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ARTS 2093 MEDIA USES: PRACTICES OF CULTURAL CONSUMPTION

Course Outline
Copied pursuant to Part VB of the Copyright Act (1968) as amended

SESSION 1, 2013 Coordinator: Dr Michele Zappavigna

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1. Location of the course

Mondays, 12:00 - 14:00, Central Lecture Block 8 (K-E19-105)

2. Table of Contents
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. Staff Contact Details .................................................................................................................... 2 Course details .............................................................................................................................. 2 Rationale for the inclusion of content and teaching approach ..................................................... 3 Teaching strategies ...................................................................................................................... 4 Assessment.................................................................................................................................. 4 Academic honesty and plagiarism ............................................................................................... 6 Attendance ................................................................................................................................... 6 Course schedule ........................................................................................................................ 6 Resources for students ............................................................................................................ 11 Course evaluation and development ........................................................................................ 11 Other information...................................................................................................................... 11

3. Staff Contact Details

Position Course Convenor Lecturer/tutor Name Dr Michele Zappavigna Dr Collin Chua Email m.zappavigna@unsw.edu.au c.chua@unsw.edu.au Availability; times & location TBA TBA Phone TBA 9385 55275

4. Course details
Credit Points: 6 Units of Credit Lecture Time: Mondays, 12:00 - 14:00 Lecture Location: Central Lecture Block 8 (K-E19-105) Course description This course draws on contemporary theoretical and empirical work from the fields of media and cultural studies to address the questions of who uses media and how and why they use it. Several methodological and theoretical frameworks are used to explore the ways that media consumers/audiences have been understood by academic researchers, policy-makers and public commentators. Both media texts and media research will be examined to understand how they can shape opinions or behaviours, entertain or distract, form identities and build communities. Students will reflect on their own media consumption practices and their relation to values, attitudes and .!
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identity, as well as engaging with case studies of media uses in Australia. The focus will be on new media and social media use. Aims of the Course 1. This course introduces you to theories of media audiences and media consumption/interaction, with the aim of improving your ability to critically engage with and communicate theoretical ideas, both in writing and in speech. 2. Through small group work in tutorials you will develop collaborative learning skills. Individual assessments will increase your ability to engage in independent and reflective learning, and enable you to reflect on and experiment creatively with your own practices of media consumption and analysis. 3. You will learn how to engage with new media and social media audiences and to critically analyse and interpret their practices. Student learning outcomes At the conclusion of this course the student will be able to: 1. Critically engage with theories of media audiences and media consumption/interaction. 2. Communicate theoretical ideas in written form. 3. Understand how to sample and analyse social media use. 4. Engage in independent and reflective learning, towards an analysis of media use. Graduate Attributes ARTS2093: Media Uses is designed to develop the following UNSW graduate attributes: 1. The capacity for analytical and critical thinking and creative problem solving. 2. The ability to independently conduct relevant and high quality multidisciplinary research. 3. The skills of effective and precise academic communication.

5. Rationale for the inclusion of content and teaching approach

One cannot understand the media without understanding audiences. This course aims to give students a detailed knowledge and appreciation of 20th and 21st century audience theory, particularly recent developments following the advent of social media. Exploring case studies drawn from microblogging to Youtube commenting, we will look at how a diverse range of audience consumption practices have been conceptualised. We will explore theorisations of audience passivity and agency; the politics of participation and the cultural significance of consumption. We will also explore the challenges that networked audiences have generated for audience theory. The assessment tasks will require students to demonstrate both knowledge of audience theory, and an ability to apply its key concepts when analysing examples of the practices of audiences.

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6. Teaching strategies
ARTS2093 Media Uses will consist of one lecture (two hours) and one tutorial (one hour) each week. Attendance at both is compulsory. Advice concerning special consideration in the event of illness or misadventure is available in the document Essential Information for all SAM Students", which can be found at: http://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/File/ESSENTIAL_INFORMATION_FOR_ALL_STUDENTS.pdf In some weeks lecture time may be set aside to discuss course related issues, such as assessment tasks, research skills and resources. Tutorials are a space for you to determine what will best help you navigate the complex terrain of audience theory and media use. Your tutors role is to assist and guide you, not to do the work for you, so the success of your tutorials comes down to you. You are expected to come to class having done the readings, but it is not a problem if you have not understood everything, as the complex ideas from the readings and lectures will be discussed and worked through in the tutorial. So come along prepared to ask questions and engage with the issues and you will find the tutorials a productive learning environment. Remember the tutorial will only be as useful and enjoyable as you make it.

7. Assessment
This course has three assessment tasks: a short answer question (500 words), and two essay questions (both 1500 words). You must COMPLETE ALL TASKS to be eligible to pass the subject. You will be penalized 3% for each day that your assessment is late. More information can be found here: http://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/resources/assessments . Assessment task one: Short answer question 20% 1000 words Due Monday April 8 What are some of the challenges that the advent of social media has posed for audience theory? Your answer should include references to academic material in this area (citations are not included in the word count). Assessment task two: Short essay 30% 1500 words Due Monday May 6 In sites like Twitter and Facebook, social contexts we used to imagine as separate co-exist as parts of the network. (Marwick & Boyd, 2010, p. 130 [Lecture 2 reading]).

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Explain the concept of context collapse in relation to networked audiences. You should use real examples of texts produced by these audiences (e.g. Tweets, blog comments, YouTube comments etc.) in your explanation. Assessment task three: Final essay 50% 2500 words Due Monday June 10 Throughout this course we have explored practices involving people using social media to align around particular issues, creating networked publics. Find two examples of networked publics that have formed around two different issues in the media and compare how solidarity is enacted as people share or contest values. Use examples of the texts produced by these publics to justify your analysis (e.g. Tweets, blog comments, YouTube comments etc.). Your answer should also draw on research into networked audiences to support the claims you make. To do well in this assignment you will need to: show a sound grasp of key theoretical concepts from the course and be able to use those concepts in relation to the examples you use; be able to show how theoretical concepts can be effectively used as tools for investigating networked audiences; be able to demonstrate a clear, well-supported argument in relation to your chosen examples. Assessment task Short answer question Short essay Final essay Length 1000 words 1500 words 2500 words Weight 20% 30% 50% Learning outcomes assessed 1, 2 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3 Graduate attributes assessed 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3 Due date Monday April 8 (week 5) Monday May 6 (week 9) Monday June 10

Referencing Your Assignments In all assessment tasks, any material or ideas taken from another source must be referenced in accordance with the Referencing Style Guidelines as outlined in the UNSW Assessment Policies. ARTS2093 follows the APA system of referencing. Guidelines on how to reference according to this system can be found at: http://monash.edu/library/skills/resources/tutorials/citing/apa.html Submission of Assessment Tasks The School of the Arts and Media (SAM) now has very strict guidelines concerning assessment tasks. You can download a copy of these ('Essential Information for all SAM Students") from: http://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/File/ESSENTIAL_INFORMATION_FOR_ALL_STUDENTS.pdf

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You should keep in mind that all courses in SAM, including ARTS2093, follow these guidelines (which include instructions on how to submit your work, whether and how you can apply for extensions, late penalties, academic honesty and plagiarism) so it is crucial that you read the guidelines now. Make sure you include a cover sheet with your assessment. Cover sheets can be found here: http://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/File/New_SAM_Cover_Sheet.pdf Your assessment should be submitted to the course box at the SAM office by 5pm on the due date. You should also submit an electronic version via Blackboard (Turnitin).

8. Academic honesty and plagiarism

For information on academic honesty and plagiarism please refer to the pdf, "Essential Information for all SAM students" available at: http://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/File/ESSENTIAL_INFORMATION_FOR_ALL_STUDENTS.pdf The Learning Centre can provide further information at: www.lc.unsw.edu.au/plagiarism

9. Attendance
Tutorial attendance is compulsory. It is FASS policy that you should attend at least 80% (10 from 12) of the tutorials and lectures in order to pass the course (see SAM's "Essential Information for Students referred to above). In short, attendance at less than 80% of tutorials or lectures without documentary evidence of illness or misadventure may result in failure of the course. Please also note that if you arrive more than 20 minutes late for tutorials you will be marked absent. This policy will be enforced in this course. Advice concerning special consideration in the event of illness or misadventure is also available in the document Essential Information for all SAM Students".

10. Course schedule

Week 1: Course Introduction Lecture: This lecture will introduce you to the fundamental ideas in Audience Theory. After surveying the history of this area we will explore the challenges new media and social media have brought to understanding audiences. Tutorials: No tutorial this week. Reading: Litt, E. (2012). Knock, Knock. Who's There? The Imagined Audience. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 330-345. Livingstone, S. (1999). New media, new audiences?. New media and society,1(1), 59-66.

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Week 2: Networked audiences Lecture: Throughout this course we will be exploring networked audiences. This lecture introduces the concept of the socially-mediated audience (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook audiences etc.) and provides context for the case studies that we will look at over the next 10 weeks. Tutorials: This week we will explore networked audiences looking at tweets and YouTube comments posted following the confessional interview of Lance Armstrong by Oprah Winfrey. Reading: boyd, d., Golder, S., & Lotan, G. (2010). Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. HICSS-43. Kauai, HI: IEEE. Retrieved from www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf. Marwick, A. & boyd, d., (2010)., I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 13(1), 114-133. Week 3: Media ethnography Lecture: Ethnography is an important way of gaining rich understandings of audiences. This lecture introduces ethnographic methods. You will learn about the emerging area of digital ethnography and its application to YouTube audiences. Tutorials: This week we will Watch a screening of a YouTube day in the life vlog. You will be asked to consider the concepts of an imagined audience and context collapse in relation to this video. We will discuss the kinds of challenges that new media platforms such as YouTube raise for ethnography. Reading: Wesch, M. (2009). YouTube and You: experiences of self-awareness in the context collapse of the recording webcam. Explorations in Media Ecology, 8(2), 19-34. Murphy, P. (1999). Media Studies' Uncomfortable Embrace of Ethnography. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 23(3), pp. 205-221. Week 4: Audiences, affiliation and YouTube Lecture: This lecture explores YouTube audiences in relation to the concepts of the imagined audience and context collapse. We will explore how these participatory audiences form communities and rally around social bonds. Tutorials: In what sense can we think of audiences as communities? In this tutorial you will consider the kinds of values are being shared in the comments to a YouTube video. Reading:

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Thelwall, M., Sud, P., & Vis, F. (2012). Commenting on YouTube videos: From guatemalan rock to El Big Bang. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(3), 616629. doi: 10.1002/asi.21679 Livingstone, S. (1998). Audience research at the crossroads: The 'implied audience' in media and cultural theory. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 1(2), 193-217. doi: 10.1177/136754949800100203 Week 5: Participatory audiences and live-tweeting Lecture: In past decades audiences have been theorized as active in the sense that they actively interpret the meanings of media texts. This lecture explores how new research in new media and social media characterises audiences as active participators in the media. We will use the phenomenon of live-tweeting TV as a case study. Tutorials: In this tutorial we will explore the concept of liveness in relation to audiences that engage in live-tweeting TV. We will discuss a sample of livetweets of the TV program, Teenmom, and consider the role that hashtags play in this practice. Reading: Lochrie, M. and P. Coulton (2012). Sharing the viewing experience through second screens. In Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Interactive tv and video (pp.199-202) Berlin, Germany: ACM. Johns, M. (2012). Two screen viewing and social relationships: Exploring the invisible backchannel of TV viewing. In M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (Eds), Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012 (pp. 333-343), Australia: Murdoch University, Australia, 333-343. Week 6: Publics 2.0 Lecture: Web 2.0 has blurred the distinction between producers and consumers of media and between the public and private domains. This lecture gives an overview of how digital media is changing the idea of publics. Tutorials: In this tutorial we will discuss how web2.0 problematises the concept of the public sphere? We will consider the public forming around the debate regarding gay marriage rights in Australia. We will consider the kinds of discourses at work in this debate by exploring the opinions presented in comments on a YouTube clip of an extract from the TV program, Q and A. Reading: Boyd, d. (2010). Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications. In Z Papacharissi (Ed.) Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (pp. 39-58). New York: Routledge.

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Livingstone, S. (2005) On the relation between audiences and publics: why audience and public? London: LSE Research Online. Retrieved from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000437 Week 7: Networked publics and Internet memes Lecture: Moving from the concept of audiences to the notion of publics, we will explore the idea of the networked public. This lecture will investigate the kinds of publics that form around Internet memes and how we might study them. Tutorials: In this tutorial we will consider the concept of publics in relation to Internet memes. We will explore in which senses the memes and remixes that occurred during the 2012 US Presidential election can be though of as enacting a public. Reading: Bruns, A. (2007). Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation. In Proceedings Creativity & Cognition 6, Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au Nancy K. Baym & danah boyd (2012): Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 320-329. Week 8: Real-time publics Lecture: The public sphere and political expression have long interested media researchers. The lecture explores the public, real-time expression of mass sentiment see on Twitter during the 2008 US presidential election. Tutorials: In this tutorial we will consider the kinds of meanings made in real-time mass reaction to public crises on microblogging platforms. We will look at tweets that occurred during the Queensland floods of January 2012 and explore the concept of citizen journalism. Reading: Zappavigna, M. (2011). "Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter." New Media & Society, 13(5), 788-806. Tumasjan, A., Sprenger, T. O., Sandner, P. G. and Welpe, I. M. 2010. Election forecasts with Twitter: How 140 characters reflect the political landscape. Social Science Computer Review, 29(4), 402-418. Week 9: Enacting networked identities Lecture: The different kinds of identities we enact in social life how we participate in audiences and publics. This lecture will explore a number of identities seen in networked audiences (e.g. geek identities). Tutorials: In this tutorial we will explore the kinds of identities enacted in microblogging using a sample of tweets. You will discuss how solidarity is construed in these texts

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! Reading: Davis, K. (2012). Tensions of identity in a networked era: Young peoples perspectives on the risks and rewards of online self-expression. New Media & Society, 14(4), 634-651. Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication, 6(2), 181-201. Week 10: Microblogging, audiences and identity Lecture: How can we study particular identities? This lecture approaches this question in relation to microblogging, exploring how users enact different kinds of personae and rally around everyday experiences. We will use coffeetalk on Twitter as a case-study. Tutorials: In this tutorial we will continue our exploration of identity and microblogging audiences. We will consider hashtagging practices and the relationship between enacting a particular persona and being a member of a community. Reading: Oulasvirta, A., Lehtonen, E., Kurvinen, E. and Raento, M. (2010). Making the ordinary visible in microblogs. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 14 (3), 23749. Java A, Song X, Finin T, Tseng B (2007). Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In Proceedings of the joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD workshop (pp. 56-65), New York: ACM. Week 11: Guest lecture by Dr Collin Chua - Advertising and new media Lecture: This lecture looks at how contemporary advertising is coping with new media and the fragmentation, diversity and agency of audiences and consumers today. Tutorials: This week we will examine how the advertising and marketing industry attempts to make use of viral media and social media as part of a contemporary strategy to cope with and manage empowered consumers. Reading: Kaplan, A. M., and Haenlein, M. (2011). Two hearts in three-quarter time: How to waltz the social media/viral marketing dance. Business Horizons, 54, 253-263. Spurgeon, C. (2008). Advertising and the new media of mass conversation. In Advertising and New Media (pp.1-23), New York: Routledge. Week 12: Humour, identity and audience alignment "/!
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Lecture: Humour is an important device for construing audience alignment. This lecture explores the role of humour in enacting solidarity and subcultural identities, focusing on the Fail meme as a case study. Tutorials: In this tutorial we will dicuss the role of humour in enacting subcultural identities. You will consider how slang such as epic fail that may have once been associated with a particular subcultural identity has been reappropriated in social media use. Reading: Shifman, L. and M. Blondheim (2010). The medium is the joke: online humor about and by networked computers. New Media & Society 12(8), 1348-1367. Jensen, K. B. and R. Helles (2011). The internet as a cultural forum: Implications for research. New Media & Society 13(4), 517-533.

11. Resources for students

Required Readings All required readings are available electronically via the course Blackboard. Recommended Readings Ross, K. and Nightingale, V. (2003). Media and Audiences: New Perspectives, Maidenhead: Open University Press. It is also highly recommended you familiarise yourself with the resources and services the university library offers: http://www.library.unsw.edu.au/

12. Course evaluation and development

This is a new course that is the result of a Media Program Review and Faculty Restructure. This course will undergo continual development, via feedback process such as CATEI and collegial review. We therefore take your feedback very seriously.

13. Other information

Information on relevant Occupational Health and Safety policies and expectations as outlined at: http://www.hr.unsw.edu.au/ohswc/ohs/ohs_policies.html Equity and diversity: Those students who have a disability that requires some adjustment in their teaching or learning environment are encouraged to discuss their study needs with the course convener prior to, or at the commencement of, their course, or with the Equity Officer (Disability) in the Equity and Diversity Unit (9385 4734 or www.equity.unsw.edu.au/disabil.html). Issues to be discussed may ""!
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include access to materials, signers or note-takers, the provision of services and additional assessment arrangements. Early notification is essential to enable any necessary adjustments to be made. Student equity and diversity issues can be discussed via the Student Equity Officers (Disability) in the Student Equity and Diversity Unit (9385 4734). Further information for students with disabilities is available at: www.studentequity.unsw.edu.au/disabil.html

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