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Audience Theory

Audience theory examines how audiences interpret messages from media texts. It considers whether audiences are passive receivers of information or active interpreters who create their own meanings. Early theories viewed audiences as passive, but current approaches see audiences as actively involved in making sense of media. Reception theory proposes that encoding by producers and decoding by audiences can result in different readings, influenced by one's social and cultural experiences.

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299 views6 pages

Audience Theory

Audience theory examines how audiences interpret messages from media texts. It considers whether audiences are passive receivers of information or active interpreters who create their own meanings. Early theories viewed audiences as passive, but current approaches see audiences as actively involved in making sense of media. Reception theory proposes that encoding by producers and decoding by audiences can result in different readings, influenced by one's social and cultural experiences.

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Audience Theory

Audience theory is concerned


with how audiences interpret Who will your text be aimed at?
messages
Mass-produced - made for the 'mass' of
people. There is a downside to this, of
course, in that it can also be interpreted
as 'commercial' or 'trashy'.

Niche - a small target audience that is


highly specific

Alternative – outside of the


mainstream. Going against dominant
ideology includes minority groups,
perhaps with subversive values
PASSIVE or ACTIVE?
Passive Active
• Audiences accept media •Audiences are involved in their
messages interpretations of media texts
• Audiences easily influenced •Audiences create their own
meanings
• Do not make own use of texts
or interpret in own way •Audiences question and
respond to institutions
The Hypodermic Needle
Model
• Dating from the 1920s
• One of the first attempts to explain how audiences react to mass
media
• Suggests that audiences passively receive information transmitted
via a media text
• Suggests that audiences do not try to process or challenge the
information
• Developed when mass media was still fairly new
• The message is entirely accepted by the audience
• The audience has no role in interpreting the text
• Is considered mostly obsolete today
• Still quoted during moral panics (computer games, violent films etc)
Uses and Gratification
This theory suggests that media texts have to fulfil one of
the following:
• Identify- being able to recognise the product or person
in front of you, role models reflect similar values to yours
• Educate - being able to acquire information,
knowledge and understanding
• Entertain - what are you consuming should give your
enjoyment and also some form of ‘escapism’ enabling us
to forget our worries temporarily
• Social Interaction - the ability for media to produce a
topic a topic of conversation between other people
Stuart Hall, 1980
Reception Theory • Encoding / decoding model of the relationship between text and
audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the
reader

• There may be major differences between two different readings of


the same code created by situated culture - social class, gender,
ethnicity etc.

• Using recognised codes and conventions and drawing upon audience


expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the
producers can position the audience and thus create a certain
amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a
preferred reading

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