Media audience theories

Active Audience Theory
Audience actively constructing interpretations and meanings from the media texts they encounter.

They bring their own individual experiences, values, ideologies and identify to each text.

Interpreted differently by different people.

Media Producer's Power

• The audience can only participate within carefully constructed and framed spaces
• The programme's host's or expert's views are dominant 
• Use of voiceover and narration emphasises producer's power
• Editing
• The narratives and scenarios

Audience participation needs to be encouraged as it generates money and audience loyalty. However, the debate is whether audiences are actually empowered or not.

The Hypodermic model - Frankfurt School (1920's/30's)
The messages in media texts are injected into the audience by the powerful syringe-like media.
The audience is powerless to resist - The media is like a drug.

Gerber (1956)
Messages do not simply flow from the text to the audience.
The audience discuss, debate and challenge the texts - reduce power.

Texts can be seen as polysemic - deliberately constructed to be read in a number of different ways, to appeal to a wide number of people.

Morley (1990)
Saw media as an object that carries a meaning and a value.

Silverstone (1994)
Argued that television provides a sort of sense of security and reassurance for many adults and young people.
The internet can also be seen in this way, as; 'the continuities of sound and image, of voices and music can easily be appropriated as comfort and security because they are there.' - Not alone - reassurance

Couldry (2004) - Mobile Audience
Audiences can visit places related to the production, like go on tours of the set or visit locally filmed scenes.

Abercrombie and Longhurst (2005)
There has been a shift in the audience's experience, allowing the boundaries between them and the producers of the media become more fluid through the use of social networking and TV voting.

Uses and Gratification

Katz and Blamer (1974) 
Audiences choose particular media products to satisfy their uses and gratifications (needs), these are to be:

• Entertained
• Informed
• Social interaction
• Personal identity

Mcquail (1997)
Motivations for using a media text are for:

• Information
• Learning
• Personal Identity
• Social Interaction
• Entertainment

Shaun Moore (1998)

Media texts allow the audience to perceive themselves as part of an imagined community.

The audience feel they have something in common with other imagined members of the audience.

Criticisms of the Uses and Gratification theory

It doesn't explain why different members of the audience interpret a text differently.

Ang (1985) identified gratifications of identification and fantasy.

Hill (2005) explored how gratification from reality TV emerge from discussions around to what degree the programme has been staged.

Clapham's theory - Selective Filtering

Selective perception - Audience only like something if it is aligned with their own views.

Selective retention - Audience only hear aspects of a media text that align with their own views.

Selective exposure - Audience only watch/engage with media texts that align with their views.

Morley - Decoding Model

Audience interpret media using their key ideologies/beliefs.

This will impact our production because the opening title sequence that I produce will need to satisfy some of the uses and gratifications.