Section 4 - Audience: a media studies key aspect

Audience theory-

Who is the audience?
In media terms the audience is any group of people who receive a media text and not just people who are together in the same place.
They receive the media carrier via through magazine, TV, DVD, radio or the internet.

Uses and gratifications: Blumer and Katz, Denis McQuail

Denis McQuail (1972) discussed four theoretical audience pleasures:

What are they?

1. Information -  BBC news, sky news, sky sports

2. Personal identity - Fashion, makeup channels

3. Social Interaction -Facebook, twitter, Instagram.

4. Entertainment - The only way is Essex, X Factor, Strictly come dancing

The uses and gratification model :

The hyperdermic model -

• The media is seen as powerful and able to inject ideas into an audience who are seen as weak and passive.

The Nazis were experts at using this model.

• It suggests that a media can text can inject ideas, values and attitudes into a passive audience.
• In a democracy this model is quite ineffective - think of all the time you're shouted at the TV!

Cultivation theory -

• another theory that treats the audience as passive.
• It suggests that repeated exposure to the same message - such as an advertisement - will have an effect on the audiences attitudes and values.
• Desensitisation
• Not an effective mode of thought.

Reception theory -

• This is an active theory
• It suggests that social and daily experiences can affect the way an audience reads a media text and reacts to it.
• The theorist Stuart hall suggests that an audience has a significant role in the process of reading a text, and this can be discussed in three different ways.

The dominant or preferred reading -

• This claims that the audience shares the code of the text and fully accepts its preferred meaning as intended by the producers.

Negotiated reading -

• This claims the audience partly shares the code of the text and broadly accepts the preferred meaning but can change the meaning in some way according to their own experiences.

Oppositional reading -

• This claims the audience understands the preferred meaning but does not share the texts code and rejects this intended meaning.

Interactive audience -

• These are increasingly popular.
• examples are:
• audiences being asked to be a voter (x factor)
• citizen journalists - news asking for viewers to send in photos and the like
• Documentary styles programmes about so called 'real' people doing professional things

21st century audiences -

• Websites such as YouTube, and blogs offer new possibilities for audiences.
• Digital transmission and production means there are many new channels and ways of viewing media texts not just on television but also via the internet.

Infographics -

Len Ang (1991) stated that "before companies make a product they will have an ideal audience member in mind. This is called an 'imaginary entity'

1). Why would a company have an ideal audience member in mind before a product was made?

2). What methods would a company use to research its audience?

3). How could knowing who the ideal audience member is benefit the funding of the product?

Advertisement helps funding and the production company.