Audience theories
There are various theories behind audiences, how they view and consume media and the texts.
Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall was cultural theorist, political activist and a Marxist which significantly influenced his theory.
The reception theory was created as Hall was concerned that the power of the media would create a dominant ideology of social values.
Audience positioning refers to how different social groups interpret Mass Media text in which a producer encodes a message they wish to convey.
Encoding: intentionally putting a meaning in a media text.
Decoding: letting the audience interpret a meaning.
Hall produced a model suggesting three forms of audience readings of a text.
These were:
The dominant reading
The negotiated reading
Oppositional reading
Dominant reading (or hegemonic): the reader fully accepts the preferred reading. This is where the audience reads the text the way the director intended them to. The code will seem natural to them.
Negotiated reading: the reader will partly believe the code and accepts the preferred reading but may modify it to reflect their own experience.
Oppositional reading: the reader will reject the reading as their social position places them in an oppositional relation to the dominant code.
There are multiple factors that affect how individual decode media texts:
Life experience
Mood at time of viewing
Age
Culture
Belief
Gender
Audience are seen as active producers of meaning rather than consuming of media meaning in this theory. Some researchers believe that looking at lifestyle has more authority than sociological approach.
Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno was a philosopher and composer- known for his critical theory society.
He created the hypodermic model which is part of the effects debate. This model is compared to a syringe, the media injects messages directly into the minds of a viewer, listens and readers. This can be additive.
This theory draws the attention to the power the media has and to the importance of the forms of media to which the audience has access.
“Audience are passive consumers”
A weakness to this theory is that the injected audience is passive and powerless. It is also frequently used toward women and children and doesn’t account for the way in which audiences use media.
Blumler & Katz
They created the uses and gratification theory which is an approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs. This is an audience centred approach to understanding mass communication.
It’s about what the audience do with the media,what they enjoy and their needs. The audience is seen as pro-active and intelligent which subverts from the view of audiences being ‘couch potatoes’. As well as the pleasure that media gives is not regarded as negative.
The audience was media forms for various reasons, Katz and Blumler created a basic model explaining these.
The basic model includes 4 key points.
Identify: being able to recognise the product or person in front of you and be an aspiration to someone else.
Educate: being able to acquire information, knowledge and understanding.
Entertain:what you are consuming show produce enjoyment.
Social interaction: the ability for media products to produce a topic of conversation between other people and spark debates.
This theory is also commonly know as the two step flow theory.
The audience get information from a type of media source
The audience pass on the information, along with their interpretation.
The audience pays close attention to the media source viewed, they become influential and are similar to the people who they influence.
However a liberal approach might distract us from how media can influence us.
Stanley cohen
sociologist and criminologist
Folk devils and moral panics (1972)
He performed a study of the uk popular media social reaction to mods and rockers phenomena.
The work applied concepts of labelling and social interaction.
Cohen suggested the media overreact to an aspect of behaviour which can be seen as a challenge to existing social norms. Media response and representation of that behaviour helps to define, communicate and portrays it as a model for outsiders to observe and adopt.
He says the media play a massive part in enforcing moral panic even when it is just reporting news. The moral panic by society represented in the media arguably fuels further socially unacceptable behaviour.
Moral panic is said to send society into mass hysteria over a certain issue that occurs. The public then believe that the issue is occurring everywhere.
Cohen states that moral panic happens when a ‘condition, episode, person or group emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.
David Gauntlett
David was a British sociologist and media theorist. A key quote from him is ‘making and connecting’
His earlier work concerned contemporary media audiences, however he moved towards a focus on everyday making and sharing digital and social media.
“Platforms of creativity” is a concept which is meant to encourage creative conversation and foster creativity of people. ‘Platforms’ are in the form of events, environment or tools. It gave people opportunity to express, connect and share.
He formed an online article entitled media studies 2.0. Gauntlett believes traditional media landscape is changing and in a post modernist society audiences and producers are merging together. Platforms like YouTube encourages audiences to produce their own productions which rejects the idea of audiences being ‘couch potatoes’ as the audience is becoming far more proactive in the world of media. Within this audiences are able to create their own identities and influences others. Add on to this is Web 2.0, this allows us to create identities without having to follow traditional forms. Gives freedom to audiences to express themselves and makes it more acceptable to be different.
In 2008, Gauntlett proposed the ‘make and connect agenda’ as a way to rethink audiences studies in context of media users as a producers and consumers of media material. This refers to audiences as prosumers.
This particular theory relates to my media project due to the fact my short film is being distributed through a new media platform being YouTube. I am not only an audience member of content that is being produced by others, I am also becoming a producer's myself and creating new content for a new audience.
Within my final piece, I want to include decoding allowing my audience to interpret a meaning by themselves instead of encoding one particular meaning following Stuart hall's theory. Although, I will be aware that down to audience positioning, not all social groups will interpret the media text the exact same way I intended them too.
Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall was cultural theorist, political activist and a Marxist which significantly influenced his theory.
The reception theory was created as Hall was concerned that the power of the media would create a dominant ideology of social values.
Audience positioning refers to how different social groups interpret Mass Media text in which a producer encodes a message they wish to convey.
Encoding: intentionally putting a meaning in a media text.
Decoding: letting the audience interpret a meaning.
Hall produced a model suggesting three forms of audience readings of a text.
These were:
The dominant reading
The negotiated reading
Oppositional reading
Dominant reading (or hegemonic): the reader fully accepts the preferred reading. This is where the audience reads the text the way the director intended them to. The code will seem natural to them.
Negotiated reading: the reader will partly believe the code and accepts the preferred reading but may modify it to reflect their own experience.
Oppositional reading: the reader will reject the reading as their social position places them in an oppositional relation to the dominant code.
There are multiple factors that affect how individual decode media texts:
Life experience
Mood at time of viewing
Age
Culture
Belief
Gender
Audience are seen as active producers of meaning rather than consuming of media meaning in this theory. Some researchers believe that looking at lifestyle has more authority than sociological approach.
Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno was a philosopher and composer- known for his critical theory society.
He created the hypodermic model which is part of the effects debate. This model is compared to a syringe, the media injects messages directly into the minds of a viewer, listens and readers. This can be additive.
This theory draws the attention to the power the media has and to the importance of the forms of media to which the audience has access.
“Audience are passive consumers”
A weakness to this theory is that the injected audience is passive and powerless. It is also frequently used toward women and children and doesn’t account for the way in which audiences use media.
Blumler & Katz
They created the uses and gratification theory which is an approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs. This is an audience centred approach to understanding mass communication.
It’s about what the audience do with the media,what they enjoy and their needs. The audience is seen as pro-active and intelligent which subverts from the view of audiences being ‘couch potatoes’. As well as the pleasure that media gives is not regarded as negative.
The audience was media forms for various reasons, Katz and Blumler created a basic model explaining these.
The basic model includes 4 key points.
Identify: being able to recognise the product or person in front of you and be an aspiration to someone else.
Educate: being able to acquire information, knowledge and understanding.
Entertain:what you are consuming show produce enjoyment.
Social interaction: the ability for media products to produce a topic of conversation between other people and spark debates.
This theory is also commonly know as the two step flow theory.
The audience get information from a type of media source
The audience pass on the information, along with their interpretation.
The audience pays close attention to the media source viewed, they become influential and are similar to the people who they influence.
However a liberal approach might distract us from how media can influence us.
Stanley cohen
sociologist and criminologist
Folk devils and moral panics (1972)
He performed a study of the uk popular media social reaction to mods and rockers phenomena.
The work applied concepts of labelling and social interaction.
Cohen suggested the media overreact to an aspect of behaviour which can be seen as a challenge to existing social norms. Media response and representation of that behaviour helps to define, communicate and portrays it as a model for outsiders to observe and adopt.
He says the media play a massive part in enforcing moral panic even when it is just reporting news. The moral panic by society represented in the media arguably fuels further socially unacceptable behaviour.
Moral panic is said to send society into mass hysteria over a certain issue that occurs. The public then believe that the issue is occurring everywhere.
Cohen states that moral panic happens when a ‘condition, episode, person or group emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.
David Gauntlett
David was a British sociologist and media theorist. A key quote from him is ‘making and connecting’
His earlier work concerned contemporary media audiences, however he moved towards a focus on everyday making and sharing digital and social media.
“Platforms of creativity” is a concept which is meant to encourage creative conversation and foster creativity of people. ‘Platforms’ are in the form of events, environment or tools. It gave people opportunity to express, connect and share.
He formed an online article entitled media studies 2.0. Gauntlett believes traditional media landscape is changing and in a post modernist society audiences and producers are merging together. Platforms like YouTube encourages audiences to produce their own productions which rejects the idea of audiences being ‘couch potatoes’ as the audience is becoming far more proactive in the world of media. Within this audiences are able to create their own identities and influences others. Add on to this is Web 2.0, this allows us to create identities without having to follow traditional forms. Gives freedom to audiences to express themselves and makes it more acceptable to be different.
In 2008, Gauntlett proposed the ‘make and connect agenda’ as a way to rethink audiences studies in context of media users as a producers and consumers of media material. This refers to audiences as prosumers.
This particular theory relates to my media project due to the fact my short film is being distributed through a new media platform being YouTube. I am not only an audience member of content that is being produced by others, I am also becoming a producer's myself and creating new content for a new audience.
Within my final piece, I want to include decoding allowing my audience to interpret a meaning by themselves instead of encoding one particular meaning following Stuart hall's theory. Although, I will be aware that down to audience positioning, not all social groups will interpret the media text the exact same way I intended them too.
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