Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Audience Theory
1
Audience Theory
Uses and Gratifications Theory
Started in the 1940s by Herzog and later developed by other theorists such as Laswell, McQuail, Bulmer and Katz.
This theory questions why people consume different types of media and what it is they want to get from it.
This theory contradicts the Hypordermic Needle as it assumes that the audience is not passive and iterprets/intergrates the media into their everyday lives.
Hypodermic Needle Model
Passive or Active Consumption
A way of looking at audiences is considering whether they are passive or active.
Passive audiences do not apply their own ideas/ experiences when consuming media. This is an example of the Hypordermic Needle Model.
Active audiences apply their own thoughts/ideas/experiences to the media they consume. Uses and Gratifications and reception theory assume that the audience is active in their consumption.
The model is a theory about audiences, suggesting that messages from the media are received and accepted directly by the audience. This meaning that mass media can have a powerful and immediate effect on its audiences.
The theory states that the audience will do as it's told with little thinking. This initially caused concern when TV and Radio became more accessible.
Nevertheless, this theory has been disproved as the audience can make their own judgements. More complex theories have been developed.
Reception Theory
Stuart Hall developed the idea for media and communication studies. Reception theory looks at how audiences interpret the media they consume. It consists of two parts: encoding and decoding.
Encoding is when the producer of the media product fills the product with a message that they want to get out to the people. For example, Newspapers, they anchor their images with captions and emotive headlines, encoding their ideas into the paper.
Decoding is where the consumer decodes the message from the media product.
The theorists had developed categories to explain as to why people use the media.
Georgia Parker-Aiken
Lasswell: Suveillance, Entertainment, Corrlation, Cultural Transmission.
McQuail: Information, Entertainment, Personal Identity, Integration and social interation.
Katz and Bulmer: Surveillance, Personal Identity, Relationships, Personal and Diversion.