Audience Investigation

Emma Matthew

What is an audience?

• An audience refers to the people who consume a media product, and the people that the media product is aimed at. (Target Audience)

• An audience is defined with the use of two categories, Demographics and Psychographics.

• Demographics: Characteristics such as ages, income, education, status, type of occupation, region of country

• Psychographics: Someone’s hobbies/interests, their beliefs and behaviour.

• Both demographics and psychographics help media institutions tailor their text to the catered audience that their trying to target

Psychological Theory – THE UNCANNY

• This was developed by Sigmund Freud, founder of Psychodynamic theory (unconscious drives, internal conflicts from childhood etc.)

• His theory of the Uncanny can help explain why some people are so attracted to the horror genre.

• The theory states that cognitive dissonance occurs when something is familiar and foreign at the same time.

• For example, people are attracted to paranormal films because Ghosts are similar to the human form, yet look frightening. This would be perceived as being uncomfortably unfamiliar.

Feminist Theory – Sadistic Voyeurism• This was developed by feminist film theorist Laura

Mulvey (the male gaze etc.)

• Her theory of sadistic voyeurism can also explain why some people are attracted to the horror genre.

• This is when a weaker female character is performing a daily, personal or intimate task (e.g getting changed or having sex) where a strong male character abuses her privacy in a sadistic way (think the shower scene in the film, Psycho)

Stuart Hall – Reception Theory

Hall Introduced the 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.

- Preffered Reading – This is when audiences respond to the product the way the media producers want/expect them to.

- Negotiated Reading – This is when a member of the audience partly afrees with part of the product e.g Film, documentary, TV programme.

- Oppositional Reading – This is when the audience are in complete disagreement with the products message or setting.

Reading of texts are dependent on who the audience is, and what their social position is, because this influences their interpretation of the denotative codes.