Audiences

What is Audience? Audience is the starting point for many media

tasks.

Both the producers and the audience need to know the intended target audience for the text.

A media text has no meaning before it is read and decoded by the audience.

Hypodermic Needle Theory:

This was the first theory that was created to explain how audiences might react to the mass media.

It is a very simplistic theory, and suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciousness of the audience, without any thought and the intelligence and opinion of an individual are not considered.

People are assumed to be "uniformly controlled by their biologically based 'instincts' and that they react more or less uniformly to whatever 'stimuli' came along“

The public essentially cannot escape from the media's influence.

Therefore, this theory suggests that an audience may be manipulated by the creators and their behaviour and thinking may easily be altered.

It is often that this theory is quoted during moral panics by parents, politicians and pressure groups and is sometime used to explain why certain groups in society should no be exposed to certain media texts, due to fear they will watch or read sexual or violent behaviour and then act upon them on based on them and characteristics may then come in themselves.

The Uses & Gratifications Theory:

In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had several functions for individual and identified them as being

- Surveillance - Correlation- Entertainment- Cultural Transmission

Blulmer and Katz then expanded on this theory and published their own in 1974, which stated that individuals might choose to use a text for:

- Diversion: escapism from everyday problems and routine - Personal Relationships: using the media for emotional and other

interaction, e.g.. Substituting soap opera for everyday family life- Surveillance: information which could be useful for living, e.g..

Weather reports, financial news or holiday bargains.

Two Step Flow:

The Two step flow was introduced as the Hypodermic needle theory became slightly difficult in interpreting the relationship between a media text and its audience. The two step flow refers to the way in which information regarding media texts transfers to other people, for example between social groups at school or in the workplace. Hence why it is called the two step flow as it works as a pattern – the first person comes to know some information through the media which they pass on down to a second person and so on. Eventually a mass of people know and it in a sense goes ‘viral.’

It came about through the political work of Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet in their 1940 presidential election, when they published the result in a newspaper. They found that information flows from the text to ‘opinion leaders’ which is then passed on to other people, who are now influenced by everyone else's views on the text.

For example, one person may have seen a film and hated it and then told a friend this; influencing their actions of whether or not they should watch it.

Reception Theory:

In the 1980s & 1990s, the reception theory was introduced the analyse and interpret how a text is received even further, also affecting their age, gender, ethnicity and class.

The reception theory is based on Stuart Hill’s work of encoding and decoding – where the text is encoded by the producer and decoded by the reader. However, the readers way of decoding the text is not passive yet interpret its meanings based on their own cultural background and experiences. This means that the meaning of the text is created through the relationship between the text and reader, rather than being within the text itself.

It is a process of ‘negotiation’ and ‘opposition’ from the audience.