Audience Theories

1.       The Hypodermic Needle Theory

This theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media, since the 1920’s. As you can see from this particular diagram, it demonstrates that audiences passively receive the information by being “injected” into them via a media text, without any attempt on their part to resist or challenge the data. Governments produced propaganda to try and sway people towards their way of thinking, as they had just discovered the power of advertising to communicate a message. Therefore, the Hypodermic Needle Theory implies that the information from a text, passes into the mass consciousness of the audience unmediated, i.e. the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual, are not relevant to the reception of the text. Overall, it suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and we are powerless to refuse this idea, making our thoughts easily changed by media-makers.

2.       Drip, Drip, Drip Effect/The Cultivation Effect

This is where rather than be “injected” with information; this theory implies the audience are more like patients you get in a hospital on a slow drip feed. Therefore, it means if a message is repeated enough over a long period of time, it will eventually have an effect on the audience. For instance, the more violence you see over and over again it will make you less sensitive on violence. An example of this could be when people constantly hear reporting of  on the television or in the newspapers, heightens the audience’s fear on crime, as they believe it could happen to them, if it could happen to someone else. This theory can also be known as the cultivation differential.

3.       Two-Step Flow

As the mass media became an essential part of life in societies all over the world and did NOT reduce populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation was invented. Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their findings implied that the information does not directly flow from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through other people’s opinions who they communicate and interactive with. Therefore, some people may be influenced by their friends or families choice or something, meaning they are not being influenced by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that other social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts.

4.       Reception Theory

In the 1980s and 1990s a lot of work was done on the way people interpreted a media text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity, peers) affected their reading. This was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience. “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 recognised codes and conventions, by drawing upon audience expectations, the producers can position individuals creating a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.

5.       Limited Effect

This theory believes that the media doesn’t affect the audience much as we are media literates, meaning we are sophisticated readers of texts who don’t get swayed easily by certain ideas.

6.       Media Dependency

Some people believe that we come to rely on our need of the media, meaning that people can’t go a day without reading magazine, newspapers, watching TV, anything that gives the audience information. Therefore, some people could argue that maybe gaining information is more of an addiction rather than a choice and you become dependent on it.

Conclusion:

I will make sure I consider each theory and recognise the codes and conventions in my magazine to grab my audience's attention. I now know that the codes I use will be interpreted differently by different people, so I am expecting a mixture of opinions and responses when my product is completed. I will try and get audience feedback through the process of my work, so that I can give my target audience a product that they would like.