Class Notes: Audience

All media texts are made with an audience in mind, i.e the group of people who will recieve it and make some sense out of it. 

Different audiences can understand a media message but can have different responses to it. Some people believe and accept the message whilst others reject it using knowledge from their own experience or can use processes of logic or other rationales to criticize what is being said.

Target audience - the group of people you want to attract

Stuart Hall - believed active audience was very important

Encoding - when the text is produced by an institution and is embedded with that institution's own values and ideologies

Decoding - the moment of reception or consumption by the audiences

Cultivation theory -

While one media text has little affect, years of violence will make you less sensitive and years of watching women being mistreated in soaps will make you less bothered. This is difficult to prove as there is no way to measure exactly how much affect media have.

Two-step flow mode - 

• Opinion leaders
• Likely to discuss media with others and, if we respect their opinion, we will most likely be affected by it
• Mass audience

Uses and gratifications - 

• Own personal needs
• Active audience
• Diversion - a form of escapism/release
• Personal relationship - companionship via television personalities and characters and sociability through discussion about television with other people
• Personal identity - being able to relate to a character/storyline
• Surveillance - a regular supply as information about what's going on in the world
• Entertainment - sometime we may just consume media for enjoyment

Hypodermic Needle theory -

• Developed in 1920s
• The first theory to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media
• Information passes on unmediated 
• The audience is passive, accepts everything

Reception analysis -

• Concentrates on how an audience arrive at a media text
• Based on the idea that no text has one meaning
• The audience help to create the meaning
• All decode the texts that we encounter in individual ways due to upbringing, the mood, the place we are in etc
• 1970s, 80s and 90s
• Near impossible to measure as it focuses upon individual