Audience Theory: From Passive to Active
How do audiences “read”, interpret, and
interact with media products?
A bit of history
When Media Studies first started
as a “serious” discipline, the focus was very much with the effects that the media had on the
audience. This approach saw the audience as a passive mass, being brainwashed
by the messages that flooded them from TV, newspapers, films, the radio and so
on. In effects theory, the media are powerful, negative forces who control
the masses. The media is seen as a hypodermic needle , injecting our
helpless minds with messages which we take on board fully. The effects model is still in evidence today,
particularly in tabloid newspapers who construct moral panics around the latest buzz in the media- rap music videos,
horror movies, Facebook and so on.
Moral Panics
Moral panics happen when members of a
society and culture become outraged, fearful and upset by the challenges and
menaces posed to 'their' accepted values and ways of life, by the activities of
groups defined as deviant. These could
be violent extremists, teenagers, or an organisation / idea such as the
internet, or facebook.
What recent examples can you think of moral panics?
A more active audience?
In more recent years in Media
Studies, there has been an increasing acceptance that the audience didn’t just operate
as a big “mass”. This recognised that
people from different types of backgrounds had varying “readings” or
interpretations of the media. This
approach sees the audience as active, rather than passive, making their own
meaning. It is known as uses and gratifications theory. The
audience has a set of needs which the media in one form or another meet. Blumler and Katz in 1974 identified
four broad needs that were fulfilled by television viewers:
- Diversion- a form of escape or release
from everyday pressures
- Personal relationships- companionship
through identifying with TV characters and sociability through discussion
about TV with other people
- Personal identity- the ability to
compare one’s own life with the characters and situations portrayed and
explore individual problems and perspectives
- Surveillance- information about “what’s
going on” in the world.
Modes of reception
As we have recognised that
audiences are often active, rather than passive, there have been three modes of
reception recognised. These describe the
ways in which we receive media messages:
Primary: The audience is fully absorbed with the media message, for
example in a darkened cinema
Secondary: The audience is paying attention, but is also doing something
else. For example eating their tea in front of the TV, whilst chatting to
family
Tertiary: The audience has minimal engagement with the media, for example,
barely noticing billboard advertisements whilst on the bus.
A 21st century approach to
audience: Media Studies 2.0?
You may have heard of the term
Web 2.0 to refer to the internet in its most recent form as creative and highly
interactive. The Media writer David Gauntlett has suggested a
possible parallel in Media Studies 2.0
(2006). Gauntlett suggests that in
today’s Media world, the lines between producers and audiences have become
blurred, and that now all of us are media experts. He recognises with the predominance of the
internet and converging media industries, that YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and
similar have potentially made all of us producers, active audiences, and
sophisticated participators. In these examples, it is the audience who has
control over the message, not a big institution. Even the larger, well-established
institutions such as the BBC have picked up on this spirit of audience as
participator, with the predominance of interactive services, blogs and the like. The following quotation summarises
Gauntlett’s Media Studies 2.0 very nicely:
“..the arrival of new media within the
mainstream has had an impact, bringing
vitality and creativity to the whole area, as well as whole new areas
for exploration (especially around the idea of “interactivity”). In particular, the fact that it is quite easy
for media students to be reasonably slick media producers in the online
environment, means that we are all more actively engaged with questions of
creation, distribution and audience.”
