Media Audience Theories

• BANDURA'S MEDIA EFFECTS THEORY:

  Carried out the Bobo Doll experiment and believed that the media can implant ideas into the audience mind and they may imitate violent and aggressive forms of behaviour if they see it in the media.

  This was further developed as he believed vide games had a wider effect as the audience is choosing that violence.
• GERBNER'S CULTIVATION THEORY:

  The media tends to repeat representations over and over again and the effect on the audience builds up over time. The cultivation of the media can change the dominant ideologies of society.
• HALL'S RECEPTION THEORY:

  Communication is a process involving encoding your producers and decoding by audiences.

  Producers try and pass along particular messages but depending on the audience’s background they may interpret it in different ways. (Preferred, oppositional and negotiated reading)
• JENKINS' FANDOM THEORY:

  Fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings (textual poaching)

  Fans also construct their social and cultural identities from media texts.
• SHIRKY'S END OF AUDIENCE THEORY:

  The internet/technology has completely changed the relationship between producers and audiences - the passive audience no longer exists
• BLULMER AND KATZ'S USES AND GRATIFICATIONS THEORY:

  They came up with several ways as to why an audience might choose a certain media product:

  • entertainment / escape
  • education / information
  • social interaction
  • identification / relatability