Audience Theory

Gingerbread Person

No you can’t eat them!

Find box office sales/TV viewing/readership numbers for your mass and niche examples

Key questions• What is audience theory?

• Who are the key theorists?

• What are the key terms?

• How does this help with your section a: 1b?

Today's menu

• Gingerbread

• Audience theory

• Effects and Moral Panic

• Storyboard

English and Maths

• Maths – handling data (audience stats and year of founded theory)

• English – communication, reading, writing, listening and research

Key theorist's

• Katz & Bulmler

• Morley

• Hall

• Ang

• Katz & Lazersfeld

Key terminology

• Primary media

• Secondary media

• Tertiary media

• Passive

• Active

• Mass media

• Utopian solution

• Situated culture

• encode & decode

Before we start…

• What concepts can come up on the exam

• What is the structure for Section A:1b (theory)

• Which coursework portfolio is it about?

• How long do you spend writing a response for Section A:1B?

• How many marks do you get for Section A:1B

We must get away from the habit of thinking in terms of what the media

do to people and substitute for it what people do with the media

Halloran (1970)

Effect or Affect?

• What effect does the media have on audiences?

• How do audiences affect the media?

• What do you think?

Active or Passive?

Passive:

• The Hypodermic Syringe model

– Developed in 1930s

– All audience members react in the same way.

– All passively receive messages.

– The media affects thoughts and behaviour.

Cultivation analysis

• Audiences are passive.

• The focus is not on how behaviour is affected, but how ‘world view’ is created.

• Belief that repeated exposure will affect how people view the real world. (Believing representation rather than reality). The ‘mean world syndrome’.

• We become desensitised to violence.

Question

• If their research was concluded in 2004 and they used journals as far back as 1956, how many years is that?

• If they researched 2,000 journals and articles in between those years, how many per year would that be?

Situated Culture

• The term for other factors that affect our interpretation of media texts (and our ‘world view’):

– Daily lives

– Routines

– Relationships

– Upbringing

– Friends

Cultural apparatus

• Dominant institution such as government uses culture to impose values, definitions, opinions etc. on the general public.

Where we pay close attention to the media text in front of us, reading a

magazine or in the cinema

Primary media

Where the media text is there in the background, not really watching TV

or music based radio

Secondary media

The text is present but we are not at all aware of it, i.e adverts

Tertiary Media

Read the report ‘Violent games affect behaviour’ (09.01.06) from the BBC news website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4594376.stm

•What points conform to the hypodermic theory?•What arguments are made against the theory?•What references are there to cultivation theory and desensitisation?•How are these theories evaluated?

The active audience

This is the dominant (most accepted) model.

• ‘Two step’ model (Katz & Lazarsfeld; 1940s)– They concluded the media alone wasn’t that

influential in affecting an audience’s attitudes, but was part of a larger system of situated culture.

– The audience often received the media’s message through ‘opinion leaders’ – individuals who pay close attention to the media and filter information to family and friends, so people receive the message without consuming the text.

Question

• How long ago was 1940?

• Does this make this study irrelevant?

Research

• I want you to research Uses and Gratification Theory?

• Find out the year

• Identify theorist/s

• Details about theory

• Apply examples to each section of the theory

• You will present and be peer assessed (2 stars 1 wish)

Extension

• Create a revision resource to cover all you have learned so far about Audience Theory.

• Research Reception Theory

Plenary

• Storyboard – storyboard what you have learned and achieved in this lesson.

• Also score your knowledge of Audience Theory at the start and end of the session.

• 0 being you knew nothing, 10 you knew everything

Homework

• Representation essay – peer assessment and self marking (don’t put your name on)