Research - Audience Theories

I researched into the ways an audience can respond to a given text:

‘Without an audience there isn’t much point in producing a text, so we can start this thorny topic by saying that the audience is crucial. If the text appeals to the audience then it is a successful text. If the audience doesn’t respond, then the text has failed. Nobody makes any money and actors and media people are all thrown out into the snow to starve with their entire families, dogs, cats and Filofaxes.

Studying audience theory is just that – studying theories or ideas about audiences. Who are they? Where are they? How old are they? What do they want? What should they want? How do we (the media producers) give them what they want so we can make lots of money?’

- From the 1920’s & 1930’s the media started to reach mass audiences through politics. We have met this idea before and we call it propaganda. Look at Russia and Nazi Germany and see how the media (mostly through cinema/radio/newspapers) manipulated audiences for ideological and political purposes.

- About the same time and going on a bit, we see the rise of advertising, with the media manipulating audiences by persuasive means, through the cinema and radio. One theory that comes from this is that an audience is vulnerable and can be made to believe all sorts of things if they are told persuasively enough. Persil really does wash whiter and if you don’t use it you are a bad mother and a complete failure as a woman.

- Moving on we come across the idea that young audiences (children & teenagers) are very susceptible to the harmful influences of popular entertainment through crime films/pop music/video ‘nasties’ and so on. In fact the British Board of Film Censors in 1994 began to monitor films that deal with crime, drugs, violence and harmful behaviour.

Quoted from: www.litnotes.co.uk/audtheory.htm

Theories:

Hypodermic Syringe Theory (1977)
TV and video games act on audiences like a direct drug injection. The audience is seen as passive and addictive. The media-makers ‘inject’ a kind of ‘instant fix’ into the viewer.
They can directly influence the audience and alter their opinions, attitude and values- (Ideology) - Propaganda.

Roland Barthes-
He was a semiotics professor around the 1950-1960’s. He said that texts can be either open or closed. Open texts can be unravelled in a numbers of ways and can have many codes. Closed texts can only really have one main code that you can derive from the text.
Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author” this links into post-modern theory

Reception Theory- The audience are actively creative in the construction of meanings from the text. They control the actual interpretation of the text (de-coding) the producer does not have the final word on what the text actually means to the audience.

Encoding and Decoding- The producer encodes the text so the audience can decode it and get what the producer of the text is trying to get across through the codes. However the audience can decode the text incorrectly; this is called oppositional reading.
There are a number of ways the audience can go when they de-code a text:

Preferred reading- This is what the producer has intended to get across to the audience and that the audience have decoded it correctly.

Negotiated Reading- Audience agrees with certain elements but not all of the text.
Oppositional Reading- This is when the audience disagree with the ideology or text or de-code it in a manner that was not intended.

Effects Debate- Does it actually make the audience at in certain ways? - Children act in certain ways that characters they see in films and on their video games.
In both of these debates they assume the audience is passive (letting themselves influenced by the media text they are taking in).

Uses and Gratification- In this theory the audience do have an active role in choosing which text to engage with and what aspects of those texts.
With reference to the uses and gratification theory, target audience may well use my text as a means of discovering the latest fashion in clothing/ music/ technology, etc.