1. Exam revision sheet – Media Studies A2 level Q1(b)
Audience theory
The Hypodermic Syringe theory
This media theory is all about the way an audience receives a text. Essentially, the
audience are passive receivers of media messages that they interpret uncritically.
The theory is popular when there is a moral panic, such as the case of Jamie
Bulger, a toddler, who was brutally murdered by two other children. During the court
case, it was mentioned that one of the boy’s father had rented the film Child’s Play 3
in the days leading up to the murder. The tabloid newpapers seized on this and
blamed the film for corrupting the two children, despite there being no evidence that
they had ever actually seen it. The link was questionable at best and ridiculous at
worst. Most people can see the difference between reality and texts; only a small
minority indulge in aberrant decoding of texts.
A good historical example of the hypodermic syringe effect was when Orson Welles
staged a radio show that reported in a very realistic way, a Martian invasion of New
Jersey and New York on October 30th 1938. Welles warned listeners that the
production was a fiction based on a work of literature (H.G. Wells’ War of the
Worlds), but people who tuned in after the warning thought they were actually
hearing a real account of an invasion. There were scenes of panic; traffic jams
leaving city centres, and even some looting. The audience were uncritically
accepting Orson Welles’ narrative and responding. The day after the show Welles
was forced to make a public apology. One question that needs to be addressed is
that of the influence of context. In 1938 many people expected a terrible war and
there were fears of an impending war, even in America. Did the general air of panic,
stoked up by the media, create the perfect setting for Orson Welles’ famous stunt?
A good example of a contemporary application of the hypodermic theory is the
connection between anorexia nervosa and media representations of ideal bodies.
This has been exhaustively researched for women, but can also apply to men who
see ‘six packs’ and ‘pecs’ as essential and so spend a fortune at the local gym in
order to appear like the idealised versions of masculinity seen in magazines such as
Men’s Health.
The hypodermic syringe theory is part of a wider media issue called the effects and
uses debate. The early exponents of the effects theory were known as the Frankfurt
School, and they analysed the power of the mass media in capitalist societies such
as the USA and in totalitarian societies such as Nazi Germany. Drawing on Marxist
methodology, the Frankfurt school emphasised the power of the media to influence a
largely passive audience; to inject ideologies that supported the status quo and
those who benefited from it – the elite.
Connected with the wider effects debate was the growing fear of the influence of
television on society in the 1960s. Groups were set up in the US and UK to monitor
the effects violent or sexually explicit material was having on audiences. One such
group was the National Viewers and Listeners Association, which has become
MediaWatch. These groups want to see much greater awareness in the general
public about the power and influence of the media in our society.

2. Exam revision sheet – Media Studies A2 level Q1(b)
Another dimension of the effects debate is connected with psychology. The famous
psychologist B.F. Skinner coined the term behaviourism, explaining that people’s
behaviour could be critically influenced by psychological manipulation. If dogs can be
made to drool when a bell is rung for food, could people become more peaceful and
democratic if exposed to positive messages in the media? Advertisers were quick to
see a profit from modifying consumers’ buying behaviour in favour of their clients’
products rather than their competitors’ A famous experiment that was conducted by
Bandura and Walters in 1963 was the ‘Bobo doll’ experiment. Children watched
adults attacking a doll on film, and were then filmed copying the behaviour when left
alone with a similar doll. Violent behaviour was being learned and refined in the
young by watching media texts – this was fuel for those who wanted to censor the
media and possibly led to age restrictions on certain violent or explicit material.
Critics of behaviourism and of Bandura’s work have pointed out a number of
problems:
Uses and Gratifications
The Hypodermic Syringe theory is generally discredited today. A more recent model
of audience is that of uses and gratifications, which suggests that there is a highly
active audience making use of the media for a range of purposes designed to satisfy
needs such as entertainment, information and identification. In this model the
individual has the power and she selects the media texts that best suit her needs
and her attempts to satisfy those needs. The psychological basis for this model is the
hierarchy of needs identified by Maslow. Among the chief exponents of this model
are McQuail and Katz.
The main areas that are identified in this model are:
a) the need for information about our geographical and social world (news and
drama)
b) the need for identity, by using characters and personalities to define our sense of
self and social behaviour (film and celebrities)
c) the need for social interaction through experiencing the relationships and
interaction of others (soap lives and sitcom)
d) the need for diversion by using the media for purposes of play and entertainment
(game shows and quizzes).
The active audience
More recent developments still, suggest that there is a decoding process going on
among the active audience who are not simply using the media for gratification
purposes.
Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory says there are three ways audiences can
interpret a media text. Media institutions encode their texts with their own
beliefs/ideology. These messages are then decoded by an audience. An audience

3. Exam revision sheet – Media Studies A2 level Q1(b)
can choose to agree with the message intended by the producer or view the text
differently:
Preferred reading: The message the producer intends the audience to receive.
Negotiated reading: The audience accepts some of the intended message but
interprets some areas differently.
Oppositional reading: The intended message of the producer is rejected entirely by
the audience.
Mode of address
Still in line with the active audience idea is the concept of mode of address. This
refers to the way that a text speaks to us in a style that encourages us to identify with
the text because it is 'our' kind of text. For example Friends is intended for a young
audience because of the way it uses music and the opening credits to develop a
sense of fun, energy and enthusiasm that the perceived audience can identify with.
This does not mean that other groups are excluded, merely that the dominant mode
of address is targeted at the young. Mode of address can even be applied to entire
outputs, as in the case of Channel 4 which works hard to form a style of address
aimed at an audience which is informed, articulate and in some ways a specialised
one. Newspapers, too, often construct their presentation to reflect what they imagine
is the identity of their typical readers. Compare The Sun and The Guardian in this
context.
Male Gaze theory
Laura Mulvey is an academic who approaches media texts, mainly film, with a
feminist, psychoanalytical approach; a woman’s point of view and a psychiatrist’s
perspective. Mulvey wrote a very influential article called ‘Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema’, published in 1975, stating that the representation of women in
films is closely connected with the pleasure men receive when they look at a
beautiful woman. This pleasure relates back to the male child’s first experiences of a
woman, his mother. Mulvey’s point is well illustrated in the work of the great British
film director, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s women are always beautiful, and
strangely, often end up as passive victims. Male film directors enjoyed depicting the
torture of women because it fulfilled deep seated psychological needs. Many films
were essentially directed by and for ‘peeping toms’. Mulvey wanted to see more
positive representations of women on the screen, ones that empowered them, rather
than ones that enforced negative stereotypes of helplessness and dependency.
Mulvey identified two ways women are looked at with a male gaze in cinema:
Sadistic-voyeuristic - enjoyment in seeing the woman punished
Fetishistic - woman as object of fantasy and desire
According to Mulvey, most mainstream Hollywood film invariably adopts the position
of the male’s gaze: camera shots linger over legs, lips, breasts, but do not follow the
same cinematographic rules when focusing on men. Men are often represented as

4. Exam revision sheet – Media Studies A2 level Q1(b)
active, women as passive. Cultivation theory states that by slowly dripping ideologies
into audiences’ minds, they adopt them without realising what is happening. The
male gaze is so manifest in many media texts that women are made more passive.
Mulvey’s position is that to put the picture straight, male scopophilic (watching)
pleasures need to be denied; mainstream Hollywood has to go, to be replaced with
avant-garde film making, which can empower women and bring down the patriarchal
dominance in media production. When traditional narrative film making has ended its
dominance of the industry, then women can start to create film that embodies the
female gaze, and audiences will be freed from the shackles of patriarchy.
Critics of Laura Mulvey point to the popularity of ‘patriarchal’ texts with both genders;
many women are not bothered or even conscious of any male bias in film: they want
to be entertained, not empowered. Similarly, critics such as Carol Clover have
pointed out that it is possible to identify positively with female characters on screen –
‘the final girl’ in horror films is used by Clover as an example of this. Terje Skjerdal
objects to the way Freudian psychoanalysis is used by Mulvey to understand film,
and her dismissal of all mainstream Hollywood production as patriarchal, pointing to
texts such as Thelma and Louise (1991) as evidence that gender issues can be
represented positively and can empower women, just as effectively as avant-garde
cinema. Some mainstream texts such as Ridley Scott’s horror Sci-Fi text Alien
(1979) represent women as powerful, capable and highly competent, in the form of
Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, who alone among the crew of a space ship with a killer
alien on board manages to kill the alien and survive. Other critics point out that
Mulvey can be seen to reinforce patriarchal heterosexuality by presupposing the
viewer is a heterosexual male.