Summarizes all main theories for AS Media

1. audience theory: a full
summary
Two ways of thinking about the audience - Passive,
and Active

2. PASSIVE
❖ Passive: accepting and unquestioning. They just take in
the the media product like they’re eating a chocolate bar,
or taking medicine. Heavily influenced by the media.
❖ This was an early twentieth century ‘model’ of the
audience, and it led to............

3. Effects Theories
❖ These are theories which state that media products have
an effect on the audience, usually bad e.g. the cartoon
violence in Tom and Jerry would make children into
violent people, either straight away, or later on in their
lives.
❖ Hypodermic theory is the earliest of the effects theories.
It likens watching a programme or reading a newspaper
to being injected with new behaviour, beliefs and
attitudes.

4. Other aspects of the
Passive audience model
❖ The passive audience will always take the preferred
reading of a text. Therefore producers are always
searching for a passive audience. However, it is difficult
to find mass audiences who are totally accepting and
uncritical of a text.
❖ Rare examples include the mass, uncritical audience for
the X Factor.

5. Two-step Flow theory
❖ This is another theory which assumes audiences are
passive. It states that opinion leaders in society (critics
like Jonathan Ross in The Mirror) give their verdict on a
new product [the first step] and only then will the public
decide whether or not it’s any good [the second step].
❖ So it assumes the public do not have minds of their own,
and cannot form opinions for themselves; that they are
waiting to be told what to think by people who know
better!

6. The Active Audience
❖ Not heavily or unduly influenced by critics, or by the
media products themselves. This assumes an audience
are: independent, critical, choosy, and they will decide
what is good, and how they are going to read a text -
❖ Active audience members will have preferred,
oppositional, and negotiated readings of texts. In other
words, minds of their own. They will still sometimes want
to know what the critics think of a film or a new computer
game, but mainly to help them decide, rather than make
up their mind for them.

7. The Debate
❖ How active or passive are the public? Are we really
happy to accept, and enjoy, what we are given by media
producers, and are we really totally influenced by what
we see/read/hear in the media? or are we much more
mentally active and engaged with the media products we
consume? Can someone playing a computer game be
passive?

8. Reception Theory
❖ This assumes an audience who are actively engaged in
the interpretation of media texts, rather than passive
consumers.
❖ Audiences decode media texts in ways that relate to
their social and cultural circumstances and individual
experience. So, unlike passive audiences, active ones
will decide what meaning a text will have. e.g. a film
about poverty might provoke a very different response
from people who have lived through poverty themselves,
compared to the response from someone who hasn’t.
How do people from the slums of India feel about
Slumdog Millionaire? Surely they’ll see it as more than
just an entertainment/adventure movie which, to be
honest, is how most Brits experienced it.....

9. Stuart Hall (1973)
❖ suggested that texts were ‘encoded’ by the producers of the texts to contain
certain meanings or messages that those producers wanted to put across.
Older audience theories like HNT suggest that this intended meaning is
exactly what the audience receives. However, Hall said this is not the case.
He said the reader of the text decodes it, and the meanings intended by the
producer may NOT be received at all. The audience interpret it their own
way.
❖ AUDIENCE POSITIONING - the text is trying to ‘position’ the audience in
such a way as to have a particular view of the story e.g. to form a particular
opinion (newspapers) or to side with one of the characters (film and TV).
❖ RESPONSES TO THAT POSITIONING - preferred, oppositional, negotiated.

10. Different Readings
❖ Preferred reading: also known as the ‘dominant’ reading. This is where the
audience interpret the text the way the producer intends. e.g. the 8 million
fans of Eastenders enjoy the storylines of the show and don’t even notice
how manipulative and unrealistic it is.
❖ Negotiated reading: the audience goes through a negotiation with
themselves so they can accept the way the text is presented - they will agree
with some aspects of it, and disagree with others. e.g. someone who reads
The Times newspaper might disagree with its politics but admire the quality
of the writing.
❖ Oppositional reading: the user of the text finds themselves in conflict with the
text itself due to their culture, beliefs or experiences. e.g. some women
object to Top Gear because of the immature and ‘laddish’ - even sexist -
attitudes of the presenters.

11. Uses and Gratifications
Theory
❖ Another theory on the Active side of the debate.
❖ It states that different audience members will use media texts for different
purposes. So WE will decide what use to put them to, what effect WE want
them to have, and what pleasures WE want to get from them. Some of the
uses are:
❖ Information
❖ Entertainment
❖ Sociability - talking about, say, a movie with others is one way we can build
friendships
❖ Identification - we identify with a character in, for example, a soap, because
they are going through something we did.

12. ❖ And finally.....
The User. This is the term for the ultimate active
audience member. It was thought up to describe
audiences for New Media texts like websites and
computer games.
❖ Users are as far away from passive as it is possible to
get, because they actually navigate their way through the
text, continuously selecting content or dictating the
action; deciding where to go and what to experience.
They even add their own content, and/or develop new
skills in the course of enjoying media products.
❖ But perhaps The User can still be influenced by a text -
there is a lot of debate about whether violent computer
games make players violent because of the way they
identify with violent characters by ‘being’ them in the
game.