Rob Capon

•All media have a products have a target audience

• They also sometimes try to create an audience (especially propaganda)

• Products can have a mass audience, or a niche

• The producer of the text (independent or mainstream) will be important regarding the make up of your audience

av d M r

• Dominant or hegemonic reading; This is when the audience share the same ideologies and beliefs as video does and therefore will just accept the beliefs and the preferred reading of the text.

• Negotiated reading; This suggests that reader party accepts the beliefs and ideologies of the video, however adapts it in a way as to suit their personal interests and needs.

• Oppositional reading or counter hegemonic; When the audience out of hand reject the views in the video and instead interpret it in a complete different and often oppositional way.

• Texts need audiences in order to realise their potential for meaning. So a text does not have a single meaning but rather a range of possibilities which are defined by both the text and its audiences. The meaning is not in the text, but in the reading. (Hart 1991, Aged 60)

u rt Ha

• Harts theory relates to the work of Stuart Hall which states that text are encoding with a preferred meaning by the producer but as audiences are active, meaning they can be interpreted in various ways

tur lis

• A Structuralist would argue that how an audience member makes sense of media text is dependent upon the cultural and moral beliefs.

• Stuart Hall’s work suggests that the audience’s interpretation is dependent on a number of frameworks outside the text. These include socio/economic frameworks such as class, gender, age, education and ethnicity. They include the individual’s past experiences and also include previous knowledge and experience of the medium. (reception theory)

a kf t Sc ol t y o erm c e

• The Frankfurt school were concerned about the possible effects of mass media. They proposed the effects model, which considered society to be composed of isolating individuals who were susceptible to media messages. The Frankfurt school envisioned the media as a hypodermic syringe

• The Hypodermic Needle Theory suggests that the media ‘injects’ its messages straight into the audience with suggestions designed to trigger a specific desired response. The theory states the audience is entirely passive and is immediately affected by the media’s messages, as the Media’s hold over the public is so intense that the public is essentially unable to escape from its influence.

• However, theorists since have thought that media could not have such direct effects on the audiences

• Audiences are not a blank sheet of paper on which media messages can be written; members of an audience will have prior attitudes and beliefs which will determine how effective media messages are (Abercrombie 1996)

• David gauntlet identifies 10 things wrong with the effects model

U a d gr if a n

• Blumler and Katz (1994) suggested that there were four main needs of television audiences that are satisfied by television

1. Diversion

2. Personal relationships

3. Personal identity

4. Surveillance

n t cr i s

• Another criticism is the tendency to concentrate solely on why audiences consume the media rather than extending the investigation to discover what meanings and interpretations are produced and in what circumstances, i.e. how the media are received. (O’Sullivan, Dutton & Rayner)

ic an x rea rs

• David Gauntlett proposes a pick and mix reader

• His research stems from primary research with female magazine readers but his theory, I would argue, can be applied to any media text.

• Gauntlett suggest that audience’s members “take the bits they like and disregard the rest”. Again this relates back to the work of Stuart Hall’s idea that audiences are active.

hn i e

• Audience power:

• Fiske also, goes against the notion of the media indoctrinating audience members. He argues that “popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry”

• Basically he is suggesting that the power of audience interpretations far outweighs the ability of the institutions and the ideology.

n l s o

• Historically it has been believed that audiences are passive, however now they are active. This is because they are consumers and producers of media, whilst also interpreting the media texts in a way which is unique to them.