Audience

By Jennifer

Concerned with what the audience do

with the message

The Hypodermic Needle Model

(1920s)

Audience passively receive the information

unmediated via media text, without any

attempt on their part to process or challenge

the data.

The experience, intelligence and opinion of

an individual are not relevant to the reception

of the text.

We are manipulated by the creators of media

texts.

Two-Step Flow (1940s)Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but goes through “opinion leaders” who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence.

This diminished the power of the media and concludes that social factors are also important in the way audiences interpret texts.

Media Opinion

Leader

Mass Audience1 2

Uses & Gratifications (1940-

1960s)

Lasswell (1948) suggested that media texts had

the following function for individuals (who

actively consumed texts for different reasons and

in different ways) and society: Information, Social

Interaction, Entertainment and Personal

Identification.

Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory.

Individuals might choose and use a text for the

following purposes: Diversion, Personal

Relationships, Personal Identity and Surveillance

Reception Theory (1980-

1990s)Individual receive and interpret a text, and how their

individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity)

affect their reading.

Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of the relationship

between text and audience –encoded by producer,

decoded by reader, major differences between two

different readings of the same code.

By using recognized codes (by the audiences

expectations of genres) the producers can create a

certain amount of agreement on what the code means.