Viewer Engagement Research Articles

내러티브 관점에서의 과학박물관 전시공간 분석 - 과천과학관의 자연사 및 전통과학 전시공간을 중심으로-

This study is based on the arguments of Sofia Sarah and concept of 'Sequence Narrative' of Nigel Coates, the founder of Nato. Specifically, this study was conducted under the premise that narrative exhibition space will affect the engagement of viewers. As a result of this study, a method of analyzing a science museum's exhibition space was presented using the narrative structure and the following attributes of visuals: sequence of viewing; spatial tension; spatial pace. The findings are as follows. In terms of 'spatial tension', the exhibiton space with the following progression was more likely to provide viewers with in-depth experience: 'raise of tension' - 'change of pace' - detente.' Although the limited sample doesn't lead to verification of the analysis method and conclusion of its significance, the following was clearly revealed: Exhibiton space that utilizes the structure and attributes of a narrative that provides progression and dramatic tension, as if the viewers were watching a film, is more likely to offer in-depth experience than other spaces. In terms of 'phase transition', the following was revealed: Pace variation around the space with the strongest spatial tension could affect the concentration and engagement of viewers. It suggests the following fact: Spatial rhythm and speed variation in the area with the strongest visual emphasis encourage viewers to feel the spatial changes, maintain their concentration, and continue their viewing.

The Power of Social Television: Can Social Media Build Viewer Engagement?

Marketers everywhere are paying close attention to radical changes in consumer behavior and engagement provoked by the rise of digital technology. In today's household, it is a common occurrence to share viewing experience across at least two screens: the television and secondary Internet-enabled devices. The current study used Steady State Topography (SST), a brain-activity recording methodology to explore this relationship. Participants' neural responses were recorded while they watched a live television broadcast and were allowed to freely interact on social-media platforms Twitter and Fango. The results indicate that engaging in social media while viewing television can significantly enhance neural indicators of viewer engagement in the television program.

Video Stream Quality Impacts Viewer Behavior: Inferring Causality Using Quasi-Experimental Designs

The distribution of videos over the Internet is drastically transforming how media is consumed and monetized. Content providers, such as media outlets and video subscription services, would like to ensure that their videos do not fail, start up quickly, and play without interruptions. In return for their investment in video stream quality, content providers expect less viewer abandonment, more viewer engagement, and a greater fraction of repeat viewers, resulting in greater revenues. The key question for a content provider or a content delivery network (CDN) is whether and to what extent changes in video quality can cause changes in viewer behavior. Our work is the first to establish a causal relationship between video quality and viewer behavior, taking a step beyond purely correlational studies. To establish causality, we use Quasi-Experimental Designs, a novel technique adapted from the medical and social sciences. We study the impact of video stream quality on viewer behavior in a scientific data-driven manner by using extensive traces from Akamai's streaming network that include 23 million views from 6.7 million unique viewers. We show that viewers start to abandon a video if it takes more than 2 s to start up, with each incremental delay of 1 s resulting in a 5.8% increase in the abandonment rate. Furthermore, we show that a moderate amount of interruptions can decrease the average play time of a viewer by a significant amount. A viewer who experiences a rebuffer delay equal to 1% of the video duration plays 5% less of the video in comparison to a similar viewer who experienced no rebuffering. Finally, we show that a viewer who experienced failure is 2.32% less likely to revisit the same site within a week than a similar viewer who did not experience a failure.

‘Making Strange’: The Photography of Steffi Klenz and Thomas Weinberger

This paper discusses the work of the contemporary German-born artists Steffi Klenz and Thomas Weinberger, who share an interest in ‘making strange’ as a device for bringing to visibility the processes that shape our environment. Klenz and Weinberger belong to a generation of young photographers who, across a considerable variety of subject matter and technique, have been challenging the categories of ‘urban’ and ‘landscape’; they have also been investing in processes of ambiguation through their work, offering an open space for the viewer's own projection and engagement. Quite distinct in focus and technique, Klenz and Weinberger turn away from urban life as action in order to meditate on the spaces where it unfolds. Their work shows complex modes of construction, appropriation and destruction of contemporary urban landscapes and their representations. The work of the two artists is discussed alongside ideas of the homely and the strange as devices of re-cognition, and is situated in the context of contemporary photographic practice that rethinks ways in which we look at our environment.

Sculpture as deconstruction: the aesthetic practice of Ron Mueck

This article analyses recent (2009) work of Australian-born, British-based hyperrealist sculptor, Ron Mueck, in order to show how it not only engages with a range of specific contemporary concerns and debates, but also operates as a visual deconstruction of Cartesian subjectivity. In order to identify Mueck’s deconstructive practice, the article uses a combination of multimodal, sensory and discourse analyses to situate Mueck’s work discursively and institutionally, and to explore the ways in which it provokes reader engagement. As the author identifies, each of the works – Youth, Still life and Drift – addresses specific issues and they all provoke a self-reflexive engagement that brings together all aspects of viewer engagement (sensory, emotional, intellectual, spiritual), challenging the mind/body dichotomy that characterizes the Cartesian subject.

Narrative Dynamics in the Competitive Reality Show

Although the genre of reality television is mocked by critics and rarely discussed by narrative theorists, reality shows confront diffi cult storytelling problems that the best shows resolve in highly creative ways. As nonfi ction, the reality show shares some of the norms associated with the documentary fi lm, with the producers and editors assembling a story from an unwieldy mass of largely unscripted recorded footage. As a genre of television, however, the reality show, like the fi ctional episodic serial, must confront the challenge of maintaining viewer engagement through the commercial breaks and over the course of a long, multiepisode season. Together, these two sets of constraints serve to establish the reality genre as a distinctive mode of storytelling, one reducible neither to the fi lm documentary nor to the fi ctional episodic serial, yet drawing storytelling strategies from both. Th is essay will show how these strategies can produce surprisingly complex narrative dynamics, and here I use the term “dynamics” in the sense proposed

What We Know About Social Media

An introduction is presented to articles published in this issue including The Power of Social Television: Can Social Media Build Viewer Engagement? A New Approach to Brain Imaging of Viewer Immersion, Money Talks...To Online Opinion Leaders: What Motivates Opinion Leaders to Make Social-Network Referrals? and Who 'Likes' You and Why? A Typology of Facebook Fans.

Catch and release: Artworks inspiring insight into environmental issues

‘Catch+Release’ is a Canadian government-funded research and creation project of interactive new media artworks produced by a team of artists, educators and designers in collaboration with Parks Canada’s Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site. Its exhibition component addresses marine environments and coastal communities that once relied on the fishing industry. Through viewer engagement with the artworks, within the context of the museum, the exhibition fosters awareness of the region’s social history and contemporary cultural conditions – ‘catching’ stories and ‘releasing’ stories into the public sphere. The aesthetic and pedagogical strategies for promoting sensory, experiential, participatory learning opportunities and critical engagement, acknowledge the museum as an important informal educational site in its role as custodian, maker of meaning and source of regional identity. The exhibition’s themes resonate globally in coastal communities that share challenges in adapting to (g)local ci cumstances of cultural and geographic transitions due to the demise of fishing industries.

Othello, ‘Turn[ing] Turks’ and Cornelis de Bruyn's Copperplate of the Ottoman Port of Famagusta in the Seventeenth Century

Cornelis de Bruyn's copperplate engraving of Famagusta, Cyprus, reproduced in Reizen van Cornelis de Bruyn door de vermaardste Deelen van Klein Asia (Delft, 1698) may at first sight seem unremarkable. Upon closer inspection, however, it offers some valuable insights into, and raises some important questions about, the Ottoman port of Famagusta and its relationship with the ‘West’. Additionally, it offers the historian a rare visual panoramic of Famagusta's historic structures before the destruction wrought by the earthquake of 1735. The artist's written description of his visit, read in tandem with a critical analysis of the image, is also intriguing and relevant to understanding the seventeenth-century European fear of ‘turn[ing] Turks’ in this, or any other, martyred realm. The starting point of this essay on de Bruyn's artistic treatment of Famagusta, and on what information we can glean from it, is rooted in assumed acceptance of Lawrence O. Goedde's tenet that ‘… we encounter in Dutch seascapes the great adventure of Dutch seafaring rendered with a detail that fascinates and convinces and invites the viewer's emotional and intellectual engagement with the history and life of that time’.

Inhibition of eye blinking reveals subjective perceptions of stimulus salience

Spontaneous eye blinking serves a critical physiological function, but it also interrupts incoming visual information. This tradeoff suggests that the inhibition of eye blinks might constitute an adaptive reaction to minimize the loss of visual information, particularly information that a viewer perceives to be important. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether the timing of blink inhibition, during natural viewing, is modulated between as well as within tasks, and also whether the timing of blink inhibition varies as a function of viewer engagement and stimulus event type. While viewing video scenes, we measured the timing of blinks and blink inhibition, as well as visual scanning, in a group of typical two-year-olds, and in a group of two-year-olds known for attenuated reactivity to affective stimuli: toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Although both groups dynamically adjusted the timing of their blink inhibition at levels greater than expected by chance, they inhibited their blinking and shifted visual fixation differentially with respect to salient onscreen events. Moreover, typical toddlers inhibited their blinking earlier than toddlers with ASD, indicating active anticipation of the unfolding of those events. These findings indicate that measures of blink inhibition can serve as temporally precise markers of perceived stimulus salience and are useful quantifiers of atypical processing of social affective signals in toddlers with ASD.

Phatic morality: Television and proper distance

This article attempts to expand Silverstone’s notion of ‘proper distance’ by asking what moral possibilities are ‘proper’ to aspects of mediation that are usually understood to be ‘distant’: impersonal, non-intimate and inattentive. Proper assessment of these low-intensity modes of mediation invites us to challenge the automatic assumption that moral sensibility has a necessary basis in audience attentiveness, intimacy and involvement with the representations of others. Instead, the article emphasizes the work of ‘phatic morality’, the moral ground created by long-term, habitual, ambient forms of mediated connectivity rather than the attentive engagement of viewers with particular texts. Focusing on television, it elaborates the features and limitations of phatic morality by exploring frequently denigrated aspects of the medium: the creation of non-reciprocal communicative relations between viewer and viewed; the transience of those depicted; the substitutability of depicted individuals and the aggregation of images over time.

Visual activity in Hollywood film: 1935 to 2005 and beyond.

The structure of Hollywood film has changed in many ways over the last 75 years, and much of that change has served to increase the engagement of viewers’ perceptual and cognitive processes. We report a new physical measure for cinema—the visual activity index (VAI)—that reflects one of these changes. This index captures the amount of motion and movement in film. We define whole-film VAI as (1 – median r), reflecting the median correlation of pixels in pairs of near-adjacent frames measured along the entire length of a film or film sequence. Analyses of 150 films show an increase in VAI from 1935 to 2005, with action and adventure films leading the way and with dramas showing little increase. Using these data and those from three more recent high-intensity films, we explore a possible perceptual and cognitive constraint on popular film: VAI as a function of the log of sequence or film duration. We find that many “queasicam” sequences, those shot with an unsteady camera, often exceed our proposed constraint.

Metropolitan neo-gangsterism and the lure of capitalism in Carlo Lizzani's Bandits in Milan

ABSTRACTThis article discusses Carlo Lizzani's Banditi a Milano/Bandits in Milan/The Violent Four (1968), a portrayal of the infamous Cavallero gang, their initial political frustration and, above all, their chronological evolution that underlines the influence of capitalist values and strategies in turning proletarian rebels into ‘managers’ of violent criminal organizations. In particular, it will be discussed the way in which the film reflects the escalation of criminal violence and the increasingly systematic organization and efficiency of criminals as a consequence of their greed for money and success in the post-economic miracle period of Italian society. Particular attention will be paid to the viewer's engagement with the scenarios and the fictional characters portrayed in the film.

Content analysis of antismoking videos on YouTube: message sensation value, message appeals, and their relationships with viewer responses

Focusing on several message features that are prominent in antismoking campaign literature, this content-analytic study examines 934 antismoking video clips on YouTube for the following characteristics: message sensation value (MSV) and three types of message appeal (threat, social and humor). These four characteristics are then linked to YouTube's interactive audience response mechanisms (number of viewers, viewer ratings and number of comments) to capture message reach, viewer preference and viewer engagement. The findings suggest the following: (i) antismoking messages are prevalent on YouTube, (ii) MSV levels of online antismoking videos are relatively low compared with MSV levels of televised antismoking messages, (iii) threat appeals are the videos' predominant message strategy and (iv) message characteristics are related to viewer reach and viewer preference.

Empathetic responses to advertising: Testing a network of antecedents and consequences

It has been proposed conceptually that viewers respond to certain advertisements via Empathetic Responses; that is, by feeling with depicted characters. Such deep viewer engagement is especially valued in today's media environment and is central to dramatic advertising strategies. Nevertheless, Empathetic Responses remain relatively understudied. We situate Empathetic Responses within a model comprising high-level personality domains (within the "Big Five"), lower-level personality facets (multidimensional Trait Empathy), and Perceived Ad Vividness, all as antecedents, as well as consequent Ad-Evoked Feelings. Our findings clarify the composition and function of Empathetic Responses, adding to both basic and applied understandings.

The Effect of User Control on the Cognitive and Emotional Processing of Pictures

This paper explores psychology related to the moment that control is exercised during interactions with media. What is the difference in the thoughtful and emotional engagement of viewers with the content presented between reacting to media versus controlling its onset? Subjects viewed pictures on a computer as part of a 2 (control) × 2 (picture type) × 16 (repetitions) × 2 (order) within-subjects experiment (N = 22). In one condition, subjects controlled the picture onset with a computer mouse. In the other condition, the computer controlled the picture onset. Heart rate and skin conductance were collected as indicators of the automatic attention and arousal elicited by each manipulation of control. Results showed that subjects exhibited a cardiac orienting response when the computer controlled the onset of emotional pictures. Subjects failed to orient when they had control over picture onset. Physiological arousal, as measured by skin conductance, was higher when subjects had control over picture onset. Subjects gave higher subjective ratings on valence and arousal for pictures that were presented by the computer. These results are discussed in relation to current assumptions about interactive media and audience activity.

Do we need new spaces for exhibiting contemporary art?

There is a deep dissatisfaction with curatorial practice today, with some critics suggesting a need for a deeper understanding of audiences and their engagement with arts practices. This article aims to consider and examine aspects of curatorial practice, which focus on the viewer's engagement with contemporary arts practice. I have engaged with issues of a broad, structural context including cultural policy, social inclusion and audience development. I have concentrated these concerns through the optic of exhibitions practice, exploring the impact of curatorial practice on the relations between the viewer and the artwork. My overall line of enquiry is to ask whether we need new spaces for art as a means of deepening and expanding the viewer's engagement with contemporary art? I argue that the gallery and non-gallery spaces are both sites for making and showing art and that it is not a question of a specific site but it concerns the critical engagement that takes place within different spatio-temporal contexts.

Attention and Brain Activity While Watching Television: Components of Viewer Engagement

Television commercials include elements designed to engage the viewer's attention. Manipulations of the commercial's visual structure that result in rapid pacing or frequent scene changes can be engaging because they require a frequent redirection of visual attention. Manipulations of semantic content through such techniques as the inclusion of humorous or anomalous elements can elicit cognitive engagement. Structural manipulations in videos are known to attenuate the alpha (8 to 13 Hz) rhythm of the electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded over posterior cortical regions involved with visual processes. To examine whether other engaging elements also affect the alpha rhythm, EEG was recorded from 10 participants who viewed television commercials. Principal components analysis was used to decompose the alpha rhythm into underlying factors that varied in spatial topography over the head and in spectral composition. Across commercials, the power of a posterior-distributed alpha component was inversely correlated with the frequency of scene changes. In contrast, a frontal component in the lower frequency portion of the alpha band was attenuated during commercials that elicited high subjective interest, independent of scene change frequency. And, an upper-frequency frontal alpha component was attenuated during commercials for which the item being advertised had a high probability of being subsequently recalled, independent of other factors. These frontal patterns of alpha reactivity are consistent with other neuroimaging results concerning frontal lobe activation by executive processes and episodic memory encoding. With appropriate neurologically guided analysis, EEG signals can provide a unique means of monitoring both perceptual and higher order neurocognitive processes during television viewing.

BOOK REVIEW: INTERNET CONTENT CONTROLS

Representations of yoga within media have become increasingly idealised, depicting typical practitioners as young, thin, and physically competent. While previous content analyses of yoga have focused on still images, social media platforms such as Instagram encourage the use of video to enhance viewer engagement. Video may contain features which reflect a more nuanced view of the body, and therefore the current study analysed 400 women in yoga-related videos on Instagram for appearance characteristics, body conceptualisation, yoga pose type, risk, and perceived intention. The vast majority of women were perceived to be in their 20s and thin or athletic. Only 13.2 % of women showed average visible levels of body fat, while more than a third displayed visible muscularity across multiple muscle groups. There was little presence of objectification with the majority of women in active poses, though more than 60 % of poses/sequences were advanced and potentially risky. The vast majority of videos appeared to be for the purpose of demonstrating skill rather than instructing the viewer. The findings show that videos on Instagram perpetuate unrealistic appearance ideals in yoga and also provide a platform for content creators to engage viewers by representing yoga as a highly performative, predominantly advanced physical activity.

Michael Baxandall and the Shadows in Plato’s Cave

Shadows usually lie on the periphery of our visual awareness and yet they constitute visual appearances. Starting from Michael Baxandall’s discussion of this paradox in his recent work on painting and visual cognition in the Enlightenment, this article explores the kinds of shadowing that occur in eighteenth‐century art and also the ambiguous status of shadow effects in contemporary art. It argues that Baxandall’s concerns have significant affinities with those of one of the more important Minimalist artists, Donald Judd. The way Baxandall in his study of shadows seems to abandon the social and cultural historical ambitions of his earlier analysis of Renaissance art, and to adopt a more phenomenological approach, focusing on a viewer's immediate visual engagement with a work, is seen here as symptomatic of a larger shift in the discipline – namely the demise of the systematically historicising imperatives previously more or less taken for granted in serious art historical scholarship.