Audience theory notes - theorists

1. Audience Theory
What is audience?
 All media products have a target audience
 They also sometimes (particularly in the case of propaganda) try to construct an
audience
 Products can have a mass audience or a niche audience
 The producers texts need to know the importance of their audience when making
products
Theory 1: The Frankfurt School
 Group of media theorists in the 1920s and ‘30s that were concerned about the
possible effects of mass media
 They envisioned the media as a hypodermic syringe – how the mass-media
influences audiences, linear communication theory (one way), passive audience, no
individuality in the group
 The contents were injected into the thoughts of the audience, who accepted the
attitudes, opinions and beliefs expressed by the medium without even thinking twice
Theory 2: The Two Step Flow
 Lazarsfeld and Katz in the 1940s and ‘50s
 Book called ‘The People’s Choice’ 1940s by Lazarsfeld - Discovered that we’re more
likely to be influenced by people than the mass media
 Katz – book called ‘Personal Influence’
 Audience is no longer passive
 2012 survey with Twitter – news finds its way to people through a diffused layer of
opinion leaders – an opinion influenced through someone else’s eyes
 More likely to buy a product if your friends are telling you to do so, other than the
media
Strengths – Audiences are active and seen as part of a society
Limitations – More than two steps in the flow of communication?
Two Steps:
 First – Opinion Leaders get information from a media source
 Second – Opinion Leaders then pass the information, along with their interpretation,
to other (friends, family, acquaintances, etc.)
Theory 3: Moving from the two step flow, audiences becoming active

2.  1960s, as the first generation to grow up with TV became grown ups, it became
increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what
they did when consuming texts
 Far from being passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively
consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways
 This layer became the ‘Uses and Gratifications’ theory
List of gratifications – Blumler and Katz – 1974
1. Diversion – escape from everyday problems and routine
2. Personal Relationships – using the media for emotional and other interaction, e.g.
substituting soap operas for family life
3. Personal Identity – finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values
from texts
4. Surveillance – info which could be useful for living e.g. weather reports, financial
news, holiday bargains
Since then, the list has been extended, particularly as new media forms have come along
(e.g. video games, the web)
 Instant messaging – do it for inclusion (to be part of a social group), relaxation,
sociability, fashion, escape, affection (heavy users more motivated by sociability and
affection, and light users its usually motivation by fashion) – split by
gender….women chat longer for sociability, and men chat shorter for relaxation and
entertainment
 Online gaming – accomplishment, success, entertainment, escape
Theory 4: Slightly more modern…David Morley, 1980s
 Dominant (hegemonic) reading – The reader shares the programme’s ‘code’ (its
meaning, system of values, attitudes, beliefs and assumptions) and fully accepts
the programme’s ‘preferred reading’
 Negotiated Reading – The reader partly shares the programme’s code and
broadly accepts the preferred reading, but modifies it in a way which reflects
their position and interests
 Oppositional (counter-hegemonic) reading – the reader does not share the
programme’s code and rejects the preferred reading, bringing to bear an
alternative frame of interpretation.