Audience Theories

Over the course of the past century or so, media analysts have developed several effects models, ie theoretical explanations of how humans ingest the information transmitted by the media texts and how this might influence (or not) their behaviour. 

1. The Hypodermic Needle Model
   This was the first attempt of audience theories and was suggested from around the 1920's. Attempting to explain how mass audience might react to mass media. It suggests the audience passively recieve the information transmitted via a media text, with any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data. This theory was developed in an age where the mass media was fairly new- radio and cinema were less than two decades old. Governments had just discovered the power of advertising to communicate a message, and produced propaganda to try and sway people to their way of thinking.
   
   Basically, the hypodermic needle model suggests that the information from a text passes into mass consciouness of the audience unmediated, ie the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text. The theory suggests that as an audience are passive and heterogeneous ( a diverse in character or context). This is still quoted during moral panics by parent, politicians and pressure groups and is used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media texts, because they will watch certain things (e.g. sexual or violent behaviour) and will act it out themselves.
   It is almost like a needle (media) is being pushed and the poisonous contagious substance (what we see, read etc in media) into our head so we copy and repeat this in today's society.
   
   
2. Two-step Flow
   Paul Lazarsfeld, Benard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters decision making processes during 1940's presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their findings suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the audiences minds but is filtered through 'opinion leaders' who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they influence. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of the researchers, and caused them to conclude the social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts, this is also known as limited effects paradigm.
3. Uses & Gratification
   Explained earlier on in blog.
4. Reception Theory
   In the 1980's and 1990's a lot of work was done on the way individuals received and interpreted text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading.
   Encoding- Putting meaning into something
   Decoding- Working out the meaning of something.
   This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/ decoding model of the relationship between text audience- the text is encoded by the producer and decoded by the audience, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and bt drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of the star, the producers can position the audience and thus crate a certain amount of agreement on what the code means, This is known as preferred reading.