Audience Theory

Active Audience Theory - Example: Child's Play 3.
Social Setting - family background
We all decode the media in a different manner.
This type of audience is said to be more opinonated and are able to be more realistic about media texts.

Passive Audience Theory - Example: "Triumph of the Will" (1936) German.
1930s Hypodermic Model - It was thought that a mass audience could be influenced by the same message. It also suggests that a media text can 'inject' ideas, values and attitudes into a passive audience who might act upon them.
When you watch something, you behave in the way that the media wants you to behave, You watch it, you believe it.
This audience are considered to be weaker than an active audience and are therefore more easily influenced by media texts.

Demographics - this is a way to categorise the audience. Example: Students and Pensioners come under the demographic of "E" whilst Teachers would be classed under "B".
The demographics model is as follows:
A - higher managerial, administrative or professional.
B - intermidate managerial, administrative or professional.
C1 - supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative or professional.
C2 - skilled manual workers.
D - semi and unskilled manual workers.
E - state pensioners or widows, casual or lowest grade workers.

Psychographics - Similarly to demographics, these look at certain specifics for the audience. They look at lifestyle choices and behaviours; kind of interests they have, values they hold, how they behave...

Maslow was an American psychologist and suggested that we all have a different layer of needs. His theory is called the Hierarchy of Needs which looks at the basic needs people (or the audience) want to meet to feel successful and satisfied.

Cultivation Theory
This suggests that repeated exposure to the same message will effect the audience's attitudes and values. Linking closely with the idea of Desensitisiation, it suggests that long term exposure to violent media will make the audience less shocked by violence therefore by being less disturbed by violence will make the audience more violent themselves.

Two Step Flow Theory
Katz and Lazarsfeld suggests that messages from the media move in two distinct ways. First, individuals who are more opinionated and assume a leader-role, receive messages from the media and pass on their own interpretations in addition to the original media content. Instead of the information flowing directly from the media text to the audience, it is filtered through the opinion leaders who then pass it on to a passive audience. Thus, this passive audience is then being influenced by the opinion leaders ideas as well as the original media text.

Uses and Gratifications Model
This bases itself on the idea that audiences are a mixture of individuals who select the media text that best suits there needs and wants. It supports the active audience theory whereby audiences are able to make their own decisions about what media they consume in relation to their social and cultural setting. This basically means that an audience will consume a media that makes them feel good (gratifications) and something that they can use (uses). Example: soaps allow the audience to appreciate their less complicated life and also take the mistakes of the characters and apply it to their own lives. Another example is the news as the audience can become more knowledgable about world events.
Bulmier and Katz (1975) suggested four main uses after analysing the theory:
1. Surveillance - our need to know what is going on in the world.

2. Personal Relationships - our need to interact with other people.
3. Personal Identity - our need to define our identity and sense of self.
4. Diversion - the need for escape, entertainment and relaxation.

Reception Analysis
This theory looks at how audiences interact with a media text. The theory suggests that social and daily experiences in life can affect the way in which an audience consumes a media text and reacts to it. Stuart Hall (1974) suggested that an audience has a significant role in the process of reading a text and this can be discussed in three ways:
1. the dominant or preferred reading - the audience shares the code of text and accepts and understands it's preferred reading as intended by the producers.
2. the negotiated reading - the audience partly shares the code of the text and broadly accepts the preferred meaning but will adapt the meaning in some way depending on their own experiences, cultures and values.
3. the oppositional reading - the audience understands the preferred meaning but doesn't share the text's code and rejects the original intentions therefore creating their own alternative meaning.