This document discusses several models of how audiences interact with and are influenced by media texts: 1) The "Hypodermic Needle (Effects) Model" views audiences as passive and easily influenced by media messages. 2) "Uses and Gratifications" sees audiences as active users of media who consume texts to fulfill needs like entertainment and escapism, rather than being influenced. 3) "Reception Theory" examines how audiences decode and understand media messages, which can be decoded dominantly, negotiated, or oppositionally.

2. Why do audiences choose to consume certain
texts?
Escapism, social interaction, entertainment and
personal identity.
How do they consume them?
TV, internet, apps, social media, YouTube.
What happens when they consume the texts?
Share it.

3. Media Audiences
Media audiences cam be defined in terms of
location, consumption, size and subjectivity.
LOCATION – control and regulation.
CONSUMPTION- consume such as particular
genre.
SIZE- mass or niche audiences.
SUJECTIVITY- groups such as gender, race and
religion.

4. Hypodermic Needle (Effects Model)
• Influences the audience
• Effect usually negative
• Passive audience
• Power lies in the message which is injected
• Media acts like a drug as they agree
• Bobo Doll Experiment 1961
• Contributes to Moral Panic (Stanley Cohen 1972)
• Moral Panic and Folk Devils is the mass response to
something such as an object defined as a threat to
society e.g. bomb
• ‘folk devil’ name given to the threat

5. Uses and Gratifications
• Audience are active
• Uses the text and isn’t influenced
• Media used for own pleasure
• Power lies with audience
• Emphasis on how they use it e.g. free to reject, use or play
• Escapism, personal relationships, identity, entertainment
A more recent model of audience
is that of uses and gratifications,
which suggests that there is a
highly active audience making use
of the media for a range of
purposes designed to satisfy needs
such as entertainment, information
and identification.

6. Reception Theory
• Considered how things are understood by the audience
by encoding and decoding.
• Sometimes the meaning will be decoded correctly
however some fail to decode correctly or fail to at all.
• Types of audience decoding's – dominant, negotiated or
oppositional.
• Dominant agreed with the message.
• Negotiated neither agree or disagree or unbothered.
• Oppositional do not agree with the message.

7. Maslow’s Hierarchy
Of Needs (1943)