100 MC: Key Concepts

For Week 7 the work set was:

For week 6 (Activity week) the work set was:

During activity week you will be working on a 72 hour project. Your brief is that you have 72 hours to produce a media object or objects based on the theme:

‘The thing we have always wanted to make!’

For Week 5 the work set was:

My Cabinet Object.

MBUK Magazine (Mountain Bike).

1. In what ways could your media object ‘influence’ the minds of a vulnerable audience?

I think that the only way MBUK Magazine could influence people is by advertising new mountain bike products to niche audience consumers. Other than this I don’t think that the magazine can pass off any other message. The magazine doesn’t hold any form of political or worldly views that could be seen as controversial.

2. What possible negative ‘effect’ does this media object have on the audience and society?

I think this media object can’t have any form of negative effect on any audience or society. They only conceivable ‘negative’ effect that the magazine could have would be that of advertising products that would severely lessen the size of the consumers wallet.

For week 4 the work set was:

The Individual task: Find out what the socio-economic groups are and what companies use these groups for.

These are the socio-economic groups which all media companies and advertisers like to use help them ‘understand’ their consumers and their ‘supposed’ income.

A- Higher managerial, administrative, professional e.g. Chief executive, senior civil servant, surgeon
B – Intermediate managerial, administrative, professional e.g. bank manager, teacher
C1- Supervisory, clerical, junior managerial e.g. shop floor supervisor, bank clerk, sales person
C2 – Skilled manual workers e.g. electrician, carpenter
D- Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers e.g. assembly line worker, refuse collector, messenger
E – Casual labourers, pensioners, unemployed e.g. pensoiners without private pensions and anyone living on basic benefits

Although these groups can be used, it is not that simple to categorise all consumers. When doing this you have also take in to consideration the idea of that people can be changing groups socio-economic groups all the time. As well as this you also have to think about the idea of that people can be in the A group but dont necessarily have the like or interests of the conventional consumer in the A group, this applies to all the groups.

The Group task:

Conduct a short media research task based upon the following provocative statement:

I hate [insert media object here]… Do you?

For example: I hate High School Musical, Do You?

This is our group response to the work set.

Group 1b.

For ourselves to better understand the question and work set, we each came up with our own questions, then from these we all then chose two which we thought were the best and most relevant to the work. So we decided this week that we would conduct our research using these two simple questions; ‘I hate X-factor do you?’ and ‘I like Top Gear do you?’. We chose these because we felt that not only were these relevant but that they were also quite up-to-date and also that they would possible provide two completely different sets of results .

As well as these questions we also asked our subjects to also state their age and gender, we did so that we could then better understand what type of socio-economic groups these people fall into and also try to possible understand who the ‘producers’ of said shows are aiming them at. Once we had the questionnaires ready we then decided to ask between 40-50 people who would then give us a well-rounded and diverse set of results.

What we found out for the first question, ‘I hate X-factor do you?’, was that out of the 45 people who we spoke to only 20 people actually watched it and that the other 25 people didn’t watch it, but what we also discovered was that 3 out of the 20 that do watch it actually don’t like but watch it because they regard it to be ‘car crash TV’. Where as with the other question ‘I like Top Gear do you?’ we found that only 8 of the 45 did like to watch it and the other 37 either just don’t like it or have ‘never really watched it before’. My personal view is that of it is quite worrying that more people would want to watch The X-factor rather than Top Gear.

Once we had compiled all of the information that we needed, we then started to try to see and understand the different types of socio-economic groups that we spoken to. We realized quite quickly that, obviously with the short amount of time and the fact of that some of the group could really only talk to people that they live with, we uncovered that really students cannot be applied to the socio-economic groups, because that theory of grouping only applies to people with or without a job of their own doing, but students don’t have jobs because they are students.

I think that as a group we did come to some good conclusions based on the work set. I also feel had we been given more time, not only could we come up with more results, that they would have been appropriate to the task of coming to some conclusions based on the socio-economic theory.

For Week 3 the work set was:

For Week 2 the work set was:

For Week 1 the work set was: