Audience Theory

In today's media lesson, we looked at "Audience theory" in relation to our final production work.

We need to look at the ways the audience receives, reads and responds to any media text. This is important for construction and distribution of our productions as well as for collective identity.
We also look at how to distribute texts in order to attract or reach our target audience. (Advertising package)

Effect Models

These are theories that explain how we take in the media all around us and the effects it has on us. How the media might influence (or not influence) our behaviour.
Some theories lead us to think we need more censorship of the media, whilst others might lead us to call for less control.
Theory helps us to work out the complexity of relationships between audience and texts.

The Hypodermic Needle Model

It assumes that the audience just sits there and gets injected with non-stop information.
Audiences are seen as passive receivers of information transmitted in the text without thinking about them or challenging them.
People began to see the power of the media to influence and communicate messages - production of propaganda to influence thinking.

The Two Step-flow

This suggests that the audience does not absorb information directly from the text but is influenced by opinion leaders. Social factors are also seen to be important in the reception of media texts.

Uses and Gratifications

Audiences were seen as being made of individuals who were active consumers. Mass is that they did the same thing but in different ways.
This theory was developed further in in 1974 by Blumer and Katz
Diversion-(escape from everyday problems and routines)
Personal relationship-(Using the media for emotional or other interaction)
Personal Identity-(Finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values for texts)
Surveillance- ( Finding information which could be useful for living) such as: weather, financial news, holiday information etc.

Reception Theory

Stuart Hall- Talk about the encoding/decoding model of relationship between audience and text.
The text is encoded by the producer (meaning inscribed). It is then decoded by the reader (in ways that the producer cannot control).

Niche Marketing

Despite the tendency to try to reach a large audience for the media text, it is important that we don't forget to look at "narrow casting". It is the opposite of " Broadcasting"

Audiences

Julian McDougall(2009)- suggests that in the online age, it is getting harder to conceive a media audience as a stable identifiable group. However, audiences still clearly makes sense and give meaning to cultural products.

An audience can be described as a "temporary collective" (McQuail 1972)

Leng Ang (1991)
"Audiences only exist as an imaginary entity" - so in other words, we create an imaginaryimage of our targeted audience before we create our product.

Hartley (1987)
Also suggests that institutions must produce "invisible fictions of audience which allow the institutions to get a sense of who they must enter into relations with"