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 producer’s texts need to know the importance of their audience when making
products.
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School (a group of media theorists in the 1920s and 1930s) were
concerned about the possible effects of mass media.
They proposed the "Effects" model, which considered society to be composed of
isolated individuals who were susceptible to media messages.
The Frankfurt school envisioned the media as a hypodermic syringe.
The contents of the media were injected into the thoughts of the audience, who
accepted the attitudes, opinions and beliefs expressed by the medium without
question.
A potential problem? The Audience are purely passive.
The two Step Flow
Developed by Lazarsfeld and Katz in the 1940s and 1950s
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, etc.)
Audiences becoming active
During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown-
ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made
choices about what they did when consuming texts.
Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively
consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways.
This later became the ‘Uses and Gratifications’ theory
2. Uses and Gratifications 1974
Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating
that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (i.e. uses and
gratifications):
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 behavior and values
from texts
4. Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living e.g. weather reports,
financial news, holiday bargains
Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, particularly as new media
forms have come along (e.g. video games, the internet)
David Morley
In a very significant study of audience responses to a popular news magazine programme in
the early
1980s, The Nationwide Audience, David Morley suggests that there are three main different
kinds of ‘reading’
Audience members can produce:
Dominant (or ‘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.
