Audiences are individuals or groups that consume media texts. Media institutions produce content to attract audiences and make a profit. Audiences can be categorized as global or local. The hypodermic model suggests that media messages are injected into passive audiences who cannot resist their influence. However, Stuart Hall identified that audiences can have dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings of media texts based on their own views. Uses and gratifications theory proposes that audiences actively use media to fulfill needs like diversion, information, and social comparison. The two-step flow theory further suggests that opinion leaders first receive media messages and then pass them on to others together with their own interpretations.

1. AUDIENCE:
An individual or collective group of people who read or consume any media text e.g Radio
listeners, television viewers, newspaper and magazine readers. Without audiences there would
be no media therefore media institution produce a media text to make profit, no audience= no
profit.
The mass media is becoming increasingly competitive than ever to attract more and more
audiences if different ways to stay profitable. Audiences are made up into two categories which
are global and local.
The hypodermic model
- The messages in media texts are injected into the audience by powerful (syringe like media).
- The audience is powerless to resist
- Therefore the media works like a drug and the audience is addicted/duped.
Stuart Hall identified three types of audience readings of text;
1. Dominant or preferred
Where the audience decodes the message as the producer wants them to do and broadly agrees
with it E.g. watching a political speech and agreeing with it
2. Negotiated
Where the audience accepts, rejects or refines elemetns of the text in light of previously held
views.
3. Oppositional
Where the dominant meaning is recognized but rejected for cultural, political or ideological
reasons.

2. Uses & Gratifications theory; Bulmer and Katz
Stating that the audience use media texts to gratify needs for
-Diversion
-Escapism
-Information
-Pleasure
-Comparing relationships and lifestyles with their own
-Sexual stimulation
Two Step Flow
Katz and Lazarsfeld developed the theory the two steps;
First-Opinion Leaders get information from a media source.
Second-Opinion Leaders then pass the information, along with their interpretation, to others
(friends, family, Acquaintances)