5. active and passive audiences

Media audiences

L.O: to identify different types of audience and investigate audience theories.

Types of Audience

How many different types of audience can you think of?Where do they consume the media? What is the

audience like?

Television audienceWatching at homeSmall, intimate audience

Film audienceWatching in cinemaWatching at homeLarge, anonymous audience

What do audiences gain from different types of media texts?

Appealing to an Audience

What different techniques might a producer use to appeal to an audience?

Relating to the audience Aspirational

Gratifications and appeal?

What would an audience get out of the following?

Passive vs. Active

Find one image which you think defines the two key words: PASSIVE and ACTIVE.

What does it mean to be a passive audience and how is

being active different?

Active or passive?• Reading the Daily Mail on the tube.• Texting in to Radio 1 on a Friday evening for a shout

out/song request.• Going to the cinema to watch a new independent film and

getting dinner afterwards to discuss messages.• Watching the UKIP party conference highlights and posting a

response video on YouTube.• Becoming the fifth judge on X Factor.• Reading Glamour magazine and buying a new anti-cellulite

product.• Reading Glamour magazine at the hairdressers and talking

about the issues with your stylist.• Playing Grand Theft Auto with your friends in person.

Media effects theoriesTip: the media have an effect on the audience.

1. Hypodermic Syringe

2. Two-step Flow

3. Cultivation Theory

Key question: what position is the audience put in?What’s wrong with these approaches?

Hypodermic Syringe

• Rooted in 1930s behavioural research (still useful?)

• Message is “fired” into minds of audience by media source.

• Audience “injected” and entirely passive. No ability to resist messages.

• Developed during time of political control and dictatorship (Nazi Germany); rise of film (seen to control); popularisation of radio.

Two-step flow

• Developed by Katz and Lazarsfeld.• Information fed from media source to opinion

leaders.• Opinion leaders pass information (with their

interpretation) onto friends, family, etc.

Who is in control in this relationship?Who has the power?

Cultivation theory (Gerbner)• 1950s rise of TV in America. TV as a social agent –

long term gradual effects.• TV over time will shape reality and social

understanding (general beliefs about world and culture, judgements and attitudes.)

• Slow cultivation of ideas.

Who would be affected?Any problems/criticisms? Monkey see, monkey do

“Life’s like a video game –

you’ve gotta die sometime”

Active audiences

• “Viewing as a purposeful, seeking sensation, a highly motivated activity” (Shimpach, 2005)

• “Viewing (being an audience) implies ‘deliberate, contemplative practice…in a sustained, more or less intentional encounter’” (Shimpach, 2005)

• “Context factors rather than textual ones account for the experiences that spectators have watching films and television” (Staiger, 2000)

We come to a text with expectations, preconceptions and our own personal viewing context.

Did it meet your expectations?

We come to a text with expectations, preconceptions and our own personal viewing context.

Did it meet your expectations?

Uses and Gratifications

A better take on audience theory?

Limitations of Uses and Gratifications

• Self-reports from viewers which are retrospective - viewers may not know why they chose to watch what they did. Reasons which can be articulated may be the least important.

• Goal-directed accounts of media use suggest rational choices of a predetermined purpose.

• TV viewing and media consumption can be an end in itself.

Target audiences

Demographic – a group of media consumer defined by age, gender, race, class, education and income level (also demographic profiling).

Psychographic profiling – activity, interests, opinions, attitudes, values, behaviour.

Imagine you are the producer of a new television programme. Design a questionnaire which aims to find out as much as you can

about your audience.