1. Audience Donka Aleksandrova, Laura Neale, Stacey Cutler

2. What is audience An audience is a group of people who are exposed to a media product.

3. Examples of Audience Children Teenagers Females Males

4. Theory and Theorist  The hypodermic needle model: implied that mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on their audiences (i.e propaganda) media in the 1940s and 1950s were perceived as a powerful influence on behaviour change It is considered by many nowadays to be not true as people clearly don’t agree with every aspect of media.

5. Theory and Theorist  Two – step flow model (Paul Lazarsfeld et al. in 1944 ) According to Lazarsfeld and Katz, mass media information is passed to a much larger audience through opinion leadership. Suggesting that people with most access to media, and having a more literate understanding of media content, explain the content to others.  For example, if certain films get a good review, more people will go to see it  Obstinate audience theory  This theory assumes that there is a transactional communication between the audience and the media. The audience actively selects what messages to pay attention to. The Zimmerman-Bauer study found that the audience also participates in the communication by influencing the message.

6. Theory and Theorist  Uses and Gratifications Theory (Bulmer and Katz, 1959) : a popular approach to understanding mass communication. The theory places more focus on the audience, instead of the actual message itself by asking “what people do with media” rather than “what media does to people”. It assumes that members of the audience are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. It also suggests audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their needs. The approach suggests that people use the media to fulfil specific gratifications.  People are not helpless victims of mass media, but use the media to get specific  gratifications. For example,  surveillance  diversion/escapism  personal relationships  personal identity

7. Theory and Theorist  Reception theory (Stuart Hall) : emphasizes the reader's reception of a literary text. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for "negotiation" and "opposition" on the part of the audience. This means that a "text"—be it a book, movie, or other creative work—is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader, based on their individual cultural background and life experiences Hall's Theory of encoding and decoding is a theory of reception theory audiences can have three different reactions to a media text, whether it be a film, documentary or newspaper: 1.Dominant, or Preferred, Reading - how the director/creator wants the audience to view the media text; 2.Opposition Reading - when the audience rejects the preferred reading, and creates their own meaning of the text; 3.Negotiated Reading - a compromise between the dominant and opposition readings, where the audience accepts parts of the director's views, but has their own views on parts as well. The text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognized codes and conventions, and by 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.

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