Audience
Audience theory
provides a starting point for many Media Studies tasks. Whether you are
constructing a text or analysing one, you will need to consider the destination
of that text (i.e. its target audience) and how that audience (or any other) will
respond to that text.
Remember that a
media text in itself has no meaning until it is read or decoded by an audience.
For GCSE, you
learned how audience is described and
measured. Now you need a working knowledge of the theories which attempt to
explain how an audience receives, reads and responds to a text. Over the course
of the past century or so, media analysts have developed several effects
models, ie theoretical explanations of how humans ingest the information
transmitted by media texts and how this might influence (or not) their
behaviour. Effects theory is still a very hotly debated area of Media and
Psychology research, as no one is able to come up with indisputable evidence
that audiences will always react to media texts one way or another. The
scientific debate is clouded by the politics of the situation: some audience
theories are seen as a call for more censorship, others for less control.
Whatever your personal stance on the subject, you must understand the following
theories and how they may be used to deconstruct the relationship between
audience and text.
1. The Hypodermic Needle Model
Basically, the
Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that the information from a text passes into
the mass consciouness of the audience unmediated, ie the experience,
intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of
the text. This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the
creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily
changed by media-makers. It assumes that the audience are passive and heterogenous.
This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents,
politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain why certain groups in
society should not be exposed to certain media texts (comics in the 1950s, rap
music in the 2000s), for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent
behaviour and will then act them out themselves.
2. Two-Step Flow
The Hypodermic
model quickly proved too clumsy for media researchers seeking to more precisely
explain the relationship between audience and text. As the mass media became an
essential part of life in societies around the world and did NOT reduce
populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation
was sought.
Paul Lazarsfeld,
Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making
processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their
results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their findings suggested
that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its
audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who
then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have
influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the
media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being
influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the
power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that
social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted
texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm.
3. Uses & Gratifications
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. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following
functions for individuals and society:
·
surveillance
·
correlation
·
entertainment
·
cultural transmission
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 (ie uses and
gratifications):
·
Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.
·
Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other
interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life
·
Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning
behaviour and values from texts
·
Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) 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 (eg video games, the internet)
4. Reception Theory
Extending the
concept of an active audience still further, in the 1980s and 1990s a lot of
work was done on the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how
their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their
reading.
This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding
model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by
the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences
between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognised
codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to
aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the
audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means.
This is known as a preferred reading.
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