Audience Theory 2

Audience Theory

What effects do media texts have on audiences?

In many ways these can fall into two camps:

Passive and Active.

The Hypodermic Model

Here , the media is seen as powerful and able to inject ideas into an audience who are seen as weak and passive. The Nazis were experts at using this model using propaganda in advertising posters for example. It suggests that a media text can inject ideas , values , and attitudes into a passive audience.

The Cultivation Theory

The Cultivation Theory is another model that treats the audience as passive it suggests that repeated exposure to the same message such as an advertisement will have an effect on the audiences attitudes and values.

Two Step Flow Theory

This suggests that messages move in two distinct ways

1. Opinion leaders receive messages from the media

2. They pass it on to a more passive audience

3.The audience mediate this received

Reception Theory

This is an active theory. It suggests that social and daily experiences can affect the way an audience reads a media text and reacts to it. The theorist Stuart Hall suggests that an audience has a significant role in the process of reading a text and this can be discussed in three different ways.

The Dominant or Preferred reading

This claims that the audience shares the code of the text and fully accepts it preferred meaning meaning as intended by the producers.

Negotiated reading

This claims that the audience partly shares the code of the text and broadly accepts the the preferred meaning but can change the meaning in some way according to their own experiences.

Oppositional reading

This claims the audience understands the preferred meaning but does not share the texts code and rejects this intended meaning.