This document discusses key questions to consider when analyzing media audiences: - How audiences process and make meaning from media texts, including Stuart Hall's theories of encoding/decoding as preferred, oppositional, negotiated, or aberrant readings. - How audiences are affected by media texts according to media effects theories versus being active in using media to fulfill needs as per uses and gratifications theory. - How audience consumption has changed from mass audiences of broadcast media to narrowcast and peer-to-peer sharing as audiences fragment across multiple platforms.

1. What questions are important when
thinking about audience?
You were asked to construct a short
questionnaire for homework. What questions
are important when finding out about
audiences?

2. AUDIENCES: Reception and
Appeal
L.O: to develop our knowledge of media audiences by
applying theories and discussing relevant examples.
STARTER: How many different ‘audience groups’ were you part of over
the weekend? What media did you consume? Make a short list.
How do these vary? Do you have different examples to your partner?
Why are they different?

3. What do we already know?
What do you already know about media
audiences?
• Add at least one idea to the mind map on the
whiteboard.
• Key words: effects theories, uses and
gratifications, demographic.

4. Audience: Key Areas
• How we process texts (encoding/decoding).
• How we are affected by texts (media effects).
• What we get from texts (uses and
gratifications).

5. Re-capping Media Effects
• Theories developed by Frankfurt School (Adorno
and Horkheimer c. 1930s-1950s). Closely linked
to Nazi ideology and power relations.
• Passive audience positioning.
• Manipulation and power of media to ‘inject’
audiences with own ideologies.
• Hypodermic Syringe Theory
• Two-Step Flow Theory
• Cultivation Theory

6. Are we really that passive?
What can media offer an audience?
• Means to create an identity
• Goals and aspiration
• Communication
• Entertainment
• Information…

7. Uses and Gratifications
Blumler and Katz (1975)
• Theory which determines audiences as ‘active’
compared to media effects theory.
• Audiences seek out and consume media texts to
satisfy and gratify needs.
• Think about a media item you have consumed
today. Why did you choose this?
• …however, limitations of model: can we really
know what an audience wants? How?
• Surveys, focus groups, interviews (but what might
be wrong with these?)

8. How have audiences changed?
• Broadcasting – few to many (mass audience).
• Narrowcasting – few to few (determined on
demographic choices).
• Peer-to-peer – many to many, file sharing,
audience distribution.

9. Audience consumption
• Media consumption – drastic change.
• TV/radio no longer centre of home, multiple
rooms, accessible from computers, tablets,
mobile phones.
• Raymond Williams concept of “flow” (1974). TV
consumption located within personal culture and
context (i.e. TV on for background noise or
company).
• Our media consumption is not always a
deliberate set of choices to gratify a need (habit,
etc).

10. READINGS:
How audiences process texts
• Different audiences react to texts in different ways.
We don’t all see the same message.
• Producers “construct” texts to attract specific
audiences.
• Audiences “READ” media texts.
• Stuart Hall (a media researcher who focused on
television in the home) proposed the theory of
Encoding and Decoding in the 1970s.

11. Stuart Hall: Encoding and Decoding
• ENCODERS (producers) create texts with a PREFERRED
READING (the meaning they WANT the audience to take
from it) which the audience then DECODE: e.g. Nike
symbol (“Just do it”).
• However, audiences may not take the preferred
reading. They may take an:
• OPPOSITIONAL READING
• NEGOTIATED READING
• ABERRANT READING

12. Oppositional Readings
• When someone makes a
conscious rejection or
subversion of the preferred
meaning.
• E.g. a feminist reading of the
charming (and thankfully
disbanded. Or did it come back?)
UniLad website.
Can you think of a text you have had an oppositional reading
to?

13. Negotiated Readings
• When someone understands the meaning but
doesn’t fully agree with it, such as if it doesn’t
relate to them so it is of no interest to them to
decode it.
• E.g. a teenager with no political interest watching Question
Time may understand the points but be neither persuaded or
dissuaded by either POV.

14. Aberrant Readings
• When someone misreads or misunderstands
the message the producers are trying to
portray.
• E.g. a parent looking at a teenage magazine and believing
them to be inappropriate or pornographic due to their
‘sex advice articles’, without putting the articles into
context.

15. How audiences process texts
• Pick one TV advert, watch it carefully thinking about the
representation of different groups, the topics and the codes
used by the producers.
• What do you think the preferred reading is?
Which audience groups do you think take away a:
1. Preferred Reading
2. Oppositional Reading
3. Negotiated Reading
4. Aberrant Reading

16. MODE OF ADDRESS
Producers will construct a particular mode of
address in order to aim their media text at a
specific audience group.
Mode of Address is… the way in which the text
“speaks” to the audience. It is a construction using a
number of codes from all elements of the text for
example technical codes (camera, lighting, sound,
etc) and symbolic codes (language, colour, etc)

17. Alternative Modes of Address
Mode of Address Audience
relationship
Audience Role Example
Direct Semi-Formal
(Informative)
Acquaintance/Client Consumer Affairs i.e.
Watchdog
Objective Formal (but equal) Listener Documentary
i.e. Wildlife Docs.
Authoritative Formal/ Submissive Learner TV News
Familiar Friendly Friend Game Show/ Docu
Soap
Familiar (Participant) Illusion of Social
Interaction
Participant-egging on
contestants or taking
part
Game Shows i.e.
Who wants to be
millionaire/ Big
Brother/ Pop Idol

18. MODE OF ADDRESS
• Look at a range of TV programmes and decide what the
mode of address is for each. Why have the producers
chosen this mode? Think carefully about who the
audience is.
• In today’s society the familiar mode is becoming far more
popular and people are having a huge input into what
they see on TV (Big Brother/ Pop Idol etc ) and now even
on film.
• Do you think this “participation” is REAL or purely an
ILLUSION?

19. Homework
• Pick a short media text (an advert, the
opening to television programme, a film
trailer, a magazine advert, etc).
• Can you apply the audience theories that we
have looked at today?
Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding.
Media effect theories and uses and
gratifications.