Introduction to Audience Theory

• What is media studies?

  Is the study of media products and how the media industries presents it to the audience.
• Give me atleast 3 types of media products

  Magazines, Websites, Billboards
• what is media language?

  How the media communicates meanings.
• define representation

  How the media portrays places, social groups events.
• Define Media Industries

  How the process of production, distribution, and circulation can affect media forms.
• Define Audiences

  How the media target, reach and address audiences. They're also the one who consumes these media products
• Define text

  A media product or a part of media product.
• define institution

  they make the media text
• give me the 3 parts of the media triangle

  Text, Audience, Institution
• define medium

  a channel of communication
• Give me 5 categories of audiences

  age, gender, race, location, hobbies
• The process of studying audiences?

  Demographics
• define mass audience

  Audience that are made up of a wide range of people.
• define niche audience

  a small and focused audience
• define passive audience

  they are easily influenced by the media products they consume. They don't question the products they consume
• define active audiences

  They engage with the media product they consume. They interpret and question the media products they consume
• define desensitisation theory

  Audiences are desensitised to violence. They accept it as normal.
• define theory

  an idea that explains something.
• Who made The Reception Theory?

  Stuart Hall
• What is The Reception Theory?

  Is the idea that there are three positions an audience can take when decoding messages and meanings.
• what are the three positions of reception theory?

  preferred, negotiated, oppositional reading
• define preferred reading

  Audiences take the intended meaning of the text
• define negotiated reading

  audiences accepts some meaning but rejects others
• define oppositional reading

  audiences rejects the intended meaning of the text
• Define Action code

  something that happens in the narrative that tells the audience that some actions will follow
• define anchorage

  the words that accompany an image (still or moving)
• define appeal

  the way in which products attract and interest an audience
• define aspirational

  encourages the audience to want more money
• define attract

  how media products appeal to audiences
• define audience categorisation

  how media producers group audiences to target their products
• define audience consumption

  A way in which audiences engage with media products
• define audience interpretation

  the way audiences make sense of media products
• define audience response

  how audiences react to media products by accepting the intended meaning
• define brand identity

  the association the audience make up with the brand
• define broadsheet

  a larger newspaper that publishes more serious news
• define caption

  words that accompany an image that explains its meaning
• define socio-economic categories

  a common of way of describing audiences through letter codes to show their income
• give 3 examples of lifestyle categories

  trendies, rebels, cowboys
• who made the gratification theory

  Blumler and Katz
• what is the gratification theory


  suggests that media consumers play an active role in choosing and using the media