Media Audience

• what is an audience?


  an anonymous and variable collective of individuals addressed (as a group and individuals) by the 'organs' of mass media communication
• what does the audience allow for?


  allows us to have products specifically aimed at you
• what is the audience commodity?


  the audiences that buy their products and create their market, leading to the demand and creation of their products

  people who bring the money in
• what are the 2 types of audience?

  mass audience

  niche audience
• what are demographics?


  'basic' categorisation of their audience
• what are ways in which audiences are categorized?


  age

  gender

  ethnicity

  social class and income
• what are psychographics?


  catagorising audiences based of psychological traits

  eg: attitudes, opinions and interests etc
• what are categories within psychographics?


  mainstreamers - make up 40% of the population, like security

  aspirers - want status and esteem of others

  sucseeders - already got status and control

  reformers - define themselves by self-esteem and have strong morals/values
• what is the hypodermic needle theory?


  a theory that suggests that people think everything they see or hear in the media

  considers the effect that media has on audiences
• what is the 2-step flow model?


  Media influence through opinion leaders on opinion followers
• what are the strengths of the 2-step flow model?


  stresses the importance of opinion leaders

  based on inductive rather than deductive reasoning

  effectively challenges simplistic notions of direct effects
• what are the weaknesses of the 2-step flow model?


  limited to its time and media environment

  uses reported behaviour (voting) as only tet of media effects
• what is the social learning theory?


  • as late as 1965, P.A Jacobs argued aggression was the product of innate dispositions
  • Banduras exploration of this area gives rise to the idea that innate traits or generic impulses do not govern our behaviours but our environment shapes the way we behave
• what are the ways peoples behaviour can be effected/influenced?

  direct experience

  modelled learning

  attention processes

  role models and social learning

  retention processing
• what are retention processes?


  visually vivid or symbolic representations can be retained for longer
• how can role models and social learning influence behaviours?


  if they are aspirational role models they are more likely to have a greater impact
• what is direct experience?


  through parents who might be violent/aggressive towards each other or the child
• what is modeled learning?

  or 'vicarious learning'

  a child who sees the poor behaviour classmate who may imitate it and take on those same behaviours
• what is meant by attention processes?


  how focused are we on the modelled behaviour

  with most people focus drifts but on tv focus can remain very high
• what type of audience do the SL theory and HDN theory have?


  a passive audience - An audience which accepts the messages encoded in a media text without challenge
• what is symbolic modelling?


  Bandura concluded aggressive behaviours were most certainly learned through modelled behaviour. When replaced with TV he found children responded in a similarly violent manner.

  The bobo doll experiment
• how can symbolic modelling link to video games?


  • attention factors - we control the avatar so high focus connection
  • reward - the more violent we are, the more games give us in return
  • absence of moral justification - no reason to kill, desensitized
  • immersive and isolated - no one else is playing to mitigate
  • realism - violence is increasingly hard to distinguish from the real world
  • addictive - sustained long term play = excessive negative modelling experiences
• what is some of the critisism on video games?


  audiences can separate game from reality

  gameplay no longer solitary

  studies that link game playing time and criminality are flawed
• what is the cultivation theory?


  TV appeared to cultivate ideologies and beliefs, acting as a form of socialization which is

  • easily decodable by all
  • access if cost-free
  • consumption is intensified

  Gerbener believed TV was the foremost influence on people's lives more so than religion and the state
• what is the violence index?


  a 9 year tracking period in 1975 in the US; it showed that

  • 8/10 programmes contained violence
  • 9/10 children's programmes contained violence
  • females are victimised and depicted as vunerable
• what is resonance?


  people find examples in the real world correlate world with what they see on tv
• what is the Sabido effect?


  if you see positive things, you get positive consequences

  eg: soaps - if there is a character struggling etc, it influences more people seek help
• what is the uses and gratifications theory?

  developed by Jay Blumler and Elihu Katz

  This considers that audiences might not be passively consuming ‘media’ but were using it in some way, benefiting from a social use or a psychological gratification

  • personal identity
  • social relationships
  • surveillance
  • diversion
• how does the audience benefit from the gratifications theory?


  diversion - a means of escapism

  personal identity - role models / a place in society

  social relationships - common topic of conversation with others

  surveillance - way of being informed of the world/keep up with the trends
• who is Arthur Asa Berger?


  developed sub-categories of pleasures
• what are the sub-categories of pleasures?


  satisfy curiosity

  be amused

  identify with the 'divine'

  reinforce belief in justice

  reinforce belief In romantic love

  participate vicariously in history

  see villains in action

  experience the ugly/beautiful
• who is Richard Dyer?


  believes that popular entertainment has great value to individuals consuming it and his theory of utopian solutions develops ideas of mass media offering escape
• what are criticisms of the uses and gratification theory


  highly individualistic - only takes into account the individual psychological gratification derived from media use

  relatively little attention paid to media content - researchers attending to why they use media not the meaning they get out of it

  media is always functional
• what is the reception theory?


  stuart hall suggested everyone has a conceptual map meaning they bring their own understanding of the world to any media text they encounter affecting their consumption of the text
• what type of audience does the reception theory have?


  active audience
• what does it mean by preferred reading?


  the meanings and messages that the producer tries to encode into the text hoping the audience will take away that same meaning
• what does a negotiated reading mean?


  a broad acceptance of the intended meaning but with some personal modification
• what does it mean by oppositional readings?


  an understanding of the intended meaning but a rejection of it in favor of one created by the individual
• what are cultural hegemonies?


  Antonio Gramsci's idea of a cultural hegemony explains how a dominant group in society can control the beliefs and values of everyone else not just through force

  by making their own ideas seem natural and common sense

  winning over the minds of people
• what are encodings?


  produces a meditated view of the world. it isn't necessarily factual, more orchestrated

  products are encoded using established product processes

  don't always result in the expected decodings