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I argue in this dissertation that the plays of Aeschylus are best understood as appeals to their predominantly male fifth-century Athenian audience centered around the presentation of dramatic character. I maintain that an examination of the Persians, Seven against Thebes, and Suppliants in these terms reveals that these plays are not primitive, static, or simplistic plays from early in Aeschylus’ career, but rather dramatically complex and mature works. More broadly, I assert that character studies are not hopelessly outdated nor at odds with audience-centered and cultural studies. By combining these approaches, we gain a fuller understanding of how playwrights composed the plays and how spectators responded to them. I also assert that divergent responses to dramas based on individual experiences are not only the rule for spectators of tragedy, but directly influence how playwrights approached their dramatic characters. The Introduction includes theoretical background for spectators’ relationship to dramatic characters culled from film theory and an application of its general principles to the Oresteia. In chapter 1, I examines how the Persians invites spectators to experience a range of potentially contradictory emotional states that include fear of the Persian invaders and sympathy with the inhabitants of the Persian Empire, with the men who fought against them in the war, and perhaps even with Xerxes himself. In Chapter 2, I show how, initially, the Seven against Thebes strongly implies, but does not establish beyond a doubt, that Eteocles is a paragon of Greek manhood and a noble defender of his city with whom Athenian spectators could identify. Questions about Eteocles emerge, however, when the play introduces Polyneices’ accusations of injustice against him, points to increasing similarities between the brothers, and shows how their fates have long since been sealed by their father’s curse and by the will of Apollo. In Chapters 3 and 4, I argue that the portrayal of the Danaids in the Suppliants is intentionally ambiguous. Spectators may have known that the Danaids would kill the Aegyptids, but the play offers vague and contradictory evidence regarding them and their situation to generate suspense in this early play of the trilogy. / text

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In this thesis I present a new dramaturgical model for understand improvised theatre. Improvised theatre is a field full of experimentation, and the art form has recently been evolving faster than the theories used to understand it. Rather than relying on colloqiual terms such as “short form” and “long form”, I propose a new terminilogy based on Chris Johnston’s notion of “Restrictions”. I explain the use of the Restrictions: Location, Role, Narrative, Game, and Materials, and how to meassure the “Scope” of Restrictions by the Number of affected performers and Duration. I explain how Restrictions affect four elements of improvised performance: Space, Time, Speech, and Physicality. By creating a rubric to illustrate the interaction between Restrictions and these elements, I move towards a new foundation for understanding improvised theatre. In addition, I propose four metrics to meassure audience participation: Number of participants, Method of participation, Agency of the participat, and Duration of the participation. Using my Restriction rubric and audience participation metrics, I analyse four case studies. Each case study is a recent piece of improvised theatre. I attended each piece multiple times and interviewed the artists behind eacch production with a questionnaire. These are Blind Date and Undercover by Spontaneous Theatre, Quest Friends Forever, and GRIMprov’s Guided Roleplay. Each production features audience participation, the effects of which I explain using Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of the autopoietic feedback loop.By analysing these contemporary productions I demostrate the efficacy of my new rubrics and terminilogy.

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Product placement is now a US$7.76 billion industry, flourishing as advertisers attempt to combat audience sophistication, zipping, zapping, muting of commercials, TiVo, media multi-tasking, the Internet and digital television, all of which may signal the death knell of the interruptive commercial model. Yet whilst research on product placement is growing, it has not kept pace with the practice, and many findings do not converge across studies. This is likely the case because parameters remain undefined and there is no operational framework to describe how product placements are processed, and no agreement as to what effects are possible or how they should be examined. Most effects-based research has focussed on executional factors and what the product placement does to the audience member. This assumes that the recipient is a passive participant. However this thesis argues that the audience member is actually an active processor who should be the focus of research. This research distinguishes product placement from related activities and develops a new conceptual model of product placement processing. It puts a strong focus on the role of the audience member, stating that their level of familiarity of the placed brands, and their level of engrossment with the entertainment story will impact their recognition of product placements in that story. Applying Rasch Measurement Theory, an Audience Engrossment scale is developed and refined over four stages of data collection, with 1360 respondents across seven films, to capture the quality of people??s interaction with a film. The result is a scale comprising 19 feeling items, 10 arousal items, 6 appraisal items and 7 cognitive effort items. The scale was then tested as part of the conceptual model, with 191 participants watching The Island and completing questionnaires after the film relating to their recognition of brands within the film and their level of engrossment. Brand familiarity information was collected four weeks earlier. Onset prominence, high plot connection, dual modality and use by star were found to have the strongest direct effects on recognition, with brand familiarity and the four audience engrossment dimensions generally found to interact with the product placement characteristics as hypothesised.

Implicit in the use of the target audience concept is the assumption that audiences are highly segmented. Yet media don't deliver the 'unique' audience they claim to. This research provides evidence that genuine audience niches are often hard to find, thus is expected to challenge entrenched assumptions about audience targeting.

Cette thèse analyse le profil culturel des visiteurs des musées d’art moderne et contemporain en Belgique dans le but de mieux comprendre ce que représente, pour eux, l’expérience muséale. Il s’agit de dépasser une certaine approche courante en sociologie qui limite l’étude des relations publics-musées à la mise à jour du rôle des déterminants socioéconomiques sur la fréquentation. Mon approche part d’un postulat de base selon lequel il faut inscrire la visite muséale dans un rapport plus large à la culture pour appréhender le sens et les usages des musées d’art moderne et contemporain. La récolte des données a eu lieu au cours de deux phases principales : une première quantitative suivie par une seconde qualitative. Le design est séquentiel (en deux étapes successives) et non équivalent puisque la première étape quantitative a plus de poids (terminologie basée sur Leech et Onwuegbuzie). Pour la première phase, a été réalisée une enquête par questionnaires auprès des visiteurs de six musées en Belgique âgés de 15 ans et plus. Au total, 1900 questionnaires ont été récoltés et encodés. A partir de ces données, une analyse en correspondances multiples a été effectuée pour évaluer de quelle manière les différentes dimensions des profils culturels (goûts pour la musique, l’art et la lecture, participation culturelle, loisirs ordinaires, créativité) s’agencent les unes aux autres. Cette méthode a été choisie pour ses qualités inductives et relationnelles. Cette analyse montre que les profils culturels peuvent être perçus comme le résultat de bricolages entre répertoires culturels. Ceux-ci doivent être compris comme des principes qui classifient les goûts et les pratiques et leur donnent sens. Parmi ces répertoires, la distinction culture haute versus culture basse à la Bourdieu conserve une place primordiale mais cohabite avec d’autres, tels que les distinctions omnivores versus univores (Peterson), voraces versus inactifs (Sullivan & Katz-Gerro), culture jeune versus culture classique, goût pour la transgression versus conservatisme. Cette thèse appuie en conséquence l’idée selon laquelle il n’y a eu ni de transformation unidirectionnel des snobs vers les omnivores (thèse de l’omnivorité), ni un effondrement des hiérarchies culturelles (massification et postmodernisme). L’utilisation de ces répertoires est principalement influencée par l’âge, l’éducation (sous diverses formes) et le statut socioprofessionnel (qui met l’accent sur les différences en termes de cultures professionnelles). Les profils culturels s’ancrent dès lors toujours dans des structures sociales, contrairement à ce que pensent certaines théories individualistes plus extrêmes (Bauman), et continuent d’être structurés par des mécanismes de distinction, puisque les répertoires sont socialement valorisés. Une classification hiérarchique ascendante a suivi l’analyse en correspondances multiples pour mettre à jour une typologie qui reflète les principales configurations des profils culturels. Six classes ont été identifiées : les cultivés classiques, les cultivés en retrait, les cultivés progressistes, les hédonistes, les éloignés culturels et les amoureux de l’art. Pour conduire la deuxième phase qualitative, trois personnes par classe ont été interviewées pour approfondir les donnés quantitatives sur leur rapport à la culture, à l’art et au musée. Au regard de cette analyse de discours, il apparaît que les six classes ainsi constituées partagent en leur sein des grilles de lecture similaires du rôle de l’art et de la culture au sein de la société moderne mais aussi du musée et agissent, ce faisant, en « communautés interprétatives » (Fish; Hooper-Greenhill). Comprendre la diversité des profils culturels des visiteurs (tout en prenant en compte l’origine sociale) permet, dès lors, de concevoir la multiplicité des rapports au musée./ What do we know about art museums’ visitors? This question can appear very trivial. Visitors of art museums seem to belong to educated elite. At least, this is the image that cultural participation surveys rightly spread. Nevertheless, this perspective focuses mainly on the characteristics of the population who do not visit museums, rather than on the characteristics of the museums' visitors. These surveys help indeed to define the sociodemographic particularities of visitors, with regards to the general population but do not investigate a possible diversity within the visitor population. They show that cultural democratization did not really happen but can we really conclude that the audience constitutes a homogeneous mass of snobs defined by a precise relation to the culture? This presentation aims to go beyond this traditional approach in sociology that focuses on sociodemographic criteria and to show how diverse can be the audience. It intends to illustrate that visitors have heterogeneous cultural profiles (described by their tastes, cultural and creative activities, and more ordinary leisure), even if they tend to be similar from a socioeconomic viewpoint, and to evaluate which impact these cultural profiles have on the way of visiting a museum. With the use of a multiple correspondence analysis and an ascending hierarchical classification, six different classes were distinguished among the visitors of six museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium (N: 1900) according to their cultural profiles. Each cultural profile is considered as a bricolage of different cultural repertoires: low versus high culture (Bourdieu), univores versus omnivores (Peterson), voraces versus non-voraces (Sullivan & Katz-Gerro), classical versus young culture and traditional versus modern values. Instead of observing an unidirectional change from snobs to omnivores, my results suggests indeed that several repertoires interact with one another to structure cultural profiles and to give meaning to them. Finally, with selected interviews among the different six classes, it will be demonstrated that people with an analogous cultural profile tend to share similar interpretations of museums and act as "interpretative communities" (Fish; Hooper-Greenhill). Therefore, the meaning of a museum visit for visitors requires taking into account their cultural profiles.

As the Internet market has become mature over the years the population of the internet users grows rapidly, which makes a significant change to people¡¦s life style in many ways, such as communication, shopping, entertainment, finance trading, information transmission. Undoubtedly, the popularity of the Internet in daily life leads to the fact that more and more people get used to listening to the radio on the internet. The paper explores the viewpoints of the audience to understand the audience webcasting comportment in depth and to probe into the webcasting situations. Hopefully, this research will provide webcasting service providers a complete scheme which can impel and activate the webcasting market in Taiwan. The studying variables of the research are based on Belk¡¦s five compositions (1975): physical surroundings, social surroundings, time perspective, task definition and antecedent state. Therefore, the report will interpret the connection between audience¡¦s receive behavior and webcasting situations. This research adopts an open network questionnaire investigation. The questionnaires were collected from 364 effective copies of 404 research objects with webcasting experience. Based on the collected data, the conclusions are as following: 1. For audiences, webcasting is the main amusement after work. 2. The majority audiences link to the webcasting right after the morning work. It indicates that listener have higher listening liberty from the webcasting than the traditional broadcasting. 3. The audiences who like to enjoy the webcasting under a leisurely, relaxed, happy atmosphere have the steady webcasting habit. Besides, those who enjoy the webcasting under the calm, happy atmosphere are random audiences. 4. Webcasting can be listener¡¦s activity before bed and it can be considered the family amusement as well. In addition, it can be shared with colleagues at work. 5. Audio on demand will be more suitable for a program that is with a theme and content that audiences can share with others. 6. The shorter the interval of the audiences listening, the more regular the audiences have listening habits. 7. The webcasting is an easy amusement for audiences, and as well as a pleasant company, which makes the audiences stay with webcasting as longer as they can.

The communion between human is frequent in modern society, and mass media has become an important tool for people to obtain information about life and experience of the outside world as a result. TV is the medium that has the largest size, is the most common and the most contacted by people around the globe, and also has the largest influences on modern people. However, with the innovation of spreading technology, the Internet has become the second largest medium industry that is next to TV due to such features as two-way spreading, real time interaction, low cost and free selection etc. Both TV and the Internet are ranged side by side as the two great powerful medium nowadays, they are both capable of spreading words, graphics, sound, images and video data, leaving profound influences on the audience, but the two vary greatly in terms of their showed appearances and usage nature. This research is based on the theory of Belk situation, locks the audience¡¦s watching/ usage behaviors in a certain special time space; a questionnaire survey has been conducted on those audience who have the habit of watching TV and using the Internet in the three areas covering Pingtung, Kaohsiung and Tainan, the purpose of the survey is to explore the watching/usage ¡¥situation¡¦ and ¡¥behaviors¡¦ of those audience who watch TV and use the Internet and make contrast for the differences between the two groups; the main conclusions come after statistics and analysis as follows: I. The differences of watching/usage situations between TV and the Internet 1. Those audience who watch TV have their home as the main environment, while the Internet users have comparably more diversified network environment. 2. The social interactive capability of the Internet is better than that of TV; TV is the main interactive media with family members, while the Internet is the main interactive media with non family members. 3. The later the time interval is, the higher ratio of watching TV of the audience will be; the main time interval for using the Internet is in the morning and evening respectively. Furthermore, the interactive lasting time of using the Internet is longer than that of watching TV and so as the addiction. 4. Due to its own features different from that of the Internet, TV can guide the audience¡¦s purpose of behaviors. 5. Through the contact with the media, the audience can maintain various satisfaction levels in daily life at a certain stable one; watching TV can increase people¡¦s pleasure level and the mood is just so-so for most users of the Internet. II. Under different situations, the behavior differences between the audience of watching TV and using the Internet 1. In case the physical environment is different, the audience¡¦s watching/usage behaviors are varied in terms of purpose, time interval and the relation with the interactive objects. 2. In case the social life environment is different, and when the interactive objects of the audience are not family members, the time interval of starting using for their watching/usage behaviors become varied is in the morning. 3. In case the time structural surface is different, the time interval of starting using for their watching/usage behaviors become varied is in the morning, at the end of usage and become varied for the watching/using hours. 4. In case the task definition is different, the audience¡¦s watching/usage behaviors are varied in terms of ¡¥ceremonial usage¡¦ purpose and ¡¥tool usage¡¦ purpose. 5. In case the previous status is different, the two groups of audience have obvious relevant features for the physiology of watching/usage behaviors, and the influence from the Internet is higher than that from TV.