Uses and Gratification Theory holds that audiences actively seek out media to fulfill certain needs like knowledge, relaxation, social interaction, or escape. People will choose the media source that best satisfies those needs and interpret it through their own experiences. The theory was developed by Blumer and Katz who identified five main motivations for media consumption: information, entertainment, personal identity, social interaction, and escapism.

1. Critical Theory

2. Uses and
Gratification
Theory
▪ An approach to understanding why and how people
actively seek out specific media to meet specific needs.
▪ Users deliberately seek out media that will satisfy given
needs and allow them to enhance knowledge,
relaxation,social interactions/ companionship,
diversion or escape.
▪ Assumes audience are not passive consumers of media
but rather have an active role in interpreting and
integrating media into their own lives.
▪ The media competes with other sources for satisfaction.

3. Blumer and Katz
▪ Five different reasons for consuming chosen media;
▪ INFORMATION AND EDUCATION – the viewer can acquire
information, knowledge and understanding by watching
programmes like the news or documentaries or reading
articles.
▪ ENTERTAINMENT – media is consumed for enjoyment.
▪ PERSONAL IDENTITY – Can recognise a person or product as a
role model that reflect similar values to themselves and mimic
some of their characteristics.
▪ INTEGRATION AND SOCIAL INTERACTION – Media products
can produce a topic of conversation between people.
▪ ESCAPISM/DIVERSON – People can escape their real lives and
imagine themselves in the situations described by the media
product.

4. Reception
Theory
STUART HALL (1970s)
▪ Media texts are encoded with meaning by produces and then
decoded by the audience.
▪ The audience decodes the meaning in one of three ways;
- Dominant/ preferred Reading
The audience uncritically accepts the preferred or intended
meaning of the media text.
- Negotiated Reading
The message is partly accepted and partly rejected.
- Oppositional Reading
The audience completely rejects the message/ intended reading.
▪ The audience is active and has different responses dependant
on their cultural background.

5. Media
Language
▪ SEMIOTOCS = how meaning is created through language and
codes.
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE – SIGNIFIER AND SIGNIFIED
- The SIGNIFIER is the form the sign takes – what we literally see in
front of us.
- The SIGNIFIED is the idea we associate with the signifier (what
concept it represents)
ROLAND BARTHES – DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION
- This theory looks at how an audience will interpret meaning from a
media text, and how they do this is dependent on society and their
personal experience of the world.
There are two levels of meaning within a media text:
- The DENOTATION is the object in a media text.
- The CONNOTATION is what the audience interprets from that
object based on their own social, cultural or historical knowledge.

6. Male Gaze
Theory
LAURA MULVEY
▪ When an audience is put into the perspective of a
heterosexual man, e.g. by focusing on the curves of a
women’s body.
▪ The male gaze denies women of human identity by
regulating them to the status of objects to be admired for
their physical appearance.
▪ In the media women can therefore only view themselves
from the secondary perspective of a man.
▪ Women become an object rather than the subject of a
media text.
▪ This leads to women gazing at other women in the same
way a man would and therefore objectifying other women.
▪ A passive audience could be influenced by and imitate
this version of reality.

7. Genre
STEVE NEIL
▪ ‘genres are instances of repetition and difference’
‘difference is absolutely essential for the economy of
genre’ (repetition would not attract an audience)