Audience and Production

L/O: Identify the key differences between passive and active audience theories.

Who are he Audience?

Audiences for mass media products are always discussed as if they are some kind of mass themselves- in fact an audience is composed of individuals.

The importance of audience
-Understanding the audience is very important to media institutions and everyone involved in making media products.
-Most media texts (film, newspapers, DVD, video games, TV programmes) are made with a TARGET AUDIENCE in mind.

What about not making media for an audience?
-Many artists may say they don't make their work for any particular audience
-REGARDLESS
-It's important to understand how audiences feel about, receive and understand the proliferation of media around us and them.

Moral panics and the audience

-Since the start of mass media in the 19th century there have always been PANICS about the audience and the effect that the media will have on them.
-When an audience is deeply effected by an issue in the media this is known as a 'moral panic'.
-'A moral panic is an intense feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order'. The term first appeared in the English Language in 1830 in The Quarterly Christian Spectator.

A moral panic ca be...
-Created by the media- such as a newspaper story that causes hysterical reaction from the public.

Effects Theory

Effects Theory argues that the mass media has a profound effect on its audience- so much to that people will believe and copy everything they see in the media Effects Theory is also called 'hypodermic syringe' and sometimes 'bullet theory'.

The effects/hypodermic model
-This model owes much to the supposed power of the mass media- in particular film- to inject their audiences with ideas and meanings. Such was the thinking behind much of the Nazi propaganda that was evident in Triumph of the will and similar films.

Passive Audience
-Totalisation states and dictatorships are similar in their desire to have complete control over the media.

2 Step Theory
- The 2-Step theory argues audience are only convinced or 'sold' via the media when there are 2 steps.
-The first step is the media product itself
-The second step is a 'celebrity', well respected person, well respected politician etc- endorses the media product or idea.

Active Audience / Uses and gratification Theory

-Suggests that there is a highly active audiences making use of the media. In this model the individual has the power and she selects the media texts that best suit her/his needs. The psychological basis for this model is the hierarchy of needs identified by Maslow.

An active audience wants:

a) the need for information about our geographical and social world (news and drama)
b)the need for identity, by using characters and personalities to define our sense of self and social behavior (film and celebrities).
c) the need for social interaction through experiencing the relationships and interaction of others (soap lives and sitcom, sports) and discussing media events with friends/ work colleagues.
d) the need for diversion by using the media for play and entertainment (game shows and quizzes).

Active Audience and De-coding

-Stuart Hall's theory that the audience De-codes media texts reading signs , particularly visual signs, but also creating OPPOSITIONAL reading to the dominant reading intended by the makers. IN the other similar to Barthes theory on audiences- the meaning is in our interpretation.

-In this model, the audience accept or agree with the encoded meanings, they accept and refine parts of the text's meanings or they are aware of the dominant meaning of the text but reject it for cultural, political or ideological reasons.