Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age

This study melds contextualist and resource dependence perspectives from industrial sociology to explore the implications that audience construction by marketing and media firms hold for the core assumptions that are shaping the emerging media system of the twenty-first century. Marketers, media, and the commercial research firms that work with them are constructing contemporary U.S. audiences as frenetic, self-concerned, attention-challenged, and willing to allow advertisers to track them in response to being rewarded or treated as special. This perspective, a response to challenges and opportunities they perceive from new digital interactive technologies, both leads to and provides rationalizations for a surveillance-based customization approach to the production of culture

In the Margins: The Impact of Sexualised Images on the Mental Health of Ageing Women

This paper describes key findings of a study exploring how a cohort of 16 rural Australian women aged over 60 years think, feel and respond to the prevalence of sexualised imagery in the media. The qualitative research framework was informed by Feminist Standpoint Theory. Participants in three focus groups responded to semi-structured questions and prompts, interspersed with viewing examples of sexualised images. Five strong thematic categories emerged: concern for the harmful impacts of sexualised images on the vulnerable, the media’s portrayal of sexual content with a focus on physical appearance and youth, descriptions of the impact of viewing sexualised images, moderators of the impact of sexualised images on well-being, and marginalisation of women in the media. Findings from this research indicate that sexualised images in the media do have an impact on older women’s self image and mental health in numerous ways and in a range of situations. Emotional impacts included sadness, anger, concern, envy, desensitisation, marginalisation, and discomfort that their appearance was being judged by others. A strong sense of self apart from appearance, feeling valued by family and community, ignoring or overlooking media content, and being aware that media images are not real and attainable helped buffer the link between sexualised images and well-being. Another important finding is that the impact is variable: women may experience different responses to similar sexualised content depending on a range of social, health and lifestyle factors affecting them at any given time

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A LANDSCAPE PERSPECTIVE OF WHOOPING CRANE MIGRATION THROUGH NEBRASKA: CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT IMPLICATIONS

Past and current discussions of conservation of whooping crane (Grus americana) stopover habitat in Nebraska have long been focused on the Platte River. We evaluated the distribution of whooping crane stopover sites in Nebraska in a broader context to (a) determine the distribution of whooping crane stopover sites on the Platte River relative to other landscapes and (b) use whooping migratory behavior data to systematically define and explain patterns of stopover clusters. The distribution of stopover clusters suggests rainwater basin wetlands and the Platte River may be used interchangeably by migrating whooping cranes. The Rainwater Basin and Platte River appear to be particularly significant for spring north migrating cranes as there appears to be a void of wetlands between Cheyenne Bottoms and Quivira National Wildlife Refuges in Kansas. We propose that whooping crane conservation and management actions in Nebraska must take a broader landscape perspective to include the Platte River plus the entire area required for whooping cranes to travel during a day. This perspective suggests that we focus conservation and management activities on a 320-km wide and approximately 240-km long area centered on the Central Valley of the Platte River. We present a strategy to focus conservation and management actions to maximize the availability of whooping crane stopover habitat in south-central Nebraska