KAT I E H A L F YA R D

AUDIENCE THEORY

STUART HALLHall argued that there are differences in cultural identity and ideology and outlined three hypothetical positions which the viewer of a programme might occupy to show these differences:• The dominant/hegemonic reading – the reader shares the

programme’s ‘code’ (its meanings, values, attitudes, beliefs and assumptions) and fully accepts the ‘preferred reading’ of the programme (a reading which may not be the result of a conscious intention of the programme makers).

• The negotiated reading – the reader partly shares the programme’s ‘code’ and broadly accepts the ‘preferred reading’, although they modify it slightly to fit their own interests and position.

• The oppositional/counter-hegemonic reading – the reader doesn’t share any of the programme’s ‘code’ and rejects the preferred reading, meaning that they interpret the signs included in the programme in a completely different way.

RECEPTION THEORY

In the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of research went into the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age and ethnicity) affected their reading of it. This work was based on Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model which stated that the text is encoded by the producer and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between the readings of the same code by different people. However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations such as genre, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement about what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.

DAVID MORLEY

David Morley was a media theorist who based his work on Stuart Hall’s theories. He worked for the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) – a research centre in the University of Birmingham, primarily in the 1970s. He conducted research into the audience’s reaction to a media text, after Stuart Hall came up with reception theory, which suggested that different people respond to the same programme differently. Morley conducted his research with various participants from different educational and occupational backgrounds. Different responses were produced to the same media texts and so he continued his research to seek whether these findings would construct dominant, oppositional or negotiated readings- the three groupings of readings proposed by Stuart Hall (see the previous slide).

THE NATIONWIDE PROJECTOne of Morley’s most famous pieces of research was the Nationwide Project which he conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside Charlotte Brunsdon. Nationwide was a BBC news and current affairs programme which ran from the 9th September 1969 to the 5th August 1983. It was originally broadcast between Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6pm, until 1972 when it was extended to be broadcast each weekday in the early evening, following the BBC News. It followed a magazine format, combining political analysis and discussion with customer affairs. When it was taken off the air in August 1983, it was replaced by Sixty Minutes.

It was CCCS as a group who decided to use Nationwide to study the encoding/decoding model – a part of reception theory which was developed by Stuart Hall. It studies an audience’s capability to decode something which has been encoded into a media text. The Nationwide study which was based on Hall’s theory was concerned particularly with “the programme’s distinctive ideological themes and the particular ways which the audience addressed the viewer”.

Morely conducted qualitative research with various participants from different educational backgrounds to test Hall’s theories of different readings, reception and encoding/decoding. He showed them clips of Nationwide and gauged their reaction, before seeing if it related to any of Hall’s readings, explained on slide 2.

The first part of this study was published by Morley and Brunsdon in 1978.

THE EFFECTS DEBATE

The effects debate is based around the idea that the media can potentially influence its audience in a negative way. It states that the public needs to be protected from inappropriate material via censorship.

HYPODERMIC SYRINGE EFFECT

In essence, the hypodermic syringe model is a linear communication theory which suggests that an audience passively accepts the message ‘injected’ into them by the mass media, such as through film. It can be said that like a drug, the message has immediate effect on the audience, and there is a correlation between the injection and the reaction. It assumes that we are all the same, and that we all respond to messages in the same way. We can relate this to the impact that globalisation has on British cinema because American culture is injected into the audience when communities in Britain watch the popular films produced in Hollywood, and the reaction is that the audience think that American culture is the correct way of living, and this culture becomes dominant in societies hundreds of miles away from the USA.

TWO STEP FLOWTwo step flow is a model created on the back of the hypodermic syringe model, as the hypodermic syringe model quickly proved too clumsy for media researchers seeking to more precisely explain the relationship between audience and text. It came about in 1940 when Paul Lazarsfield, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters’ decision making processes during the presidential election campaign that year. They found from their analysis that information doesn’t flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated – there are two steps. Firstly, opinion leaders get information from a media source, and secondly the opinion leaders pass on the information, along with their interpretation to others, including friends, family and colleagues. The opinion leaders were found to pay close attention to the mass media, to be influential and also similar to those they influence whereas the ‘influentials’ of the study were not informed by the media and look up to the opinion leaders.

USES AND GRATIFICATION THEORYAs the first generation to grow up with television reached adulthood in the 1960s, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Unlike a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1984 Lasswell suggested that media texts have the following functions for individuals and society:• Surveillance• Correlation• Entertainment• Cultural transmission• Researchers Bulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974,

stating that individuals may choose and use a text for the following purposes (i.e. uses and gratifications):

• Diversions – escape from every day problems and routine• Personal relationships – using the media for interaction• Personal identity – finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values

from texts• Surveillance – information which could be useful for living, e.g. weather reports and

financial newsSince Bulmer and Katz, the theory has had to be updated as new media forms have come along, such as video games and the Internet.