Communication Concepts

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Communication is the process of sharing, negotiating, and contesting meaning—a more-than-human practice deeply embedded in social issues, power structures, and everyday life that shapes both understanding and action.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• Core definition: Communication is the sharing of meaning, not merely transmission of information from sender to receiver.
• Beyond understanding: Communication involves negotiation and contestation; understanding does not require agreement, and dissent is part of the process.
• More-than-human scope: Communication extends beyond human actors to include AI tools, algorithms, non-human animals, and environmental impacts.
• Common confusion: The transmission model (sender → message → receiver) is useful but incomplete—it neglects audience agency, interactivity, and the blurred roles in digital contexts (e.g., a gamer or social media poster is simultaneously sender, receiver, and message).
• Why it matters: Communication challenges—climate change, pandemics, conflict—require strategic, clear, and ethical meaning-making; effective communicators recognize barriers and enable understanding across diverse contexts.

📡 From transmission to meaning-sharing

📡 Shannon's transmission model

The transmission model depicts communication as a flow of information from a source through a transmitter, across a signal (subject to noise), to a receiver and destination.

• Developed by Claude Shannon (1948), a mathematician interested in efficacy—getting the message to the right person accurately.
• Components: sender/source, message, receiver, destination, and noise (anything disrupting the signal).
• Metaphor: communication as a radio transmission.
• Historical context: created in the 1930s–40s during WWII, when radio and cryptography were vital; the model prioritized error-free delivery.

🔄 Limits of the transmission model today

• Neglects receiver agency: the model focuses on the sender's goal (accurate delivery) and doesn't account for what audiences do with messages.
• Interactive and networked contexts: in video games, social media, or collaborative platforms, users are simultaneously senders, receivers, and part of the message itself.
  • Example: A gamer firing a laser in Space Invaders or posting a selfie on social media cannot be neatly placed in the sender/receiver binary.
• Obscured sources: in today's media landscape, identifying the "sender" is often difficult—news stories may be attributed to journalists, editors, mastheads, or large corporations; AI-generated content blurs authorship further.
• Don't confuse: the model's simplicity is both its strength (clarity) and its weakness (it omits complexity).

🤝 Communication as sharing meaning

Communication is the sharing of meaning through information, ideas, and feelings.

• "Sharing" implies co-inhabiting a space of potential understanding, not one-way transmission.
• Meaning can be shared intentionally (strategic communication plans) or unintentionally (e.g., a student with their camera off in an online class may unintentionally signal disengagement).
• Sharing meaning takes many forms: body language, clothing, gestures, symbols, flowers, art, activism, emergency warnings.
• Example: An artist shares meaning abstractly to evoke emotion; an activist throws food at an artwork to provoke attention; emergency responders share life-saving information during disasters.

🔀 Negotiation, contestation, and dissent

🔀 Understanding vs. agreement

• Understanding is a desired outcome, not a guaranteed one—miscommunication and breakdown happen frequently.
• Barriers to understanding: technological failures, lack of access or skills, confusing or offensive messaging.
• Understanding does not equal agreement: audiences can comprehend a message and still disagree, unpack, rework, or speak out against it.
• As sociologist Niklas Luhmann wrote, "Communication can be used to indicate dissent. Strife can be sought."

⚖️ Meaning is contested

• Communication is not always smooth; it involves negotiation (working toward shared understanding) and contestation (challenging or resisting meanings).
• Effective communicators recognize potential barriers and ask: How can understanding be enabled?
• Don't confuse: seeking agreement with enabling understanding—the latter is the foundation, the former is one possible outcome.

🎤 Case study: Julia Gillard's misogyny speech

🎤 Context and content

• In 2012, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard (Australia's first female PM) delivered a 15-minute speech in parliament responding to an accusation of sexism.
• Gillard had faced constant media scrutiny, personalised attacks, and sexist language (called "witch" and "bitch") based on her gender, marital status, and appearance.
• Triggered by opposition leader Tony Abbott (who had been photographed in front of a "ditch the witch" sign), Gillard said: "I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever."

📊 Denotative and connotative meaning

• Denotation (straightforward meaning): Gillard expressed frustration with sexist attitudes of male politicians.
• Connotation (secondary meanings):
  • The parliamentary system is steeped in prejudice.
  • Prejudice against women should no longer be tolerated.
  • Female politicians have the power to speak out.
  • Parliament is a place to discuss gender politics.
  • Silence on gender inequality is no longer acceptable.
  • Gillard is empowered, not a victim.

🌊 Ripple effects and legacy

• The speech went viral, attracted global media attention, and prompted the Macquarie Dictionary to update its definition of "misogyny" from "hatred of women" to "entrenched prejudice against women."
• Over a decade later, the speech circulates on TikTok, is performed on stage, and has been turned into a song.
• Key insight: Acts of communication can intervene in events and become events themselves; they can challenge power structures and (re)construct reality.
• Messages can have an afterlife—their capacity to share meaning extends when people spread, discuss, recall, and remake them.

🌍 Who and where: communicators and contexts

🌍 Who communicates?

• Communicator as professional role: journalists, PR practitioners, filmmakers, social media creators.
• Communicator as everyday practice: anyone creating, connecting, or expressing themselves using media.
• Identifying the sender is not always straightforward:
  • A news story: journalist, editor, editorial team, masthead, or media company?
  • A Netflix drama: writer, showrunner, director, crew, production company, or Netflix itself?
• As media scholar W. James Potter notes, there is a "decoupling of messages from their senders"—it is often difficult or impossible to identify the sender and their intentions.

📍 Where does communication happen?

• Much communication today is mediated or mediatised—it takes place in media spaces facilitated by digital tools.
• Major commercial players (Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook) create interfaces that shape interaction with content and with each other; for them, communication is a business of sharing meaning.
• Communication is grounded in place: even virtual communication is rooted in embodied, emplaced experiences.
  • Example: During COVID-19, many worked/studied from home via Zoom. Scientist Gretchen Goldman appeared on CNN with a professional background but later revealed her makeshift desk and toy-strewn living room, sparking a trend of "being honest" about one's surroundings.
• Don't confuse: virtual spaces with placeless realms—communication does not occur outside the rhythms and details of emplaced life.

🤖 More-than-human communication

🤖 Beyond human communicators

• Communication is more than human—it includes but extends beyond human people.
• AI and algorithms as communicators:
  • In 2023, ChatGPT was given a byline in an Australian newspaper; Microsoft replaced journalists with AI software in 2020 (resulting in errors and ethical breaches).
  • The world's first human-robot press conference was held in Geneva (2023), with AI-powered robots answering journalists' questions.
  • Prompt engineering is now a communication practice; humans using AI are simultaneously users (receivers) and communicators (senders), collaborating with AI tools.
• Algorithms as audiences: content creators write for both human viewers and the non-human processes (algorithms) that sort, organize, and evaluate online content.

🐾 Non-human animals and nature

• Non-human animals communicate through sound, touch, visual signs, and chemical transfers—in ways both similar to and beyond human communication.
• Humans' sensory interactions with nature can be described as a type of meaning-sharing.
• Environmental impacts: digital communication practices have deep effects on the natural world (carbon emissions from data centers, electronic waste).

🌿 More-than-human world

• Cultural ecologist David Abram coined "more-than-human world" to describe the planet as including humankind and non-human kin.
• Communication is an emplaced, embodied practice that includes humans, non-human digital tools, and the impacts of mediated communication on the planet.

🧠 Critical thinking and communication concepts

🧠 What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking: a mindset where we take nothing for granted; everything is open to interpretation.

• It is a higher order of thinking involving inquiry, interpretation, and seeking evidence.
• As communication scholars, we take messages apart to discover what makes them work and their consequences: how people, places, and events are represented; how ideas move; how power is enacted; how common sense is formed and can be un-formed.

🔧 Communication concepts as tools

• Theory provides:
  • A framework for understanding communication.
  • A vocabulary for explaining and analyzing communication processes and products.
  • Conceptual tools for scholars and practitioners.
• Communication concepts are tools for sharing meaning in a complex world and for understanding how, why, and what happens when meaning is shared.
• This book invites a researcher's mindset: keep critical thinking switched on; ask not just "how can we do it better?" but also "what is happening here and why does it matter?"

🌐 Communication challenges today

• Climate change: David Attenborough (2020) stated "saving our planet is now a communications challenge"—a failure to act is often attributed to communication breakdown (inability to explain, make relevant, move audiences, deal with misinformation).
• COVID-19 pandemic: UN Secretary-General António Guterres said "good communication saves lives"—clear, accurate information was hampered by competing claims, falsities, and cultural barriers.
• Conflict and war: During the Israel-Hamas conflict, communication blackouts in Gaza had catastrophic impacts—individuals couldn't access critical information, aid agencies couldn't coordinate, media coverage was unreliable.
• Compounding factors: misinformation, polarization, speed of information flow, cluttered media landscape, distracted and time-poor audiences, information overload.

📚 Why this book matters

• Communication is both an object of academic scholarship and a practical endeavor undertaken in urgent, vital contexts.
• Four fundamental ideas:
  1. Communication is a process, not a thing.
  2. Communication is the process by which meaning is shared, negotiated, and contested.
  3. Communication shapes meaning and, in doing so, shapes action.
  4. Communication is deeply entangled with social issues, power, and everyday life.
• The book equips readers with thinking tools for understanding communication, meaning-making, identity, and storytelling—useful in both everyday and professional contexts.

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Collaboration is both an essential communication process and an increasingly vital skill in the digital age, where networked technologies enable collective intelligence and collaborative knowledge-building across boundaries.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• What collaboration involves: working with others to produce outputs and achieve shared goals, functioning as both a skill and a process.
• Collective intelligence: communities can pool resources and knowledge to achieve outcomes beyond individual limits, exemplified by platforms like Wikipedia.
• Digital transformation: digitization and networked communication enable collaboration across temporal, geographic, and cultural boundaries through virtual teams and tools.
• Common confusion: collaboration is not just a skill—it's also a structure, mindset, and attitude; people can work together without truly collaborating if trust or equality is absent.
• Key success factor: psychological safety (the shared belief that risks, ideas, and mistakes can be expressed without fear) is the most important element of effective collaboration.

🤝 Understanding collaboration fundamentals

🤝 What collaboration means

Collaboration involves working with others to produce outputs and/or achieve shared goals.

• The outcome is usually a physical product or measurable achievement (solving problems, making decisions).
• It's commonly identified as a transferable skill—developed in one setting and applied to others.
• Example: A student working on a group project develops collaboration skills beneficial to future professional practice.

🔄 Multiple dimensions of collaboration

Collaboration operates on several levels simultaneously:

Dimension	What it means	Why it matters
Skill	Something people do well or poorly	Can be developed and improved
Process	How interaction unfolds	Requires active participation
Structure	Framework supporting interaction	Without proper structure, collaboration won't happen
Mindset	Attitude toward shared work	Groups can work together non-collaboratively if they lack the right attitude

Don't confuse: Working in a group is not automatically collaboration—barriers like distrust, antagonism, misunderstanding, or inequality can prevent true collaboration even when people are working together.

⏰ Synchronous vs asynchronous collaboration

• Synchronous: happening in real time (e.g., videoconferencing, live meetings).
• Asynchronous: occurring at different times (e.g., email exchanges, shared documents edited separately).
• Both types are enabled by digital tools and can occur in virtual spaces.
• Digital technologies allow collaboration across temporal and geographic boundaries, making virtual teams increasingly common.

🌍 Intercultural communication in collaboration

Intercultural communication: the process through which people from different cultures create shared meanings together.

• Communication technology enables connection and collaboration across the globe.
• Increasingly, collaboration occurs across cultural boundaries.
• Effective collaboration requires intercultural communication skills as a key ingredient.
• Example: An organization with team members in different countries must navigate cultural differences to collaborate successfully.

🧠 Collective intelligence

🧠 The concept of collective intelligence

Pierre Lévy (1994) challenged the notion that intelligence is purely individual:

• As individuals, there are limits to our knowledge and expertise.
• As communities, we can pool resources and work toward common goals.
• The result: outputs or outcomes beyond individual limits.

Key insight: Collective intelligence doesn't diminish individual expertise—it requires individuals to develop their own voice and knowledge to contribute meaningfully.

🕰️ Temporal dimension of collective intelligence

• Knowledge is "accumulated and developed" through "long intergenerational chains of transmission."
• Collaboration occurs across temporal and generational boundaries, not just geographic ones.
• Example: Academic writers engage with ideas from past scholars while contributing to present conversations, placing themselves in dialogue with a scholarly community.

Don't confuse: Collective intelligence is not only future-focused—it involves inheriting and building upon wisdom from those who came before us.

📚 Wikipedia as collective intelligence in action

Wikipedia exemplifies collective intelligence:

• Created by a community of knowledge experts.
• "Freely editable content" written "collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers."
• "Authors, readers and editors exchange roles to further the dissemination of knowledge."
• Less a product than an "ongoing process by which its community pools information, debates what knowledge matters, and vets competing truth claims."

Why it works: Wikipedia has strict rules about sourcing facts to reliable sources and requires neutral point of view, making articles often "the best available introduction to a subject on the web."

Caution: The collaborative, fluid nature means information can change rapidly and be manipulated, requiring digital literacy to engage effectively.

🤖 Augmented collective intelligence

Emerging forms in the AI age:

• Augmented collective intelligence: networks of people collaborating with AI-powered machines.
• When you collaborate with AI (e.g., ChatGPT), you employ prompt engineering skills—crafting messages the AI can interpret effectively.
• Examples already part of everyday life: Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit, Bitcoin.
• May increasingly replace traditional top-down communication forms.

📱 Digital transformation of collaboration

📱 Mobile devices and collaborative capacity

The 2007 iPhone introduction was transformative:

• Combined phone, music player, and Internet communication tool.
• Enabled new forms of expression: emoticons, GIFs, memes enriching digital conversations.
• Mobile apps (Instagram, TikTok) reaching billions daily facilitate rapid connection and collaboration.

🌐 Democratization of information

Mobile devices revolutionized information access:

• News and information no longer limited to traditional media outlets.
• Available through mobile apps, podcasts, social media, online platforms.
• Individuals become active participants in shaping public discourse.
• Challenges traditional gatekeepers of information.
• Amplifies diverse voices and unique perspectives.

Example: The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag on Twitter and evolved into a global phenomenon, driving conversations about racial injustice through computer-mediated communications.

🏘️ Niche communities and crowdsourcing

Smart devices facilitate connection with like-minded individuals:

• Gives rise to niche communities and subcultures that might not otherwise exist.
• Crowdsourcing: a collaborative process where individuals contribute knowledge, skills, and resources to achieve a common goal.
• Platforms like Reddit, Discord, GitHub serve as central hubs for collaborative efforts.

Example: The GameStop stock surge (2021) was driven by individual investors from Reddit's WallStreetBets forum who organized collectively, symbolizing collective intelligence and decentralized decision-making.

🎓 Collaborative knowledge-building

🎓 Knowledge as collaborative construction

Collaborative knowledge-building: knowledge is discursively and collaboratively constructed through acts of communication.

• Knowledge is a "product of social communication."
• More than knowledge sharing—participants engage in "constructing, refining, and transforming knowledge."
• When we communicate, we are not just sharing something—we are collaboratively transforming meaning and knowledge.

🐦 Real-world example: Twitter and natural disasters

Lacassin and co-authors (2020) studied earthquake-related events in Indonesia and the Indian Ocean (2018):

• Scientists and citizens rapidly co-built knowledge through Twitter threads.
• Exchanges between seismologists and specialists helped the knowledge community understand event location, size, origin, and after-effects.
• Journalists quoted these threads, interacting with scientists to fact-check and ensure accuracy.

Key insight: Where one message could misinform, collaborative communication allows information to be confirmed, checked, refuted, developed, and consensus to be built.

📖 Open educational resources (OER)

Open educational resources: educational resources openly available for use by educators and students, without royalties or license fees, incorporating licenses that facilitate reuse and adaptation.

• The ability to remix or adapt content enables collaboration.
• "Sharing materials that others can adapt and use recognizes the value inherent in team work and the improvements in thinking that will emerge from such collaboration."
• Open sharing "fosters creativity, innovation and collaboration, thereby enabling progress in addressing global challenges, especially when it facilitates connections between people with diverse perspectives."

🔑 Keys to successful collaboration

🔑 Psychological safety as foundation

Google's Project Aristotle (2012-2014) studied real teams to discover the secret ingredients of perfect teams:

Psychological safety: a "shared belief" that risks can be taken, ideas expressed, and mistakes made without fear of consequences.

• Identified as the most important element of successful collaboration.
• Other key ingredients: sense of shared meaning and impact, dependability, structure and clarity.

🌱 Conditions that support collaboration

What enables good collaboration:

• Honest communication and empathy (relational qualities).
• Good time management (work habits).
• Trust and equality (structural conditions).
• Shared goals and sense of impact.

Challenge: Western cultures often value individual achievement more highly than collective achievement, making people nervous about group projects—yet collaborative work is increasingly common across all sectors.

🛠️ Digital tools enabling collaboration

• Email, social media, videoconferencing enable real-time and asynchronous collaboration.
• Augmented or virtual reality expanding collaborative possibilities.
• Culture of speed: information can be shared quickly, even instantly.

Critical question: What expectations and problems does this culture of speed create? How does it impact collaborative production of culture, information, and knowledge?

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Audiences are active participants in communication who decode messages in diverse ways, and understanding their behaviors, practices, and identities is essential for effective communication in today's fragmented digital media landscape.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• Audiences as active decoders: Audiences don't passively receive messages; they interpret, negotiate, and sometimes resist intended meanings based on their identities and contexts.
• From passive receivers to "produsers": The digital age has blurred boundaries between producers and consumers, with audiences now creating, sharing, and remixing content.
• Measurement and reach: Professional communicators use various tools (analytics, social listening, audience research) to understand and engage dispersed audiences in an attention economy.
• Common confusion—mass vs. fragmented audiences: Today's audiences are distributed across platforms and devices rather than gathered as a "mass," requiring personalized rather than broadcast approaches.
• Change as constant: Audience behaviors evolve continuously with technology, requiring communicators to adapt their strategies and avoid assumptions.

📜 Historical perspectives on audience research

📜 The tug-of-war between media power and audience agency

Media theorist Sonia Livingstone identifies a conceptual tension in audience studies:

• Early 20th century: Audiences viewed as vulnerable to propaganda and media manipulation; research focused on protecting audiences from powerful media forces.
• Late 20th century: Shift toward recognizing audiences as active users who respond to and use media in their own ways.
• Today: Balance has shifted back toward concerns about media power, driven by worries about misinformation, big tech consolidation, and big data surveillance.

Don't confuse: The focus on media power today with a return to viewing audiences as purely passive—contemporary research still recognizes audience agency, but examines it within structures of algorithmic control and corporate ownership.

🎯 Why audiences matter to everyone

Audiences: the people with whom meaning is shared in communication processes, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

• Nearly everyone is interested in audiences because audiences matter to stakeholders across fields: advertisers, marketers, campaigners, content creators, academics.
• Audiences are "a site of struggle" over what constitutes effective communication.
• The meaning of "audience" has been contested throughout history by diverse groups with competing agendas.

🎧 Listening and responsiveness

🎧 Josephine Baker's "Be a good listener" (1907)

Josephine Turck Baker's book The Art of Conversation: 12 Golden Rules emphasized audience attentiveness over a century ago.

Rule Number 8: "Be a good listener"

• An artful conversationalist doesn't just speak but allows others to speak.
• Effective face-to-face communication involves responsiveness to listeners' cues.
• Communicators should adjust tone and subject based on audience reactions.

Why this matters: Baker's advice reveals that centralizing the audience is not new—good communicators have always needed to understand and respond to their listeners.

🔄 Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication

Type	Characteristics	Audience knowledge
Synchronous	Real-time (e.g., face-to-face conversation, Zoom)	Immediate feedback allows adjustment in the moment
Asynchronous	Time gap between sender and receiver (e.g., social media posts, recorded content)	Capacity to know audience is diminished; requires imagination and research

The gap problem: Asynchronous communication creates a gap between sender and receiver. Professional communicators must "leap across this gap" by gathering information about audiences.

👂 Social listening in the digital age

Social listening: the analysis of communication patterns and trends to develop knowledge that benefits a brand, client, or stakeholder.

• The term "listening" is used figuratively—researchers analyze digital traces and conversations.
• Acknowledges that audiences are communicators themselves whose interactions are worth attending to.
• Recalls Baker's emphasis on listening, but applied to digital contexts.

🔓 Encoding and decoding

🔓 Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model (1973)

Stuart Hall, a Jamaican cultural studies scholar, revolutionized audience studies by showing audiences as active meaning-makers.

The model:

• Encoding: Messages are made with intended meanings; communicators attempt to fix meaning and limit audience responses.
• Decoding: Audiences interpret messages differently based on identity, life experiences, and social/cultural contexts.

Reading positions audiences adopt:

• Agree with intended meaning (preferred reading)
• Oppose or contest it (oppositional reading)
• Rework or negotiate it (negotiated reading)

Key insight: Meaning is not fixed in the message itself but emerges through negotiation—sometimes struggle—between texts, audiences, and communicators.

🎨 "The Dress" phenomenon (2015)

A viral photograph demonstrated that perception itself involves active decoding:

• Some viewers saw the dress as blue and black; others saw white and gold.
• Neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch explained this as the brain making different assumptions about lighting conditions.
• Lesson: Humans mistakenly assume others see the world the same way they do; audiences actively construct meaning even from seemingly objective content.

Example: Similar sonic memes like "Yanny/Laurel" demonstrate the same principle with audio.

💻 Decoding in digital contexts

Researchers have extended Hall's model to digital practices:

Modding (Adrienne Shaw, 2017):

• Creating modifications to digital games can be understood as a resistant reading.
• Players actively (re)create meaning through their modifications.

Strategic encoding by teenagers (danah boyd, 2014):

• Young people encode social media messages knowing their intended audience has cultural knowledge to decode them, while others do not.
• This protects privacy even in public virtual spaces.

Produsers (Axel Bruns, 2008):

Produsers: people who both produce and consume media content.

• The boundary between encoding and decoding has blurred in the digital age.
• Audiences occupy hybrid positions as both creators and consumers.
• Recalls the interchange of roles in conversation that Baker described.

📊 Defining and measuring audiences

📊 Imagining the unknowable

John Hartley defines audience as "a means by which an unknowable group can be imagined."

The challenge:

• Identifying a target audience often means homogenizing it—ignoring differences within the group.
• Skilled communicators must understand diverse audiences: considering accessibility needs, cultural inclusivity, and varied consumption patterns.

Example: Netflix creators must consider audiences who binge-watch vs. those who watch sporadically; who watch at home vs. while commuting; who watch immediately vs. months later.

🔬 Audience research methods and tools

Traditional measurement tools:

• Box office figures (cinema ticket revenue)
• Test screenings with focus groups
• Ratings and reviews

Digital measurement tools:

• View counts and watch time
• User location and navigation patterns (where they go after viewing)
• Likes, shares, comments
• Eye-tracking (where attention is placed)
• Sentiment analysis (positive/negative reception)

Academic research methods:

• Interviews, focus groups, surveys
• Reception analysis: studying how audiences respond to and interpret media texts
• Netnography: studying online communities
• Autoethnography: studying one's own position and experiences within culture

Why research matters: It helps communicators avoid making assumptions and instead uncover evidence about who audiences are and what they do.

📡 Reach and attention

Audience reach: the number of people (or percentage of target audience) exposed to a message.

Key distinctions:

• Reach: number of unique users exposed to content
• Impressions: total number of times content is viewed (including multiple views by same user)
• Both measure size and visibility, but not quality of interaction

The attention economy:

Attention economy: a context in which attention itself is a scarce and valuable commodity that is bought and sold.

Characteristics:

• Digital culture offers abundant information but people have limited attention
• Communicators compete for attention
• Emphasis on maximizing exposure and increasing reach
• Attention has always been commodified (radio, TV, newspapers sold audience attention to advertisers), but the term highlights this dynamic in digital contexts

🧩 Fragmentation

Fragmentation: the proliferation of media leading to more choice for consumers and erosion of the mass audience.

• Audiences are "distributed over many different channels in no fixed pattern" (Denis McQuail)
• Content consumption has become more personalized
• Our own attention may be fragmented across multiple texts and platforms (multi-screening)

Surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff, 2015):

• Online behaviors are turned into data that is commodified, captured, and sold
• Audiences have always been socially constructed by media industries, but now also constructed by big data

🔄 Audiences and change

🔄 Evolving behaviors

Australian audience behavior changes (2016-2022):

2016 findings:

• 76% of Australians engaged in multi-screening (using multiple devices simultaneously)
• 33% used three or more devices at once (triple-screening)

2022 findings (ACMA):

• 95% used communication or social media websites/apps
• 77% of young Australians (18-24) used four or more social media tools weekly
• 43% of young Australians used TikTok
• Average 16.1 hours per week watching video content
• 81% accessed news from online sources

Significance:

• Multi-screening reshapes how communication practices are embedded in everyday life
• Mobile devices allow media consumption outside fixed spaces
• Media and non-media practices are woven together in complex ways

Example: Watching TV while commenting on social media; listening to podcasts while jogging; playing augmented reality games while walking.

🤔 "The people formerly known as the audience"

Media critic Jay Rosen (2006) argued the term "audience" no longer captures what media consumers do:

• Consumption has evolved beyond passive viewing
• Audiences now make, share, play, recreate, and speak back
• Professional communicators engage audiences in increasingly dialogic ways
• Boundary between professional and amateur communicators is blurring

However: The term "audience" still has currency and encompasses a range of practices today.

New reality: Those traditionally thought of as "audiences" must now think about other audiences for their own content (likes on Facebook, professional brand on LinkedIn). Imagining an audience is now an everyday practice, not just for professional communicators.

📰 News audiences as case study

📰 Why study news audiences

• Most people are news consumers in some form (even news avoidance is a practice worth investigating)
• News has a long history, allowing observation of changes over time
• News industry faces major problems related to audiences: declining trust, polarization, misinformation, erosion of mainstream audiences

The "audience turn" in journalism (Irene Costera Meijer, 2020):

• Shift from viewing audiences as problematic to recognizing them as fundamental to journalism's democratic role
• Audience expectations and interactions are now central to journalism studies and practice
• Audiences are no longer a vague public to whom news is "served"

📱 Algorithmic news consumption (case study by Deni Stanwix)

What it is:

Algorithmic news consumption: consumption of news content that has been generated or distributed automatically through algorithms.

How it works:

• Users "like" and "follow" accounts to curate their newsfeeds
• Algorithms infer interest by tracking behavior over time
• Visibility depends on user actions, friends' actions, content publishers, and platform algorithms

Benefits:

• Users feel a sense of control over content they see
• Can attract preferred content to newsfeed
• Built-in features allow influence (liking, following, hiding, reporting)

Risks:

• May decrease engagement with long-form journalism
• Users place trust in algorithms to provide simplified content
• Algorithm categorization can affect exposure beyond self-reported interest
• Platform business strategies change (e.g., Facebook prioritizing friends/family over news in 2018)
• "Set and forget" approach may decrease conscious engagement

Key difference from traditional media:

• Traditional media is curated by editors with clear beginning, middle, end
• Algorithms deliver information to encourage continued platform engagement
• Social media doesn't curate content the same way news publishers do

🌍 Transformative journey as news consumer (case study by Harshita Pant)

Childhood pattern:

• Daily newspaper reading in small Indian town
• Reading developed knowledge, communication skills, vocabulary
• News consumption shaped confident identity

Shift during journalism education:

• Learned about journalism ethics, values, press freedom
• Became aware of media bias and influence rather than pure information
• Witnessed misrepresentation during university incident involving anti-India slogans

Working in newsroom:

• Boundaries between work and personal life blurred
• Shifted from passive receiver to active consumer and producer
• Experienced information overload from constant social media access

Consequences of overload:

• Skimming content without verifying accuracy
• Trust issues with information
• Volume exceeded attention limits (news fatigue)
• Negative news felt overwhelming
• Interest in news waned

Professional challenges:

• Observed media biases and selective coverage
• Organization avoided news critical of ruling government
• Ethical lapses: misinformation, disinformation, partial reporting
• Personal political convictions conflicted with organization's stance
• Struggled with dual identities (work vs. authentic self)

Solution—subscription model: Switched to Newslaundry (India's first subscription-driven news website) in 2020

Benefits of subscription approach:

1. Eliminated information overload
2. Access to high-quality content
3. Heightened sense of trust
4. Full control over news consumption
5. Better ability to distinguish authentic from fake news

🎓 Key takeaways

🎓 What news consumption reveals about audiences generally

• Audience practices are unique to individuals and embedded in everyday life
• However, trends can be observed—individuals share practices, motivations, experiences with other audience members
• Should never make assumptions about audiences, what they do, why they do it, or how media affects them
• Can avoid assumptions by collecting evidence: reflecting on own experiences, interviewing, surveying, or observing others

🎓 The complexity of audience studies

• Audiences are fascinating because they are "the human part of communication"—interesting but also volatile, challenging, complex
• The field is "fraught with tension and riddled with complexities"
• Many voices and perspectives converge because audiences matter to nearly everyone
• Understanding audiences requires untangling this complexity at the intersection of communication theory and practice

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Storytelling is a fundamental communication practice that organizes meaning through narrative elements, engages audiences more effectively than information alone, and shapes worldviews through the "stories we live by."

📌 Key points (3–5)

• Core story elements: Stories contain characters we care about, causally linked events forming a plot, disruption of equilibrium, and meaningful endings that provide resolution.
• Storytelling vs. information: Facts alone are insufficient for effective communication; wrapping information in narrative form makes messages more compelling, shareable, and memorable.
• Stories as sense-making tools: Narratives organize meaning according to particular worldviews and "root metaphors" that shape how we understand reality and power relations.
• Visual storytelling through semiotics: Images tell stories through signs (signifiers and signifieds), visual metaphors, composition, and codes—anything that communicates meaning is a sign.
• Common confusion: Storytelling is not just entertainment or a simple technique everyone knows; it's a craft requiring skill and critical awareness of how narratives construct and reinforce ideologies.

📖 What makes a story

🎭 Character and care

Story elements: the components of which stories are composed, including actors, objects, actions, states, and events.

• Most stories center on a human or non-human character.
• The "magic ingredient" is care—audiences must care about the character's experiences, whether through curiosity, empathy, admiration, or identification.
• This emotional investment binds audiences to the unfolding narrative events.
• Example: A fairytale protagonist facing challenges keeps readers engaged because we care what happens to them.

🔗 Plot and causation

• Events in stories are linked rather than random, connected through cause and effect.
• One event causes another, forming a coherent plot structure.
• Example: In Where the Wild Things Are, Max misbehaves → gets sent to bed → travels to the land of wild things (each event causes the next).

🌀 Disruption and resolution

• Stories typically begin with disruption of equilibrium—something changes the character's ordinary circumstances.
• This is the "call to adventure" that moves the character from their normal world.
• Stories end meaningfully with resolution, not just fizzling out.
• Endings may include twists, punchlines, or goal achievement that brings narrative balance.

🎬 Modern narrative complexity

📺 Transmedia and complexity

• Narrative complexity: contemporary storytelling features intricate plotlines across multiple episodes, large casts, and sophisticated story structures.
• Audiences can track detailed plots without cliff-hangers; complexity itself provides engagement.
• Transmedia storytelling: systematic dispersal of narrative elements across multiple media platforms.
• Example: Franchises like Star Wars create vast storyworlds with hundreds of characters across films, shows, games, and books.

🎯 Entertainment and pleasure

• Stories elicit pleasure beyond what information alone provides.
• Compelling narratives attract and hold attention, making them difficult to disengage from.
• Entertainment doesn't require happiness or light content—dark, troubling stories can still be entertaining through character connection and vicarious experience.
• The transaction: audiences give attention in return for narrative pleasure.

🛠️ Storytelling as communication strategy

💼 Beyond entertainment contexts

• Storytelling matters for all communicators, not just novelists or screenwriters.
• Scientists, journalists, activists, advertisers, and professionals use narrative techniques to share information effectively.
• Example: A scientist explaining discoveries becomes more effective when employing storytelling to become "a character we care about, to whom interesting things happen."

🌊 Viral content and vessels

• Stories function as vessels in which information travels.
• Narratives grab attention and engage emotionally, making people more likely to share content.
• Spreadable content wraps information in narrative form.
• Example: Advertising campaigns like Qantas "Feels Like Home" tell family reunion stories rather than listing airline features.

⚠️ Not just a simple technique

• Knowing storytelling is important differs from knowing how to create effective narratives.
• Storytelling is a craft requiring skill, not something everyone automatically does well.
• The term is sometimes misused interchangeably with "communication" without deeper understanding.

🧠 Stories as worldview construction

📊 Data journalism example

• Data journalism: using datasets to find, generate, or evidence news stories.
• Data itself is not the story—journalists look for patterns and combine data with human faces.
• Critical awareness needed: data is "entangled with politics and culture, money and power," not neutral.
• Journalists must question what ideologies are "baked into" the data.

🌍 Stories we live by

Stories we live by: mental models existing "behind and between the lines" of texts that influence behavior and normalize particular ways of thinking.

• These are sense-making narratives that quietly shape worldviews.
• Not obviously stories—they require effort to recognize and question.
• Example: The Jungle Book contains the "story we live by" that humans are superior to non-human animals, with real-world consequences for how humans treat animals.
• Root metaphors: patterns of meaning that constitute "the roots of human knowledge" and shape common-sense perceptions.

⚖️ Narrative power and social change

• Narrative power analysis: breaking down stories to reveal their connection to power relations.
• To create social change, communicators must understand the histories and institutions that shape culture and collective meaning-making.
• Storytelling is communal and multidirectional—people respond, contest, mash up, and share their own stories.
• "Controlling the narrative" relates to power—understanding how stories work enables greater control over surrounding narratives.

🔍 Visual storytelling and semiotics

🪧 Signs as building blocks

Sign: a unit of meaning; all stories are organized collections of signs.

• Signifier: the form of the sign (what we perceive—letters, images, sounds, colors, gestures).
• Signified: the meaning attached to the sign (the concept represented).
• Example: The word TREE (signifier) represents the concept of a tree (signified).
• Anything that communicates meaning is a sign: words, images, sounds, colors, gestures, movements.

🎨 Color as semiotic example

• Colors are signifiers with multiple attached signifieds.
• Communicators use color as visual shorthand to activate particular meanings quickly.
• Code: a set of shared understandings about how signs are used.
• Don't confuse: Meaning is not fixed or universal—red signifies danger in some cultures but not everywhere.

🖼️ How images tell stories

Semiotics: the science of signs and how meaning is made through sign systems.

• Images are collections of signs that tell stories through content (what's in the image) and composition (how it's arranged).
• Visual metaphor: communicating an idea by using a seemingly unrelated image (e.g., an empty room as metaphor for loneliness).
• Anchorage: written captions limit or "anchor" the range of potential meanings in an image.
• Example: Placing a celebrity next to a brand in an advertisement creates metaphoric transfer of the celebrity's qualities to the brand.

👁️ Reading the room

• Literally: determining who uses a space by deciphering visual signs in an image.
• Idiomatically: understanding your audience by interpreting subtle cues.
• Both are semiotic exercises—picking up on signifiers in posture, body language, facial expressions, silence, energy shifts.
• Semiotic analysis is not just academic theory but an everyday communication practice.

🐊 Case study: Animals in Philippine media

🦅 Three anthropomorphized examples

The case study examines how anthropomorphism (ascribing human characteristics to non-human entities) shapes meaning in Philippine media through three animals:

Animal	What it signifies	Media impact
Saltwater Crocodile	Political corruption ("buwaya")	Challenges conservation; editorial cartoons critique politicians
Whale Shark (Butanding)	Cultural identity, tourism	Social media portrays as "friendly giants"; raises exploitation concerns
Philippine Eagle	National pride, conservation	Symbol of resilience; anthropomorphism may diminish perception of fragility

🔬 Semiotic analysis reveals

• Animals become representations through complex semiotic interactions in media.
• Media platforms shape evolving meanings that influence public perception, policy, and conservation.
• Anthropomorphism can blur boundaries between humans and wild animals, leading to unsafe interactions or exploitation.
• Need for critical examination of media's impact and responsible practices.

💡 Practical applications

✅ Key communication strategies

• Use narrative patterns: Apply conflict, suspense, resolution, and causal connections to make ideas compelling.
• Visual storytelling tools: Employ visual metaphors, composition techniques, and anchoring captions.
• Semiotic awareness: Break messages into signs; take control of meaning-building.
• Facts need narrative vessels: Share histories, anecdotes, and scenes—not just information.
• Find the protagonist: Put a human face on abstract issues; look for "unlikely characters" rather than heroes.
• Data requires interpretation: Look for patterns; don't let data speak for itself.
• Question deeper narratives: Consider the underlying "stories we live by" that shape how people feel about your topic.

🎯 The heart of every story

The most important principle: a good story has at its heart a character, who we care about, to whom interesting things happen.

No matter the communication context, anchor messages in character experiences—return to "the human heart" of any issue rather than covering it with policy, technology, or abstract concepts.

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Framing is the strategic practice of selecting and emphasizing certain details while omitting others in communication, which shapes meaning and has real-world social consequences.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• What framing is: the choices communicators make about what to include, exclude, and how to express messages, which create meaning regardless of whether those choices are conscious.
• How framing works: by making certain information more salient (noticeable/memorable) while obscuring other aspects, framing influences how audiences interpret events, issues, or people.
• Strategic vs unconscious framing: professionals (journalists, PR practitioners, influencers) may frame strategically for specific outcomes, but all communicators frame through their choices, even unintentionally.
• Common confusion: framing is not just about "spin" or deliberate manipulation—every communication choice frames meaning, from email tone to camera angles.
• Why it matters: framing shapes social norms, reinforces or challenges ideologies, and can perpetuate inequalities or drive social change through reframing.

🎯 The mechanics of framing

🎯 What communicators choose

Every communication involves decisions about:

• What details to include or leave out
• Language and word choice
• Tone and mode of address
• Visual composition (for images/video)
• Timing and context

These choices are unavoidable—even seemingly neutral decisions shape meaning.

Example: Writing an email to a colleague involves choices about formality, length, timing, and details. Using hot pink text or sending from a personal account creates different meanings than standard formatting from a work account.

🔍 Salience—what stands out

Salience: the quality of being noticeable or memorable to audiences.

• Framing makes certain aspects of a message "jump out" while others recede into the background.
• What is made salient influences how audiences understand and remember the message.
• The excerpt emphasizes that salience is created through communicator choices, not inherent in the information itself.

📰 Journalism example: homelessness coverage

A journalist reporting on homelessness makes choices that frame the issue:

Source selection matters:

• Interviewing only experts/police vs. people experiencing homelessness creates different frames
• Omitting voices of those affected positions them as "other" or voiceless

Language choices matter:

• Words like "beggar" or "vagrant" carry negative connotations
• Investigative approaches exploring systemic issues (mental health, policy failures) illuminate complexity differently

Professional pressures shape framing:

• Deadlines, editor advice, image availability, and newsworthiness judgments all influence choices
• Even unintentional choices shape how the issue is defined and who is seen as responsible

Don't confuse: The journalist may not be deliberately trying to frame homelessness negatively—professional constraints and habits shape framing even without conscious intent.

🎨 Strategic framing in professional contexts

🎨 Public relations and influencers

PR practitioners frame strategically to achieve planned outcomes:

• Creating or repairing brand identity
• Shaping public responses to issues
• Constructing meaning to serve organizational goals

Social media influencers frame to influence audiences:

• Combining verbal and visual elements strategically
• Making certain message parts prominent
• Deliberately omitting details to enhance influence
• Framing themselves and their lifestyles (e.g., as "superwomen")

🔄 Reframing for social change

Reframing challenges dominant ways of thinking about issues.

Example: Taryn Brumfitt (body positivity)

• Used a "reverse before and after" image on social media
• Labeled her post-pregnancy body as ideal, representing self-acceptance
• Subverted conventions of transformation narratives
• Challenged cultural narratives about "perfect" bodies

Example: Dylan Alcott's Shift 20

• Addresses disability representation in advertising
• Nearly 20% of Australians have disabilities, but only 1% of ads feature them
• Aims to shift perceptions of disability through increased representation
• Seeks to create real-world change through changing media representations

Key insight: Communicators don't just share meaning—they shape it, often with real-world impacts.

🧠 Why meaning matters

🧠 Social constructionism perspective

Social constructionism: a theoretical approach exploring the social constructs through which we collectively understand the world.

• Communication concepts themselves are social constructs
• Media are systems of representation through which social norms are established or challenged
• Meanings circulated through media have social consequences
• As communication contexts become more complex, meanings and their consequences become more important to investigate

🔬 Analysis as a tool

Communication research dismantles processes to expose representations:

• Framing analysis: how issues are packaged for interpretation
• Discourse analysis: how language shapes meaning
• Semiotics: how signs and symbols create meaning
• Political economy: how economic forces shape meaning and power

Purpose: Understanding how meanings are made reveals who those meanings serve and enables better, more ethical communication.

📚 Case study applications

📚 Racialised framing of Meghan Markle

The excerpt includes a case study showing how framing can perpetuate racial stereotypes:

Contrasting headlines about Markle vs. Kate Middleton on identical topics (flowers, pregnancy, avocados) reveal different framing:

• Middleton's actions framed positively or neutrally
• Markle's identical actions framed as dangerous, vain, or problematic

Language patterns:

• Use of words associated with criminality and violence for Markle
• "Angry Black Woman Trope" positioning Black women as threats
• Timing during heightened racial tensions amplified impact

Real-world consequences:

• Reinforces racist stereotypes affecting all Black women
• Links to poorer outcomes in employment, health, maternal care
• Active death threats against Markle and her children

Don't confuse: This isn't just about celebrity gossip—racialised framing has serious consequences for minoritized people beyond the individual being covered.

📚 Women in sport representation

The excerpt includes analysis of how media framing diminishes women's sport:

Language patterns identified:

• Female athletes called "girls" or by first names (infantilization)
• Gender marking ("great women's tennis player" vs. "great tennis player")
• Phrases like "anything can happen in women's sport" implying inconsistency

Coverage disparities:

• Women's sport receives only 9% of combined media coverage despite high participation
• Male sports get prime positioning (91.8% of newspaper back pages)
• Better production values and longer stories for men's sports

Visual framing:

• Women shown as "passive glamorous models" not "active strong athletes"
• Camera angles emphasizing appearance over athleticism
• Inconsistent programming makes audience-building difficult

Impact: Framing affects public perception of importance and seriousness of women's athletic achievements.

📚 Semiology of Paris protests

The excerpt includes analysis of protest imagery as a system of signs:

Historical references as signs:

• Effigies of Macron beheaded (referencing Louis XVI)
• Protests at Place de la Concorde (execution site)
• Fire as a recurring symbol

Myth and naturalisation:

• Repeated images and phrases become "naturalised"
• Protest language rooted in shared cultural history
• Signs elevate to myth when accepted as universal

Key insight: Protest communication relies on shared cultural codes—understanding what signs signify requires cultural knowledge and historical context.

⚠️ Ethical implications

⚠️ Responsibility of communicators

• All choices have consequences, whether conscious or not
• Framing can reinforce inequalities or challenge power structures
• Professional communicators have particular responsibility given their reach

⚠️ Responsibility of audiences

• Digital consumers participate in spreading frames through sharing
• Racially-coded imagery can justify vitriol that audiences perceive as moral
• Critical media literacy helps audiences recognize framing at work

⚠️ Potential for harm

The excerpt emphasizes that framing can:

• Perpetuate injustices like racism and sexism
• Affect real-world outcomes (employment, safety, health)
• Normalize stereotypes with tragic consequences
• Shape who is seen as worthy, trustworthy, or important

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Identity is both an authentic sense of self and a constructed performance shaped through communication, media consumption, digital practices, and social interactions, influencing how we present ourselves and how others perceive us.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• Identity as construction and performance: Identity is not fixed but built through interactions with people, institutions, media, and culture, and performed differently depending on context.
• Multiple dimensions: Identity encompasses demographic factors (age, gender, race, religion, occupation) that intersect and influence how we are treated in society.
• Digital and generational aspects: Digital technologies and generational labels (millennials, Gen Z) shape identity formation and expression, particularly through social media.
• Common confusion: Authentic self vs. performed self—the "front stage" and "back stage" distinction shows identity is both genuine and contextual, not either/or.
• Branding and persona: Identity involves strategic presentation similar to commercial branding, where we curate how we appear to others while maintaining consistency.

🎭 Identity as performance and construction

🎭 Goffman's theatrical metaphor

Identity performance: The presentation of self through "front stage" (public-facing) and "back stage" (private) behaviors.

• Front stage: how we act when others are watching or during social interactions
• Back stage: private preparation and authentic moments when not performing for others
• We are the roles we play—our performances constitute our selves
• Example: An organization might present differently in public meetings (front stage) than in internal planning sessions (back stage)

🧩 Identity as ingredients

• Identity comprises multiple components that intersect: age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, occupation, interests, cultural tastes
• These factors don't exist in isolation—they overlap and interact
• Intersectionality: overlapping identity aspects can contribute to marginalization or privilege
• Don't confuse: Identity isn't just a list of traits; it's how these elements combine and interact within power systems

🔄 Identity through interaction

• We learn about and build identities through interactions with:
  • Other people
  • Institutions and cultural groups
  • Media and popular culture
• Identity changes depending on context and audience
• Example: A viewpoint might be expressed differently in professional settings versus among close friends

🏷️ Branding, persona, and public identity

🏷️ Commercial branding principles

Branding: Creating or manufacturing a sense of difference by attaching meanings through semiotic processes.

• Brands work through association—borrowing cultural meaning from other things
• Brand identity can be changed through rebranding: redefining associations to reach new audiences or recover from problems
• Example: An organization repositioning itself to appeal to younger audiences by changing visual identity and messaging

👤 Personal persona

Persona: The presentation of self, involving public displays and mediated constructions of identity.

• Greater aspects of life now involve public, mediated displays
• Persona functions like an automated script we assemble to interact with the world
• Includes digital traces: email, social media accounts, online profiles
• Identity sometimes "happens to us"—moments out of our control (e.g., being tagged by others)
• Don't confuse: Persona isn't fake; it's the strategic presentation of genuine aspects of self

⭐ Celebrity and parasocial relationships

Parasocial relations: Imagined, one-way relationships with celebrities or public figures.

• Celebrities cultivate and manage consistent identities across appearances
• Celebrity endorsement lends identity to commercial brands
• The persona audiences interact with is carefully constructed
• Social media can transcend the imagined aspect, allowing actual interaction
• Example: A receiver following a public figure on social media may feel connected, though the relationship remains asymmetrical

💻 Digital and generational identities

💻 Digital natives and social natives

• Digital natives: people born 1981-1996 (millennials) who grew up with digital technology
• Social natives: people born 1997-2012 (Gen Z) who grew up with social media
• Term popularized to describe "native speakers" of digital language versus "digital immigrants"

⚠️ Problems with the digital native concept

• Assumes all young people have equal digital competencies—ignores the digital divide
• Geographic location, cultural background, education, and family environment affect digital proficiency
• Age doesn't automatically confer digital skills or knowledge
• Don't confuse: Growing up with technology doesn't mean understanding how to use it effectively or critically

🔍 Questions about digital identity

Key considerations for understanding digital identity:

• Does social media help express authentic selves or enable cultural participation?
• Is there a difference between online and offline identities, or do they blend?
• Do digital technologies disrupt or enable identity formation?
• How do private and public selves intersect in digital spaces?
• Who owns information about our identities (companies, platforms)?

📊 Data-driven identity

• Platforms like Spotify create identity packages based on user behavior
• "Spotify Wrapped" formulates and re-presents users' identities through listening data
• Serves multiple purposes: user service, marketing, self-branding opportunity
• Reveals tangled relationships between identity, communication, digital culture, fan practices, and commercial brands
• Example: A sender's musical taste becomes both personal identity marker and marketable data

🌟 Fandom and cultural identity

🌟 Fan practices as identity

Fandom: Active and creative responses to texts, involving both individual expression and community membership.

• Fandom is not just feeling—it's a form of expression
• Often involves collective identity: relationship with cultural object and other fans
• Can include creating fan works, participating in communities, defending against criticism
• Example: A viewpoint shared within a fan community creates belonging and collective identity

🎬 Media consumption and identity formation

• Communication, media, and popular culture play roles in identity formation
• Choices about what to consume and how to make meaning are crucial
• Media tools help communicate, curate, and transform identity aspects
• Often performed in public-facing ways
• Cultural tastes contribute to identity but also help others identify us

🔄 Active vs. passive fandom

Two types of fan engagement:

• Active fans: consume and produce (fanart, fansites, fan projects, trading)
• Passive fans: primarily consume, following news and updates as daily routine
• Both types form community membership and collective identity
• Don't confuse: Passive fandom isn't less legitimate—it's a different mode of engagement

🤝 Intersectionality and social positioning

🤝 What intersectionality means

Intersectionality: The interaction between identity factors (gender, race, etc.) and their contribution to social inequality, including intricacies within individual factors.

• Not just about multiple identities—about how they interact within power systems
• Identity aspects overlap and affect social treatment
• Media shapes narratives around identity, assigning predetermined social status
• Example: A sender's mixed heritage may be authenticated or invalidated depending on audience perception

🎭 Authenticity and belonging challenges

• Physical features may allow choosing which identity to present
• Hiding aspects of identity can sacrifice belonging
• Revealing identity can lead to being labeled "exception to the rule"
• May be positioned as representative who can "speak for" entire group
• Creates conflict between different role expectations (family vs. professional)

⚡ Lateral violence

Lateral violence: Violence directed within oppressed groups, stemming from internalized negative views from oppressors.

• Questioning of identity authenticity within membership groups
• Can manifest as psychological unsafety, derogatory language, or ignoring membership
• Behavior like receiving education or accolades can trigger shaming
• Creates tension between professional engagement and community connection
• Don't confuse: This isn't external discrimination but internal group dynamics resulting from historical oppression

🔧 Moving beyond acknowledgment

• Not enough to simply "support intersectionality" as bystanders
• Requires actively breaking down systems and structures
• Need to create diverse workplaces and institutions
• Must address inequality at structural level, not just individual level
• Example: An organization must examine hiring practices, not just express support for diversity

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Media effects research has a century-long history of examining how communication influences individuals and society, but this tradition must be approached critically because it often reflects deeper cultural anxieties rather than straightforward cause-and-effect relationships.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• What media effects means: the real, predicted, or imagined influence of mediated communication on audiences' behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes, typically focusing on negative impacts and changes following exposure.
• Historical context matters: effects research dates back over 100 years, with waves of concern emerging around new technologies (movies in the 1920s, television in the 1970s, social media today).
• Critical scholars are skeptical: many communication researchers argue that effects theories "tackle social problems backwards," underestimate audience agency, and fail to account for media fragmentation.
• Common confusion: effects vs. uses—effects research asks "what does media do to us?" while uses and gratifications research asks "what do we do with media?"
• It's complicated: effects can be both real lived experiences (cyberbullying, mental health impacts) and moral panics that scapegoat media for complex societal problems.

📚 The effects tradition

📜 Origins and history

Media effects: a communication concept referring to the real, predicted, or imagined effect of mediated communication on audiences.

• The effects tradition of audience research is over a century old
• Researchers have been exploring and debating communication effects for more than 100 years
• Students often unknowingly step into this long research tradition when studying topics like video game harm or social media mental health impacts
• This history involves powerful dissent from key thinkers—"media effects" is a communication concept we don't have to agree with

🎬 Early research examples

1920s Payne Fund studies:

• Investigated effects of movie-watching on children in the United States
• Movies were new technology and extraordinarily popular with kids
• Research informed by concerns about erosion of moral standards and unknown impacts of new technology

1970s cultivation analysis:

• George Gerbner proposed the mean world syndrome
• Theory: people develop heightened anxiety and sense of risk due to crime/violence depicted in media
• Long-term media consumption builds up pessimistic ideas
• Someone who watches/reads a lot of media will think the world is scarier than it actually is

1970s social learning theory:

• Albert Bandura's work suggested individual behavior is influenced by what we observe in others, including on screen
• Cast media effects in new light of relevance

⚠️ Characteristics of effects research

Effects research typically focuses on:

• Negative effects rather than positive ones (risk, vulnerability, harm)
• Changes in audiences following message exposure (attitude or behavior changes, not fleeting mood shifts)
• Long-term impacts rather than immediate emotional reactions

Example: A crime drama researcher wouldn't care about suspense felt during viewing, but would be interested in whether viewers felt scared in real public places afterward or believed violent crimes were more likely than statistically probable.

🎯 Politicization of effects

Media depictions are often debated, scrutinized, and blamed when high-profile crimes occur.

Example: After the 2018 Parkland school shooting, Kentucky governor Matt Bevin claimed video games like Grand Theft Auto are dangerous because they celebrate a "culture of death"—the idea of media effects was weaponized politically.

🤔 Critical perspectives

🔍 Scholarly criticisms

Most communication and media scholars today are suspicious or openly critical of media effects, arguing:

• It "tackles social problems backwards" (Gauntlett 2005)
• Fails to hold up in an era of media fragmentation (Bennett and Iyengar 2008)
• Underestimates how audiences—including very young audiences—actively decode media meanings (Jenkins 2015)

🧠 What concerns really represent

Concerns about media effects are usually articulations of deeper cultural anxieties.

Surface concern	Deeper anxiety
Gun violence in media	Gun control or social disorder
Children's "screen time"	Changing nature of childhood
Social media addiction	Loss of traditional social connection

⚖️ The paradox

On one hand: Fierce arguments from thought leaders debunk the media effects model, leading to progress in communication studies and more research into audience practices and everyday lives.

On the other hand: These concerns haven't gone away—they resurface around new media emergence, and in some cases media effects are very real problems lived and experienced by individuals daily.

📱 Social media effects

🆕 Contemporary concerns

Since social media emerged in the mid-2000s, legacy media have spent considerable time reporting on platform harms.

Common claims about social media:

• Addictive
• Impacts sleep
• Impacts attention and concentration
• Leads to polarization and division
• Perpetuates harmful stereotypes

Ironically, these conversations often unfold on social media platforms themselves.

🔬 Research findings

Negative impacts documented:

• 2021 Centre for Digital Wellbeing research brief: social media negatively impacts mental health, especially for young people
• Linked to technology-facilitated abuse including gender-based violence, online harassment, stalking
• 2021 internal Facebook/Meta research: Instagram worsened body image problems for one in three girls due to algorithmic content vortex

Positive impacts documented:

• Increased feelings of social connectedness
• Strengthened civic engagement and political participation
• Body positivity movement promoting healthier self-perception
• Tool for social justice communicators
• Online gaming improves memory, creative thinking, problem-solving

🎬 The Social Dilemma case

The 2020 documentary by Jeff Orlowski catalogued negative social media effects with themes of addiction, enslavement, power, and abuse.

Facebook's response used language echoing academic criticisms: the film "gives a distorted view" and creates "a convenient scapegoat for what are difficult and complex societal problems"—essentially accusing it of "tackling social problems backwards."

Research on the film itself: University of Annenberg's Media Impact Project found The Social Dilemma had positive effects by improving viewers' knowledge of persuasive design techniques, activating healthy suspicion of social media products.

✅ Key takeaway

It's complicated. We shouldn't accept effects-based theories without question, but should acknowledge their continuing power in public discourse and always ask what assumptions lie within such theories.

🌍 Societal-level effects

📊 Polarization

Polarization: the division of audiences or publics into two sharply contrasting groups that are mistrustful of each other.

• In polarized society, people are less inclined to listen to others whose ideas don't confirm their worldviews
• The rise of social media has deeply contributed to 21st-century societal polarization
• Can be described as an effect of communication on society, especially digital and networked communication

📰 Agenda setting

Agenda setting: when communicators strategically put an issue "on the agenda" or "set the agenda" for public conversation.

• Theory developed by McCombs and Shaw (1972)
• By focusing on some issues rather than others, communicators influence what is considered important
• Also determines what or who is silenced

Reflection exercise: List five globally important issues right now. Then ask: Where did I get these ideas? How did I come to believe these are important at the expense of others?

Likely answers involve:

• Personal impact or home country impact
• Reading about them in news
• Seeing them in film/television
• Hearing them in podcasts
• Seeing them depicted online

The latter examples demonstrate agenda setting in action.

🤐 The spiral of silence

The spiral of silence: a theory that we're more likely to speak out if we feel our opinion is supported by others; the seeming dominance of an opinion leads to creation of silences because dissenters are less likely to voice perspectives.

• Conceptualized in the 1970s by German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
• Silence can grow when topics/perspectives are not represented
• Silence spirals into more silence

Media component: Media regularly and strongly impact our perceptions of what other people are thinking (Tsfati et al 2014). Media seemingly tell us what others think, influencing our willingness to speak out about topics or share opinions.

Contemporary example: Audiences exposed to right-wing media tended to believe public opinion was "tilted toward" the right—describing how societies become polarized.

Research insight: For communication researchers, silences are deeply interesting. Key questions: What are the things nobody is talking about, and why?

💑 Case study: Online dating apps

📲 Background

• Online dating: the practice of using the internet to search for, interact with, and meet potential romantic or sexual partners
• First broke out publicly in mid-1990s with Match.com (1995)
• Followed by eHarmony (2000), PlentyOfFish (2003), OkCupid (2004)

🐝 Bumble's transformation

Founder Whitney Wolfe's innovation:

• Adopted familiar swiping feature with "matriarchal twist"
• Men can't message women unless she initiates contact first
• Women given 24-hour window to "make the first move"
• Match disappears if time elapses

Effect on gender norms:

• Flipped the dating script and changed narrative for heterosexual online dating
• Redefined gender norms by leveling male-dominated industry
• Positioned women as directors of their own love story

🎯 Applying communication concepts

Agenda setting: Bumble put female-led dating on the table for public discussion.

Framing: Bumble reframed online dating and romance by focusing on women as leaders in relationships.

Personal context: Wolfe experienced sexual harassment and discrimination at Tinder, filed lawsuit in 2014, now dedicated to empowering women and advocating for gender equality globally.

💡 Lessons

• Media effects is complicated
• Online dating apps often receive negative coverage focusing on disruption to "traditional" romance
• Little coverage of online dating as relationship enabler
• Bumble shows rules can be rewritten to enable women's participation and paint different picture of acceptable romantic behaviors
• Communication shapes meaning through various life aspects, directly and indirectly affecting worldviews, beliefs, ideologies, perceptions

🎮 Beyond effects: Use and agency

🔄 Alternative approaches

"Effects" is only one approach to understanding the relationship between communication, society, and everyday life.

Other approaches explored in earlier chapters:

• Meaning (Chapter 5): Focus on meaning and interpretation opens avenues often closed by effects debates (Jenkins 2006)
• Identity (Chapter 6): Relationship with digital media is too complex to be contained within "effects" idea

🎯 Uses and gratifications

Uses and gratifications: theory proposed by Elihu Katz in the 1960s, considered an antithesis to media effects.

Key shift:

• From "what the media does to us"
• To "what we do with the media"

Katz believed media use was an active choice—wanted to work out how audiences use media rather than whether they were affected by it.

Application to phones: Rather than asking how phones effect us, ask what benefits and uses phones provide:

• Escapism
• Diversion
• Connection
• Information
• Participation
• Activism
• Identity formation

🔧 Affordances

Affordances: the qualities or attributes of an object that define the ways it can be used.

Term deployed by scholars writing about social and digital media uses to describe relationship between media platform, its properties, and its users.

💪 Agency and power

danah boyd's research on teenagers and digital practices:

Observed that digital technologies shifted social norms about privacy and sharing—a clear "effect" of digital media on society and individual lives.

However: Young people often develop their own ways of operating within systems designed to restrict privacy and profit from sharing.

"Rather than eschewing privacy when they encounter public spaces, many teens are looking for new ways to achieve privacy within networked publics. As such, when teens develop innovative strategies to achieve privacy, they often reclaim power by doing so. Privacy doesn't just depend on agency; being able to achieve privacy is an expression of agency." (boyd 2014: 76)

Agency: the capacity to act with power and intention.

Key insight: boyd's research actively disrupts media effects paradigms by foregrounding the power (or potential power) of a social group typically perceived as both vulnerable and problematic in relation to media use.

🎓 Conclusion

🔑 Why effects matter

Effects of communication should not be dismissed because:

• They can be real and lived
• Ignoring them neglects the power they have in their imagined form
• They play a powerful role in public discourse about communication and social problems

👥 Participatory responsibility

As communication becomes more participatory, effects of media become everybody's problem and everybody's responsibility.

🔍 Critical approach needed

When engaging with media effects:

• Locate questions within the effects tradition context and debates it has sparked
• Don't accept effects-based theories without question
• Acknowledge their continuing power in public discourse
• Always ask what assumptions lie within such theories
• Never stop asking these questions

🧭 Overview

🧠 One-sentence thesis

Participatory culture transforms audiences from passive consumers into active creators and distributors of meaning, enabled by digital technologies but defined by cultural practices that lower barriers to expression, support sharing, provide mentorship, and foster social connection.

📌 Key points (3–5)

• What participatory culture means: a shift from consumption-only to active creation, sharing, and meaning-making by citizens and audiences, not just professional communicators.
• Technology vs. culture distinction: participatory culture is a property of culture (values, practices, community), not just technology; interactivity is technological, participation is cultural.
• Key elements: low barriers to expression, strong support for sharing creations, mentorship from experienced to novices, and a sense that contributions matter.
• Common confusion: don't confuse participatory technology with participatory culture—activism, memes, and fan communities involve both digital tools and offline/creative practices.
• Challenges alongside opportunities: participatory culture brings new voices and civic engagement but also misinformation, echo chambers, digital divides, and expanded responsibilities for all communicators.

🎭 What participatory culture is

🎭 Core definition

Participatory culture: a culture with low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement; strong support for creating and sharing; mentorship passing knowledge from experienced to novices; and a sense of social connection where contributions matter (Jenkins et al. 2009).

• It contrasts with consumer culture, where people only consume products rather than create or share.
• Communication has always been somewhat participatory (conversations involve participants, not just senders/receivers), but today citizens have unprecedented access to cultural production processes.
• Mediated communication now resembles conversation; many public conversations are led by citizens and grassroots movements, not just elites.

🔄 Participation vs. consumption

• Ask yourself: what verbs describe your interaction with media? You might binge, scroll, follow, listen, watch, read—but also blog, share, remix, post, play, write, remake, lead.
• Your audience practices extend beyond consumption to active production and sharing of meaning.
• Example: A word cloud of audience self-descriptions shows many words indicating active participation, not passive reception.

🌐 Technology's role (but not the whole story)

• Digital tools (social media, platforms, augmented reality) facilitate participation by making it easier to share messages and organize groups.
• But participation is not solely technological: activism includes sit-ins, walk-outs, craftivism, and careful message-crafting—decidedly analogue practices.
• The 2023 Digital News Report found audiences gravitating toward private platforms (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram) for news participation, showing how technology and participation co-evolve.
• Don't confuse: interactivity (property of technology) vs. participation (property of culture).

🧩 Memes as participatory culture objects

🧩 What a meme is

Meme: a unit of cultural information that spreads from person to person, self-replicating like genes (coined by Richard Dawkins, 1976); includes buzzwords, melodies, fashion trends, ideas, rituals, images.

• Internet memes (image + caption) are perfect participatory culture objects: low barriers to creation, rely on pop culture knowledge and timing, can be impactful and express complex emotions or serious issues.
• Tools like Canva provide meme generators requiring little more than drag-and-drop.

🧙 Historical example: the witch meme

• The "wicked witch" iconography (pointed hat, broomstick, black cat, old woman) is a centuries-old meme.
• It spread via printing press technology (woodcuts in pamphlets) in the 14th–15th centuries, rooted in Christian discourse and male authority's control over female identity.
• Ordinary people (especially women depicted) had no access to cultural production then.
• Today, anyone can create witch memes using Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, or Minecraft characters; modern witchcraft communities can remake these signs to express their beliefs.
• The same harmful meme can still be deployed misogynistically (e.g., against female politicians).

📖 Memes as storytelling capsules

• Memes encapsulate stories that express shared values and common visions (Reinsborough and Canning).
• Example: the raised fist is a meme of the Black Lives Matter movement, encapsulating stories about justice and reclaiming power—identifiable, easy to replicate, impactful.
• The movement's website provides social media templates and toolkits, supporting participation in message-sharing.

🎬 Disrupting top-down communication

🎬 Grassroots vs. elite practices

• Meaning-making can be top-down (controlled by elite actors) or grassroots (led by audiences/citizens)—or a messy mix of both.
• We use popular culture products as raw material (Fiske 1990) for our own messages and stories.

🕷️ Case: Preston Mutanga and Spider-Man

• Mutanga, a 14-year-old Canadian, created LEGO animations on YouTube using free software (Blender) and his follower audience.
• His LEGO version of the Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse trailer impressed Hollywood producers, who invited him to create a sequence for the commercial film.
• Is this participatory culture? Arguably yes: YouTube lowered barriers to filmmaking; a culture supports amateur creativity and sharing; Mutanga's work was widely seen and shared.
• But also: Spiderverse is owned by Sony Corporation; some argue Mutanga's "participation" was a promotional move capitalizing on fan labor, fitting the Spider-Man brand narrative.
• Don't confuse: authentic collaboration vs. corporate co-optation of fan labor—not all communicators are equal, and participatory spaces are often owned/monetized by powerful companies.

🎮 Fan practices and identity

🎮 Doctor Who and "My Doctor" identity (case study by Serena Pantano)

• Doctor Who (British sci-fi series since 1963) features one character (the Doctor) portrayed by many actors over decades.
• "My Doctor" phenomenon: fans identify with a specific incarnation of the Doctor character.
• Common belief: your Doctor is the one you first watched or "the one you watched when you were twelve"—but not always true; fans identify for various reasons (acting, writing, lived experience).
• Fans may distinguish "my Doctor" (personal identification) from "the best Doctor" (objective assessment).

🌐 Tumblr examples

• Tumblr posts tagged #MyDoctor show fans describing their identity within the fandom.
• One user explains their first Doctor became their Doctor, using show lore (TARDIS) to explain identity.
• Other posts show strong connections between fans and actors: meeting the actor is a culmination of this connection (e.g., "I met my Doctor yesterday").
• Fans build their own culture from the "semiotic raw materials" the media provides (Jenkins)—the "my Doctor" trend demonstrates identity within participatory fandom.

⚠️ Problems and challenges

⚠️ Extra work for professional communicators

• Roles have expanded dramatically: expected to master multiple platforms, engage audiences on social media, curate online identity.
• Keeping up with technological change is difficult; upskilling may be financially out of reach.
• Boundaries between professional and personal life disappear; harder to switch off.
• The gig economy (freelanced, casualized workforce sourced via digital platforms) means less job security.

📢 Harder to be heard

• More competing voices and messages make it difficult to stand out.
• Confronting a diversity of opinions is challenging; harmful ideas can be amplified and hard to dislodge.

🔒 Filter bubbles and echo chambers

• Algorithms personalize online experiences based on past consumption, delivering information that aligns with existing views.
• Result: intellectual isolation—less exposure to divergent opinions.
• Question: does this make us less able to participate meaningfully in civic discourse?

🚨 Misinformation

Misinformation: false, misleading, or deceptive information that can cause harm (Australian Communication and Media Authority).

• Easier to spread in participatory culture; harder to fact-check because sources are difficult to pin down.
• Viral content often lacks proper source attribution; not everyone shares the ethical frameworks of professional communicators.
• Misinformation can be malicious or result from poor digital practices/lack of training.
• Example: When content goes viral, hundreds or thousands share it without linking to sources or hiding them altogether (Caulfield).

📉 The digital divide (participation gap)

• Not everyone has access to tools, technologies, knowledge, and competencies for participation.
• Digital exclusion: barriers due to lack of education, cost of connectivity, or geography (remote areas, developing countries).
• In Australia, 9.4% are "highly excluded"; considerable gap between First Nations and non-First Nations people (Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2023).
• Don't confuse: digital access as luxury vs. requirement—"the ability to access, afford and effectively use digital services is…a requirement for full participation in contemporary social, economic and civic life."

🎓 Media and digital literacies

🎓 What media literacy is

Media literacy: the skills and competencies to read, access, analyze, evaluate, share, and create media content, and to understand and participate in media processes.

• A media literate person can "decode, evaluate, analyze and produce both print and electronic media" (Aufderheide 1993).
• Defined by the 1992 Aspen Institute meeting: understanding that media are constructed and construct reality; have commercial, ideological, and political implications; form and content are related; receivers negotiate meaning.
• Media literacy is about power: understanding power relations in media production/distribution and empowering oneself through knowledge.

🛠️ Media literacy as life skill

• Described as "a constellation of life skills necessary for full participation in our media-saturated, information-rich society" (Hobbs 2010).
• An ongoing process, not a one-time achievement.
• Acquired through formal education or informal learning (e.g., mentorship in online communities).

🛡️ Media literacy and misinformation

• Media literacy helps discern truth from falsity and detect bias.
• But danah boyd warns: don't treat it as a "silver bullet"—also teach interpersonal skills (empathy, understanding otherness, negotiating perspectives).
• Media literacy encourages critical, reflexive thinking about information we share, slowing the spread of misinformation.
• It intersects with other literacies: health literacy, environmental literacy, social justice literacy.
• Don't confuse: media literacy as only protective (effects perspective) vs. understanding what people do when they communicate in digital spaces.

🌟 Participatory design and inclusivity

🌟 Universal design

Universal design: creating products (including communication products) accessible to all abilities, with accessibility built in at the design phase rather than retrofitted.

• Applies to digital and built environments; maximizes participation by allowing as many people as possible to participate in and enjoy public spaces.

🤝 Participatory design alternative

• Teston and Hashlamon propose participatory design as an alternative: involve diverse groups in content design rather than assuming universal needs.
• Practices supporting inclusivity and diversity are fundamental to professional communication today.
• In participatory culture, we all share communicators' responsibilities but don't necessarily receive training for our "increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants" (Jenkins et al. 2009).

📚 This book as participatory culture

📚 Open educational resources (OER)

• Communication Concepts is a product of participatory culture: a collective endeavor supported by the ACX701 learning community and Deakin University's OER community.
• Students participated in knowledge-work, adding voices and perspectives to explore communication from many vantage points.
• Writing an open textbook involves remix practices, collaboration, scholarly collegiality: borrowing respectfully with attribution, responding to and transforming existing ideas.
• This reflects the best of academic thinking: engage with ideas, respect sources, respond, adapt, transform—participate in building knowledge.
• The book is a space of ongoing growth as new community members participate in its development.