Audiences in the Media

Authors Avatar

Audiences in the Media

Introduction

  • It would be unusual for any of us living in a contemporary western society to go throughout a day without encountering some form of mass media.
  • This is not surprising.  The media is directed at us, we are its audience.
  • There seem to be 3 important questions:
  • Does the media affect our behaviour or beliefs?
  • If it does produce an effect how can this be explained and measured?
  • To what extent do we ignore or subvert media messages?

  • In general there seem to be two main approaches to the study of audiences.
  • One approach views the audience as very much the passive recipient of media messages – the media produces effects in an audience.
  • The second approach considers the audience as much more actively involved in media interpretation – the reception analysis model.

  • Or more simply:
  • What does the media do to us?  (The passive audience)
  • What do we do to the media?  (The active audience)
  • This division reflects the more general argument within social sciences as to the extent to which our behaviours are determined by the wider society, or the result of freely exercised choice.

Passive Audience Models

The hypodermic syringe / Effects model

  • The earliest model of media effects has two main features:
  • The effect is fairly immediate.
  • It is a simple stimulus-response model of human behaviour.

  • According to the theory, the media is like a syringe which injects ideas, attitudes and beliefs into the audience who as a powerless mass have little choice but to be influenced.
  • Consequently:
  • It is a transmission model of communication.
  • The message encoded by the sender is received by the audience, unless there are obstacles which corrupt the message.

  • There seem to be two areas of concern here: violence and political attitudes.

Problems with the theory

The assumptions that mass audience theory makes about the members of the audience:

Join now!

  • The audience has no role in the creation of meaning – there is textual determinism.
  • Elitism – in other words, that it suggests a value judgement about these masses – that they are easily led and not so perceptive and self-aware as the theorists who are analysing them.
  • The media are often experienced by people alone.
  • Wherever they are in the world, the audience for a media text are all receiving exactly the same thing.  That is, the text is understood in the same way by anyone watching.

  • These assumptions lead to certain methodological conclusions ...

This is a preview of the whole essay