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Audience Theory in Practice

The Types of Theories and How they Work

Types of Effects

• Hypodermic effects suggest media directly influence people, largely adversely, injecting them with views and behaviours

• Copycat effects focus on imitation of media behaviours;

• Inoculation theory: audiences become desensitized to the adverse qualities of media through repetitious exposure

More Types of Effects

• Two-step flow theory: media influence is indirect, mediated through opinion makers and opinion leaders in the social groups inhabited by a given audience member

• Uses and gratifications theory: audience needs influence their choice and use of media

• Cultivation theory: repetitive consumption of certain kinds of media accumulatively cultivates certain kinds of attitudes and values

Media as an Agent of Change

• Attitude change

• Cognitive change: effects on people’s values and beliefs – how one thinks about a topic

• Affective change: effects on the emotional state of the audience: this may include the production of an emotional frame of reference for or against such subjects as social groups or commodities – what one feels about a subject;

• Agenda setting: especially through news material, constructing a prioritized set of issues for the public sphere, and denying the importance of other issues:

Change Continued

• Moral panics: including unfounded anxieties about given social groups, social behaviors or social phenomena;

• Socialization: persuading audiences that certain norms, certain kinds of behavior, certain kinds of social relationship should be adopted

• Social control: acting mechanism to create consensus about the proper relationship between social groups, between the state and society, emphasis on particular ideas about law and order;

• Endorsement of ideology: reinforcement of a dominant set of values which add up to a certain way of looking at and thinking about the world: this includes reinforcement of views about power relationships between social grounds and about difference between groups

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Effects on Audience

• John Thompson (1990) Disagrees with the notion of the ideologically subjugated audience. “It cannot be assumed that the individuals who receive media messages will, by the fact of receiving them, be impelled to act in an imitative and conforming way and thereby be bound to the social order which their actions, and the messages which allegedly impel them, serve to reproduce.”

• “there is no adequate vocabulary to describe the relationships between the media, individuals and society.”

Uses and Gratifications Theory

• How is this text used? • Informational needs

• Personal needs such as maintenance of identity;

• Is this an inclusive or exclusive identity

• Social needs, not least for forms of interaction;

• Entertainment needs, including the need for kinds of diversion

• Given these differing theories, UGT is unique in its assumptions:

• The audience is active and its media use is goal oriented

• The initiative in linking need gratification to a specific medium choice rests with the audience member

• The media compete with other resources for need satisfaction

• People have enough self-awareness of their media use, interests, and motives to be able to provide researchers with an accurate picture of that use.

• Value judgements of media content can only be assessed by the audience.