Agenda Setting Theory, Uses and Gratification Theory and Dependency Theory

1. COMMUNICATION
THEORIES
Prepared By:
• Nandini Goel
• Kajal Gautam
• Ankit Chabba
• Yash Mudgal
• Harshit Jain

3. IN A WORLD
WITHOUT
COMMUNICATION
• we would not know what other people
think
• identify problems in the communities
would be impossible
• we would be more individualistic
• the discoveries would be difficult to share

4. • Communication theory was
proposed by S. F. Scudder in the
year 1980.
• It states that all living beings
existing on the planet
communicate although the way of
communication is different.

6. Exchange of information
A key to engage with
people
Convey, exchange of
thoughts
Awareness
Mutual Understanding,
Connectivity, To express
anything verbally and
non verbally
Simplification
The foundation of society
Social media
Gain or give some
knowledge or thought to
someone
RESPONSES

7. WILL DISCUSS
ABOUT:
• Agenda Setting Theory
• Uses and
Gratification Theory
• Dependency Theory

8. AGENDA SETTING THEORY

9. HISTORY
• It was formally developed by Max
McCombs and Donald Shaw.
• In a study on the 1968 American
presidential election.

10. CONCEPT
• The "ability of the news
media to influence the
importance placed on the
topics of the public agenda.
• Media has a great influence
to their audience by instilling
what they should think
instead of what they think.
• If a news item is covered
frequently and prominently,
the audience will regard the
issue as more important.

11. ASSUMPTIONS
Two basic assumptions:
• the press and the media do
not reflect reality; they filter
and shape it;
• media concentration on a few
issues and subjects leads the
public to perceive those
issues as more important
than other issues.

12. PARTS OF AGENDA
SETTING THEORY
Parts of agenda setting
according to Rogers and
Dearing in their book
Agenda Setting Research
are:
• Importance of issues
• Impact over public
thinking or public
agenda
• Effects on policy agenda

13. CRITICISMS
• Agenda setting of any media or news article is
difficult to measure.
• Surveys and studies are very subjective and not
very accurate.
• People have many options to read the same stories
from different angles due to new media nowadays.
So people have various choices on what to see or
hear.
• People might not look at the details and miss some
important points resulting in misunderstanding.
• Media effect does not work for people who have
fixed mindset.
• Media is not able to create information but is able to
change the priority of the information to the public

14. EXAMPLE

16. USES AND
GRATIFICATION
THEORY

17. HISTORY
• Jay Blumler and Denis McQuail laid
the primary groundwork in 1969.
• With the categorization of audience
motivations for watching political
programs during the time of the 1964
election in the United Kingdom.

18. CONCEPT
• An approach to understand why and how people actively
seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs.
• Audience-centered approach
• Focuses on "what do people do with media?"
• Media is a highly available product and the audiences are
the consumers.

19. TYPES OF NEEDS AND GRATIFICATIONS

20. ASSUMPTIONS
• The audience is active and its media use is goal oriented
• The initiative in linking need gratification to a specific medium choice rests with
the audience member
• The media compete with other resources for need satisfaction
• People have enough self-awareness of their media use, interests, and motives to be
able to provide researchers with an accurate picture of that use.
• Value judgments of media content can only be assessed by the audience.

21. CRITICISMS
• Audiences of different ages likely
have different motivations for
using identical media.
• Due to the individualistic nature
of uses and gratification, it is
difficult to take the information
that is collected in studies. Most
research relies on pure recollection
of memory rather than data. This
makes self-reports complicated
and immeasurable.
• Audiences interpret the media in
their own terms and any debate
for or against this can be argued.
• Each individual has unique uses to
which the media attempts to meet
their gratifications.

22. EXAMPLE

27. HISTORY
• Introduced by the American communications researchers
Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Melvin DeFleur in 1976.
• Emerged in reaction to modernization theories of
development, arguing that international inequalities were
socially structured.

28. CONCEPT • Systematic approach to the study of
the effects of mass media on
audiences and of the interactions
between media, audiences, and social
systems.
• Conceives dependency as a
relationship in which the fulfillment
of one party’s needs and goals is
reliant on the resources of another
party.
• Focus is the relationship between
media and audiences.

29. PROPOSITIONS
• the greater the number of
social functions performed
for an audience by a
medium, the greater the
audience’s dependency on
that medium, and
• the greater the instability of
a society, the greater the
audience’s dependency on
the media and, therefore,
the greater the potential
effects of the media on the
audience.

30. CRITICISMS
• Lack of competition: by subsidizing in-country industries
and preventing outside imports, these companies may
have less incentive to improve their products.
• Sustainability: industries reliant on government support
may not be sustainable for very long, particularly in
poorer countries and countries which largely depend on
more developed countries.

31. EXAMPLE

34. And here we conclude with the presentation!