1. AUDIENCES AND AUDIENCE THEORY
In our media lessons we have been learning about why audiences
are important and the different audience theory.

2. Why audiences are important
To read or watch the texts.
To help make money.
So that there is someone to promote a product to.
To gain feedback about the product.
To help make the product what it is - a film is meaningless unless
it has been decoded by an audience.

3. How are audiences defined
Audiences can be defined as follows:
Socio-economic group
Age
Gender
Ethnicity
Lifestyle

4. Hypodermic Needle Effect
Explains how mass audiences might react to mass media.
Suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a
media text, without any attempt to process or challenge the data.
Experience, intelligence ad opinion are not relevant.
People are manipulated by the creators of media texts.
The behavior of people and thinking might be easily changed by media
makers.
Propaganda - zeitgeist affects media communications
Advertising - heterogenous, passive

5. Two Step Flow
The hypodermic needle effect was proved to be too “clumsy”.
Paul Lazarsfelel, bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet.
Information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of
its audience unmediated.
However it is filtered through opinion leaders who then
communicate it to their less active associates over whom they
have influence.

6. Two Step Flow

7. Uses and Gratifications
Audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed
texts for different reasons and in different ways.
In 1948 Laswell suggested media texts related to:
surveillance
correlation
entertainment
cultural transmission

8. Uses and Gratifications
Lists of uses and gratifications have been extended:
schadenfreude
ritual pleasure of consuming the familiar
entertainment
diversion, direct mode of address
personal relationships
identification
self definition
sense of being given to

9. Reception Theory
The way individuals received and interpreted a text and how their individual
circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading or reception.
Stuart Hall’s theory
encoding, decoding model of the relationship between text and audience.
the text is encoded by the producer
the text is decoded by the reader
there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code.
texts can be polysemic - they have many meanings
Preferred reading vs aberrant reading - depending on the readers (SAGEL)