. But of
course, it goes way beyond just how much we enjoy the text.
We will actually create a different meaning for it as well.
Reception
analysis is all about trying to look at these kinds of differences
and to understand them. What reception analysts have found
is that factors such as a gender, our place inside society,
and the context of the time we are living in can be enormously
important when we make the meaning or a text.
Take the example of a performance by S Club 7 on Top of the Pops. A
12 year old girl watching this may find it very meaningful for her personally
- she may feel that the image the group project has important things to say
to her about how she might behave. Her father, on the other hand, may create
different meanings for the text - he may disapprove of their clothing or behaviour
and so the same performance that the girl finds so inspiring may be disgusting
to him.
Often
when our views of the media differ, it can say as much about
us as it does about the media text itself. In this example,
the most important factor is probably how S Club 7 trigger
off in the two people's minds ideas that they have about
their own lives. The girl may relate to the female members
of the group because they are of the same gender as her and
because, while they are not the same age as she is, they
are probably more like the age she would like to be. For
the father, his views of the group are probably influenced
by the fact that his daughter likes them so much - the idea
that she might want to become like them, may make their performance
seem more frightening.
Of
course this kind of thing is often closer to psychology-
the study of personality- than Media Studies and can be very
difficult to research. While quantitative researchers simply
count the number of people watching a programme, reception
analysts have to make use of interviews in order to get some
kind of idea of the meanings that people attach to texts.
This can be very time consuming- a simple questionnaire is
rarely enough and often the researchers will have to ask
quite detailed and spontaneous questions.
The
ideas that reception theorists come up with are also not
so neat and straightforward as those of other approaches.
If you remember, Uses and Gratifications made up a simple
list of four types of use for the media. Because reception
theory concentrates on the individual it can never do this
- we are all different and no one theory can comprehend that.
This
can be seen as a strength of the theory - that it takes into
account the complexity of our response to the media. At the
same time the theory has a weakness which has been pointed
out. This will be clearer if we return to our example of
S Club 7. The girl's reaction to the programme may also have
been affected by the day that she had had at school - the
way that her teacher shouted at her may have made her particularly
excited about the idea of being someone else. Similarly,
an encounter with a strong woman who he was not keen on,
may have affected the father's reactions to the programme.
Reception analysis takes none of this into account it ignores
the context of everyday life, something which we will turn
to in the final theory concerning audiences.
The
media in everyday life.
Uses
and gratifications theory looked at why we make use of the
media, Reception analysis looked at what we see when we watch
a media text- what both of them leave out is the question
of how the media fits in with our everyday lives - how do
we live with the media?
One
researcher who has looked at this is David Morley. He has
come up with the idea of the "politics of the living
room"- the idea that the media is just part of all the
different things that may be going on in your home, that
a television can become more than just a form of entertainment
but in a typical family can be a subject of argument or a
symbol of power. This may be a concept that you will find
quite familiar. Imagine a situation where a man comes home
from a terrible day at work. He is in a bad mood and does
not want to talk to anybody in his family so he switches
on the TV. Anyone doing quantitative research would simply
see him as the another viewer of whatever programme is on
but in fact he is probably barely watching it - the television
is simply a way of shutting the rest of the world out. This
is one simple example of the media in everyday life - here
are some more general principles.
We can never consider one example of the media on its own- we are always choosing
from many different alternatives and more confusingly our understanding of
one text may be affected by our knowledge of another - to go back to the earlier
example the man watching S Club 7 may have read about them in that morning's Daily
Mail.
It
is very rare for us to concentrate fully on any media text-
we may skim read through a magazine or glance at various
different channels while using the remote. Once again, quantitative
research cannot cope with this - it simply counts the number
of texts encountered but doesn't consider whether the audience
have taken them in.
The
media can become an important part of the routines of our
lives - you may want to watch Neighbours when you
get in from college or listen to the Chart Show every
Sunday when you do your homework. In these examples, the
exact time and the way that the media text fits in with the
pattern of your day are almost as important as what the media
text actually is.
It
is very rare for us to be completely alone when we encounter
a media text. If you think back to the mass audience theorists,
they talked about the media audience being isolated like
atoms, but in fact, even when you are reading a newspaper,
you are often surrounded by other people - even when you
are in your room watching the TV, your family are close at
hand.
Gender
differences
One
interesting thing that Morley found in his research was that
there were clear differences in the uses that people made
of the media in their everyday lives depending on their gender.
He found that men tended to prefer factual programmes eg
News and sports while women preferred fiction Soaps and other
drama series. Also, men preferred watching the programmes
extensively while women tended to be doing something else
at the same time. Another thing that he found was that if
someone had control over what the family was watching, it
was more likely to be the man - often with the remote control
in his hand.
Of
course, this does not necessarily mean that there are fundamental
differences between men and women. What it does relate to
is the kinds of lives they are often leading - for a man,
working during the day outside of the home, television is
seen as a form of relaxation. For women, on the other hand,
the home is often a place of work and so it is likely that
that work will have to continue during the evening's television
as well. Of course, the account given of typical lifestyles
of men and women is now becoming quite out of date and so
it is very likely that research such as Morley's, if carried
out today, would come up with quite different conclusions.
New
ideas about the audience
What
you have been reading about up to now are very much the classic
ideas about audiences. You need to be familiar with these
theories if you are to answer questions in the media studies
exam successfully. However, there are other ways of looking
at the audience which are a bit stranger, but maybe even
more up to date. The rest of this page will cover these weirder
ideas.
A lot of what follows deals with the relationship between advertisers and the
programmes that you watch on the television. Obviously, the vast majority of
the programmes that you watch (with the single exception of those produced
by the B.B.C) are made with money raised from advertising but it can be easy
to ignore the effect that this might have on what you end up seeing. The theories
that follow look at the relationship between advertisers, media producers and
audiences in more detail.
Audience
Surveillance
While
you were reading about Morley's ideas about the politics
of the living room, you may well have thought that it was
all very different from your own family life at home. The
truth is that the traditional idea of a family sitting down
together to watch the same programmes on the TV is very much
out of date. Many of you will have your own televisions,
stereos and game consoles in your bedrooms. The result of
this is that the mass audience is even more divided than
ever before. This is a problem for us when we try to analyse
the media, but it is even more difficult for the people who
produce media texts. It has always been very important for
media producers to have some kind of idea about the people
who are consuming their texts. This was confusing enough
in the old days when they might have been trying to analyse
a cinema audience - it is well nigh impossible today.
But
advertisers do not give up easily and their need to find
out exactly who is consuming what and how is resulting in
some new techniques of surveillance. Our media use is being
watched more than ever before. One recent example can demonstrate
how easy this kind of thing is becoming - your parents may
have recently got a loyalty card from the supermarket, the
idea of this is not just to give away lots of free goodies,
but it also allows the supermarkets to keep an exact track
of what you are buying week by week. They can build up a
profile of you as a consumer and then, by buying up advertising
space in the magazines which they sell and which they can
see from your receipts that you buy, target you more directly.
As Cable, Satellite and the Internet become more commonplace,
this kind of direct individual advertising will become much
more common and will affect us all as audiences.
Of
course all of this is only possible now because of computers.
In the past it might have been feasible to look in detail
at the buying behaviour of people, but it would have been
impossible to come to any useful conclusions. Today, on the
other hand, a simple computer program could be written which
would analyse your shopping receipts in detail and then produce
a list of suitable adverts which could be sent to you alone
during your evening's T V viewing. This would mean that in
the future, you could end up watching the same programme
as your friends, but seeing different adverts in the middle
of it.
Audiences
as products
Audience
surveillance in extreme form is probably still a few years
away, but something that is very much with us already is
the idea of audiences being the products of television companies.
This is a strange way of looking at the media - but quite
a useful one. It is usual to think of media texts as being
made for the audience - so, for example, Match of the
Day is a show that has been made for football fans -
a group of people who already exists. The idea of the audiences
as products theory is that the process works the opposite
way round: the media producers will create a text in such
a way that it will produce an audience which they can then
sell to advertisers.
A
good example of how this works is Friends. It might
be normal to think of this as just being a funny program
that happens to be on on a Friday night. According to the
theory, though, Friends is actually a way of selling
beauty products. In America where the series started, the
producers would have been looking for advertising revenue
and so they came up with the idea of a show which would feature
beautiful people in funny situations with happy endings.
They would have seen this as a great way of selling beauty
products as the show would attract an audience of young people
who would want to follow the fashions of the main characters
particularly as the feel good endings would make this audience
want to lead the same lives as the beautifully manicured
main characters. To help them to attract this audience they
would have scheduled the programme at a time when they could
catch these people.
We
have been talking about the producers attracting this audience
as if the bunch of people who watch the show were already
there beforehand as a recognisable group in society, but
in fact, by assembling such a group of people to watch the
show, in a very real sense they have produced this audience,
and the same pattern has been repeated in Britain where the
programme was at first sponsored by a hair products manufacturer.
You
can probably think of almost any media text in the same way.
It is rare today for texts to be created just for fun - much
more often, commercial companies are trying to produce a
certain audience. This would be fine if we were all as attractive
to the advertisers - we would all get the programmes that
we want. Unfortunately, some types of people have more money
and are therefore more attractive to advertisers- they therefore
will get more programmes tailored for them. Strangely enough,
as teenagers, you are one of these groups. You may not feel
as if you have a lot of money, but as a group, compared to
older people who have their money tied up in mortgages and
buying essentials, you spend a much higher proportion of
your money on consumer products.. This has meant that in
recent years, media producers have been bending over backwards
in order to try to produce teenage audiences. The most recent
example of this has been Channel 5 who have geared a lot
of their programmes around the kinds of things they think
you are interested in - with not much success so far!
This
theory was first thought up by American theorists and does
not fit British Television quite so much because of the existence
of the BBC. This channel is different because since it was
first set up by the government it has been funded by public
money in the form of the license fee and therefore does not
have the same kind of need to produce specific types of audiences.
This allows it to make programmes to attract different kinds
of audience who may be left out by other stations and also
allows it to follow its stated aim of "informing and entertaining"
However,
the BBC is now quite competitive for audiences and so will
try to produce similar audiences to ITV which is commercial.
The BBC now sells a lot of it programmes abroad, particularly
to America and it therefore is in the business of producing
audiences in different countries. Many of the famous costume
dramas that fill up Sunday afternoons are full of are partly
intended to produce a certain kind of audience on American
television.
Niche
marketing
All
of this is happening at the same time as the number of different
media products available to us is increasing constantly.
So we have a situation where there are more and more media
texts and they are being targeted more and more precisely
at certain groups. this process can involve something called
niche marketing. A niche is a small part of the market and
advertisers have found that they can get a greater return
on their investment if they produce an audience who although
smaller can more easily be targeted. A good example of this
is the specialist hobby magazines that you might see in W
H Smith's. There can't be that many people who are interested
in Carp Monthly, but the producers of the magazine
can be fairly sure that they will attract a large proportion
of them. So although profits will not be large, they will
probably be secure. Another good example of this is computer
magazines: one company, Future Publishing, produce dozens
of different magazines each aimed at one particular niche
of computer users - there are magazines for people who use
the Internet, for those who are new to computers, or those
who are experts and for those who just play games on them.
Once again, no single one of these magazines has a large
enough niche to make lots of money, but the company has become
very successful with all the magazines combined.
All off this might help to explain why programmes with quite high ratings can
be inexplicably taken off the air and why at the same time a minority show
might flourish. The high rating texts might well have been popular with a part
of society with little buying power- for example the elderly, while the niche
for the minority show might be much more attractive to the advertisers.
An
example of this is the enormous success of the various types
of Star Trek over the years. The American producers
of these programmes discovered a long time ago that although
they did not produce large audiences, the particular niche
they attracted included a high proportion of intelligent
single men in quite well paid jobs- a niche that was very
attractive to advertisers.
The opposite of this can be seen in the case of Hello magazine which
has had financial difficulties in the past because of this - although it has
produced a large audience, the kinds of people it attracts like the working
class and the elderly, are not those that advertisers are interested in.
Audiences
as Labour
In
a sense this next theory takes things a little bit further.
The idea of audiences as Labour is that rather than the media
producers working for us when they make shows, we are working
for them. The advertisers who put up the money for the programmes
that we watch are clearly trying to make money out of us.
You could see us, therefore, as working for them by watching
their adverts. This might seem even more important, when
you think about all the other work that you have been doing
during a typical day - after a hard day at college, the last
thing that you want is to have to sit through a load of adverts
- you simply want to be entertained and the adverts sometimes
get in the way of that. In America, the work that audiences
have to do in order to be able to watch their favourite programmes
has increased as adverts have become more and more frequent.
In Britain, you can see this same process in action if you
compare satellite television with ITV - the massive amount
of advertising on satellite means that you have to work harder
for your entertainment.
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