Audience Theory

Audience theory is concerned

with how audiences interpret Who will your text be aimed at?
messages
Mass-produced - made for the 'mass' of
people. There is a downside to this, of
course, in that it can also be interpreted
as 'commercial' or 'trashy'.

Niche - a small target audience that is

highly specific

Alternative – outside of the

mainstream. Going against dominant
ideology includes minority groups,
perhaps with subversive values
 PASSIVE or ACTIVE?
Passive
• Audiences accept media
messages
• Audiences easily influenced
• Do not make own use of texts
or interpret in own way
Active
•Audiences are involved in their
interpretations of media texts
•Audiences create their own
meanings
•Audiences question and
respond to institutions
 The Hypodermic Needle
Model
• Dating from the 1920s
• One of the first attempts to explain how audiences react to mass
media
• Suggests that audiences passively receive information transmitted
via a media text
• Suggests that audiences do not try to process or challenge the
information
• Developed when mass media was still fairly new
• The message is entirely accepted by the audience
• The audience has no role in interpreting the text
• Is considered mostly obsolete today
• Still quoted during moral panics (computer games, violent films etc)
Uses and Gratification
This theory suggests that media texts have to fulfil one of
the following:
• Identify- being able to recognise the product or person
in front of you, role models reflect similar values to yours
• Educate - being able to acquire information,
knowledge and understanding
• Entertain - what are you consuming should give your
enjoyment and also some form of ‘escapism’ enabling us
to forget our worries temporarily
• Social Interaction - the ability for media to produce a
topic a topic of conversation between other people
 Stuart Hall, 1980
Reception Theory • Encoding / decoding model of the relationship between text and
audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the
reader

• There may be major differences between two different readings of

the same code created by situated culture - social class, gender,
ethnicity etc.

• Using recognised codes and conventions and drawing upon audience

expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the
producers can position the audience and thus create a certain
amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a
preferred reading