Week 6

 Grossberg tells us that because audiences are so large, critics have identified ways of separating them into smaller subgroups, mainly based on shared taste and shared identity. Both of these position the audience as existing outside of their interaction with the media; audiences are already formed and bring their own resources to the interaction with media. Grossberg argues that these ways of partitioning off audiences do not consider how texts construct their own appropriate audiences. In other words, they don’t consider how audiences’ identities may be constituted during their interaction with media, not before or after it. My question is, can we think of possible strategies for how media can create appropriate audiences?  Are there examples of how media has created a specific subgroup of audience?

I was interested in Hall’s characterization of communicative institutions, practices, and relations as lines of tendential force that serve as powerful barriers to the potential for rearticulation. How do we see examples of this characterization in our present communicative institutions and how can we rearticulate them?

-Daisy