1. Christian wright
Audience theory homework
Audience theory has several theories within itself in order to construct it. There is:
The Hypodermic model, two step flow theory, uses and gratifications and
encoding/decoding.
The music video I have selected is ‘Justin Bieber- Beauty and a beat’.
Blumler and Katz created theory of uses and gratifications. This video fits in
magnificently with their theory of the ‘Diversion’. This is due to the mise en scene of
the video. The setting is an extremely large pool party with excess amounts of
attractive young women in swim wear which instantly fetishizes them. The girls are
also a lot older Justin Bieber himself. Also the POV camera shot creates a sense of
ironic verisimilitude stating that it isn’t a sort of dream. This allows the audience to
divert from normal day to day life and experience the pop star lifestyle. The audience
from a male prospective could also see personal identity within the central
protagonist themselves as they both appreciate females and the figures they both
sexually objectify. The material is bias as the camera see’s everything through ‘The
male gaze’.
When discussing encoding it is fairly evident that the producer wanted to encode
material which would be 100% bias towards the male prospective in order to
capitalize on potential appreciation from males. This relates to the uses and
gratifications as they attempt to divert the male mind set to what they’ve created; to
what they are ‘encoding’. Although it may be controversial to what the audience as a
whole decode, the whole male audience will be in awe of the escapism they’ve
endured. On the other hand female audiences could find this material offensive
through its objectifying of females. The camera fetishizes females at all times. So
each gender decodes the material in a totally different way.
When discussing the reading of the material, this aspect is almost identical as well.
When males watch this material they gather a positive mentality towards it, they
appreciate and are in awe of all the themes represented such as promiscuous
females. This produces a preferred reading from males. On the other hand when
discussing females they most probably take a negotiated or oppositional reading the
video as they oppose the gaze employed from the narrative.