Audience Theories

The term 'audience' is probably one of the most often used terms in media. We don't tend to analyse an audience apart from at a distance, we make generalisations about it and we never seem to think of ourselves as a part of one.

 

When we actually start analysing the idea of 'it', we see that is in fact not an 'it' but, depending on where we are standing and why we look it is a collection of different things. Media texts are constructed with an audience in mind- they are made specifically for us (the audience). In certain cases they try to construct the audience, particularly in the case of propaganda.

 

My own opinion is that an audience is a group of people, or an individual, that consume a media text and interpret it in their own way depending on many different factors (e.g. Age, Gender).

 















Photo Editing

 

 

In the media, photo editing is used a lot to perfect or alter images. To get some inspiration for my magazine I tried out some editing techniques using Adobe photoshop.

 

Magazines are known to airbrush models to make them 'perfect'. For example make them slimmer or remove unwanted imperfections. Using this knowledge I decided to use a picture of a scar and see how easy (or hard) it would be to remove them, and therefore alter this person's image. Using the 'spot healing brush tool' I experimented for a while and found that it was difficult to make it look natural and not obviously blurred.

After some practice I found it easier to blur away the impefection with the tool, because I realised you had to be a lot more precise than I had first thought. In the end I managed to create an image that looked a lot better than my first attempt, however it still looks quite obviously tampered with. Through this I have found that a lot more effort goes into making models look 'perfect' and 'airbrushed' than I had previously thought.





 





Original photo, taken from google.

My edited photo.