Audience

How the audience reads media text
Audiences can choose to read any form of media any way thay want to:

Preferred Reading: The people who produce media texts have a certain meaning in mind when they create it. They hope the audience will decode their text in a specific way (especially when it comes to advertisement).

Dominant Reading: The way the majority of people in society interpret a text.

Oppositional Reading: Audiences can chose to read a text in anyway that pleases them.  Frequently when an audience (for whom the text was not originally targeted. e.g. girls looking at boys magazine etc.) will interpret it in a completely different way to how the producers intended.

Audience theories

1. Hypodermic needle theory

The Hypodermic needle theory suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data. This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers. It assumes that the audience are passive.

   2. Two step flow

This theory suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow.

   3. Uses and gratifications

Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications):

• Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.
• Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, e.g. substituting soap operas for family life
• Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts
• Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living e.g. weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains