Active theories

• USES AND GRATIFICATIONS MODEL

  • Blumler and Katz 1959
  • Audience is active
  • Asks the question- 'what do people do with the media' rather than 'what media does to people'
• USES AND GRATIFICATIONS MODEL cont.

  Suggests that individuals CHOOSE and USE media to GRATIFY a want or a need:

  • Information/surveillance
  • Entertainment/escapism
  • Social interaction
  • Personal identity
• ENCODING AND DECODING A TEXT

  • Stuart Hall (1973)
  • Producers encode a meaning in a text and the viewers decode it
  • The way that it's decoded depends on things like ideologies, beliefs or cultural competence
• ENCODING AND DECODING A TEXT cont.

  Spectators will 'recieve' meaning in one of 3 ways:

  • Preferred reading - they decode the text the way it was encoded by the producer
  • Oppositional reading - they reject the encoded meaning
  • Negotiated reading - they partially decode the text the way it was encoded