Exploring Audience Theories in Media Studies

1. Exploring elements of audience theory in Media Dillon Lyons

2. Audience Theories • There are three theories of audience that we can apply to help us come establish the link between audiences and media texts. • The Effects Model • The Uses and Gratifications Model • Reception Theory

3. The Effects Model • The idea that consumption of media texts has an effect on the consumer – usually negatively. • It explores the idea that audiences are passive and conform without realisation to these influences. • The audience are powerless to the injection of these messages. • The conclusion reached with this theory is that media texts will have an influence/effect on the audience or consumer.

4. The belief in this theory is that message is injected into audiences, that are submissive to its power. • The media can work like a drug to humanity, addicting them to a belief empowered onto them. • 2012 Aurora Shooting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting A mass shooting during a night screening of Batman The Dark Knight Rises. When the culprit, James Eagan Holmes was arrested, he referred to himself as “The Joker”, a reference to the famous Batman character. • Bobo doll experiment

5. The film Child’s Play 3 in the murder of James Bulger in 1993 • The game Manhunt in the murder of Stefan Pakeerah in 2004 by his friend Warren LeBlanc. • After these crimes there were calls for films to be banned and newspaper columnists protested for them to be burned.

6. The Uses and Gratifications Model • This is the opposite of the effects model • Explores that the audience is active and it uses media, mainly for entertainment – not media texts using them. • ‘Uses’ for their own ‘gratification’. • Here, power lies with the audience, not the producer of text. • The audience is free to reject the usage of media. For example by changing the programme, or picking an alternate magazine etc.

7. Therefore, audiences uses media for these reasons: - Escapism - Diversion - Information - Pleasure - Sexual stimulation - Comparison between lifestyles or relationships

8. This theory also argues people use media to help them with personal issues: • Learning • Emotional satisfaction • Relaxation • Help with issues of personal identity • Help with issues of social identity • Help with issues of aggression and violence

9. Controversially the theory suggests the consumption of violent images can be helpful rather than harmful. • The theory suggests that audiences act out their violent impulses through the consumption of media violence, such as in video games like GTA, or expressed through action films. • The audience’s inclination towards violence is therefore sublimated, and they are less likely to commit violent acts.

10. Reception Theory • A version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes the readers reception of a literary text. • This means that a text, is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the consumer interprets the meanings of it based on their individuality and background. • The meaning of a text is not inherent within itself, but exploited within the relationship between itself and the consumer, thus up to their interpretation.

11. Models • Dominant – the consumer fully shares the text’s message and accepts it. • Negotiated – Consumer partly shares the texts codes and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position and individuality – it involves contradictions. • Oppositional – The reader whose individual situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code of the texts. (voting/believing against the message of a specific political programme).