Audience

2. Audience: are the viewers and targeted groups of people for media
products. They are important because media texts are all constructed
with audience in mind.
“All media products are made for us, the audience.”
However media products are sometimes made to construct a medias
audience.

3. Audience Theory describes the different
ways of thinking about the audience.
Audience Research tries to produce
evidence about the relationships between
media and audience. It is always linked
closely to certain audience theory an
example of which is if you are watching
Natural Born Killers encourages teen
violence, you're probably working with the
assumption that the media strongly
influences young, teenage audiences.

4.  This theory became common in 1950s America.
Orsen Wells adapted the H.G. Wells story, War of
The Worlds, and it was broadcast as a set of
mock news bulletins about the Martian invasion
of earth. These radio broadcast resulted in wide
spread panic of the listening audiences and even
reported sightings of these aliens. This is an
example of Hypodermic Model. This theory in
summary revolves round how the media text
effects the viewing audience, in that present
moment and in the future; whether this be on a
small or large scale.

5. Some theorists think that the media can cause cultural effects and there are two main
theories about how the media are thought to do this. Each view comes from a
different political perspective.
One is right wing and the other is traditionally left wing.
1. Right wing: reality TV like that of Love Island, Jeremy Kyle and Big Brother that is
available to the masses has a negative effect on peoples phycology and mental
capabilities. It’s the idea of ‘dumbing down’.
2. Left Wing: Mass media are controlled by those who have power in society and
because of this they tend to provide representations which uphold the status quo. An
example of this, the news may prioritise a story about the royal family over normal
people living in suburbia, the implication of this is that the first group of people are
more important. The example means that the news programme is helping the more
powerful people stay in power.

6.  Stuart Hall proposed the idea that all media texts contain meaning which are all
encoded by the producer and decoded by the audience. This suggests that audiences
are active and their own cultural experiences meant that audiences may decode the
messages in different ways depending on their particular view point.
 This can be broken down into three categories:
 Dominant or hegemonic reading: the reader shares the texts code and fully accepts
the texts ‘preferred reading’.
 Negotiated reading: the reader partly shares the text code and broadly accepts the
preferred reading but may modify it in a different way which reflects their
individual opinion.
 Oppositional or counter hegemonic reading: the reader doesn’t share the text code
and rejects the preferred reading.