Stranger Things - Audience

Target Audience:

• Primary audience - Teenagers (15-19)
• Secondary audience - Older people who were around during the 80s (30s - 40s)

Official Marketing:

• Original Trailer - Released 30th June 2016
• Tagline - 99 out of 100 times a kid goes missing, the kid is with a parent or relative. A love letter to the supernatural classics of the 80s.

Specific Things from Trailer that appear to both primary and secondary audience:

Primary:

• Main characters are young; ranges from 12 year olds to 16 year olds, reaching out to teenagers.
• Trailer circulates around the younger characters, we don't see much of the older characters.
• Netflix logo
• Show is more weighed towards younger characters.
• School environment - Mise-en-scene; costumes, props - bikes.
• Younger actors

Secondary:

• Scene from episode one thats similar to the scene from Close Encounters To The Third Kind 1977).
• Tagline - A love letter to the supernatural classics of the 80s.
• Winona Ryder's scene
• Nostalgia - Dungeons and Dragons (Mise-en-scene)
• Part of E.T. reference scene; dropping references into the trailer
• Matthew Modine there as well; even though his narrative role isn't that much.

Netflix targetting influencers - reaching people with big digital footprint; peer to peer marketting. 

Economically cheaper; established relationship with influencers, word of mouth, for a show like stranger things; being in on a secret plays into what the show is about, you could take more ownership.

• Twitch
• Stephen King
• 8-Bit Video Game of Stranger Things - 80s nostalgia, going for secondary audience.
• 360 Video - getting involved, like you're apart of the show. Sharable content Viral Marketting.

Nostalgia -  A love letter to the supernatural classics of the 80s.

• Integral to marketting campaign
• It's about the past, looking back on things that have happened before.
• Post Modernism

Passive Audiences:

• 400,000 people watched the whole of season one in one sitting
• Way to avoid spoilers, want to be part of that discussion
• Binge Watching - Helps you follow the story.
• Drops show in its entirerity to avoid risks, changing audience behaviour
• Younger Audience - expectation of being able to binge watch, season drop binge watching important to keep them on board
• Secondary Audience may be more inclined to that viewing position.
• Have to wait so long until new season
• Binge watching can fry your brain.

Bandura:

• Media will have a direct influence on our behaviour
• Hyperdermic needle model. We do things that we're not supposed to do because the TV told us to.
• 'TV Rots your brain' and that it destroys your own agency
• Regulation could still be important, limits should be put on how people watch

Cultivation Theory And Gerbner:

• Media doesn't inject us with badness, but if we do get exposed to this over a long period of time it will change the way we think of things.
• If we keep watching Stranger Things we may view the world differently
• Mean World Syndrome
• People who watch much TV think the world may be meaner to those who don 't watch.
• We watch bad TV and not good TV.

Stranger Things makes us distrust the government and the science community.

Stranger Things reflects many social values in relations to areas such as gender roles and family. Stranger Things can contribute to 'mean world syndrome', we see this through it's depiction of vulnerability of children and it's representation of sinister government conspiracies.

Gerbner argues that the ways in which media products may shape audience attitudes over a period of time, it also draws attention to the 'mainstreaming' of values and attitudes. Although Gerbner's studies took place during the 1970s and television in the 70s is very different to modern day viewing.

Jenkins:

Participatory Culture - This is the idea that the development of new media allows the audience to be active and create participants rather than simply passive consumers

Audience members can become Textual Poachers, by taking aspects from media text to create their own content

Convergence Culture - This is where media is shared, adapted and consumed constantly on a range of different platforms.

Spreadable Media - Content that is adapted by audience members for their own purpose and shared with others.

Stranger Things demonstrates the participatory nature of media audiences and the use of textual poaching. There is extensive evidence of fan culture for Stranger Things including fan art, fan fiction, memes and social media posts and interactions.

We can use the 'Justice For Barb' meme as an example as it shows convergence culture as something which emerged from the audience. It arguably suggests the way in which fan culture can interact with media production, demonstrated in season tow story line focused on Barb's parents which was a response to audience's reaction of the character of Barb.

Stranger Things success is partly down to it's spread-ability. The use of intertextuality, retro styles, appealing characters and cast members active on social media all make it suited to the creation of shareable content.

Jenkins ideas are useful fro considering how audiences actively engage with media products across different platforms but they don't support discussion of the ways in which meanings are constructed by producers within LFTV drama.

Shirky - End of audience:

• Technological developments have changed the relationship between media producers and audiences
• In the past media producers created content for audiences, now content can be created by audiences.
• Prosumers have different motivations to professional media producers.
• This can create cognitive surplus where potentially large numbers of people give their time and expertise to create something 
• Audiences can no longer be seen as a single mass of people. Audiences engage differently with media products across different platforms with some audience members now creating or adapting media products themselves.

Fanfiction
Some people write their own fan fiction using characters from the show in new situations.
Slash-fiction is a niche sub-genre of fan fiction that puts same-sex characters into extreme, erotic situation.s