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AUDIENCE THEORY PRESENTATION

Uses and Gratifications

Stuart Halls audience positioning

Uses and Gratification Theory is an extention of Abraham Maslows Needs and Motivations Theory.... (1970) people actively looked to satisfy their needs based on a hierarchy

Uses and Gratifications Theory is an approach to understanding why people actively seek out specific media outlets and content for gratification purposes. The theory discusses how users proactively search for media that will not only meet a given need, but enhance knowledge, social interactions and diversion. It assumes that members of the audience are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. The theory also holds that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their needs. The approach suggests that people use the media to fulfill specific gratifications. This theory then implies that the media compete against other information sources for viewers' gratification.

He looked at the role of audience positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by different social groups.

Hall came up with a model suggesting three ways in which we may read a media text:

Media Power

Hall was concerned with media power, including how it publicises particular social values, to create dominant ideas (surrounding certain issues e.g. the role of women in society, asylum and immigration, the welfare system, the monarchy)

He believes that the mass media create and define issues of public concern and interest through audience positioning .

TWO STEP FLOW (KATZ and LAZERSFELD)

This theory asserts that information from the media moves in two distinct stages. First, individuals (opinion leaders) who pay close attention to the mass media and its messages receive the information. Opinion leaders pass on their own interpretations in addition to the actual media content. The term ‘personal influence’ was coined to refer to the process intervening between the media’s direct message and the audience’s ultimate reaction to that message. Opinion leaders are quite influential in getting people to change their attitudes and behaviors and are quite similar to those they influence. The two-step flow theory has improved our understanding of how the mass media influence decision making. The theory refined the ability to predict the influence of media messages on audience behavior, and it helped explain why certain media campaigns may have failed to alter audience attitudes an behavior. The two-step flow theory gave way to the multi-step flow theory of mass communication or diffusion of innovation theory.

Audience reception theory (David Morley)

Hypodermic needle

David Morley was a media researcher who specialized in audience reception theory is an element of thinking that developed within academic literacy theory and cultural study that emphasizes the reader's reception of a literary text, more commonly known as audience reception. Different types of audience reception:

•Oppositional– people disagree with the message and reject it.

•Negotiated

– On the whole, the view is agreed with but slightly altered.

•Dominant

– The message is fully accepted.

The Nationwide Project

From the 1970s, researchers from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) researched into the relationship between texts and audiences. One of these was The Nationwide Project by David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon.

The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by ‘shooting’ or ‘injecting’ them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response.

Both images used to express this theory (a bullet and a needle) suggest a powerful and direct flow of information from the sender to the receiver. The bullet theory graphically suggests that the message is a bullet, fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head". With similarly emotive imagery the hypodermic needle model suggests that media messages are injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by the message. They express the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating an idea because the receiver or audience is powerless to resist the impact of the message.

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