Audience

Question 1

What is the Hypodermic Needle Theory?

Answer 1

The idea that audiences are passive, and can be easily influenced and manipulated by the media. It also suggests that the media can influence audiences’ attitudes and behaviour.

Question 2

What is Blumler and Katz’s uses and gratification theory?

Answer 2

The idea that audiences use media for their own pleasure.

Question 3

What are the three I’s and two E’s? (Blumler and Katz)

Answer 3

Interaction
Identification
Information
Escapism
Entertainment

Question 4

What is a niche audience?

Answer 4

A small audience with a unique interest. (An audience which can be created).

Question 5

What is the Jicnars Scale?

Answer 5

A scale used by mass media producers to separate audiences.

Group A - Upper m/c
Group B - M/c
Group C1 - White collar, lower m/c
Group C2 - Blue collar, skilled w/c
Group D - Semi/unskilled manual workers
Group E - Unemployed

Question 6

What is disposable income?

Answer 6

The money people have left to spend on themselves once they’ve paid their bills.

Question 7

What is tokenism?

Answer 7

When the media includes a person/item just to please society.

Question 8

Why are audiences crucial to media industries?

Answer 8

Because without audiences they would not exist.

Question 9

Why do media providers want big audiences to buy their products?

Answer 9

Because the more mainstream it becomes, the more profit the industries make.

Question 10

What are effects studies?

Answer 10

The effects that media has upon its audiences. The idea that audiences are used, manipulated and effected by the media.

Question 11

What are uses and gratifications theories?

Answer 11

The ways audiences use media texts for their pleasure and aren’t affected by the media.

Question 12

What is the context of reception?

Answer 12

Where media texts are consumed.

Question 13

Why are there critics of the Hypodermic Needle Theory?

Answer 13

There’s no evidence that suggests that mass media effects behaviour. Though there is an argument that mass media does affect behaviour in a positive way.

Question 14

Why does Barker criticise the Hypodermic Needle Theory?

Answer 14

He says that audiences can tell the difference between fact and fiction. Also, everyone responds differently to different texts and there is no evidence that media effects violence in society.

Question 15

Why is the effect of mass media on audiences considered to be a moral panic?

Answer 15

Because society sees itself threatened in some way.

Question 16

According to David Morley, what are the four factors involved in audience decoding?

Answer 16

• Social position: age, sex, race, class etc.
• Cultural identities: membership of trade unions, political parties, specific subcultures etc.
• Direct experience: the relationship between a particular message and a group’s direct experience of it.
• The context of decoding: work, schools, home etc.

Question 17

According to Stuart Hall, what are the three types of media decoding?

Answer 17

• Dominant: when the audiences takes the full preferred meaning offered by the text.
• Negotiated: where the content of the message is altered so the receivers own view produces a new meaning.
• Oppositional: where the dominant view is contested and a reading which opposes it is produced.

Question 18

According to Jeremy Tunstall, what are the 3 different levels of attention an audience member can pay to a media text?

Answer 18

Primary
Secondary
Tertiary

Question 19

What is a niche audience?

Answer 19

An audience that has specific tastes or concerns.

Question 20

Can audiences be constructed and/or made?

Answer 20

Yes

Question 21

Which group of people are targeted by advertisers the most?

Answer 21

People with ‘disposable income’: 15-44 y/o m/c women.

Question 22

What do you need to consider when answering a question on audiences?

Answer 22

Media content and audiences and the relationship between the two.
Context of reception: where media texts are consumed.

Question 23

Who do advertisers target when they advertise a product?

Answer 23

Aspirational m/c (C1+C2)

Question 24

What is the Hypodermic Needle effect?

Answer 24

Concerned with the harmful effects of the media on ‘ordinary people’.

Question 25

How do effects theorists see audiences?

Answer 25

As passive receivers of messages. They see audiences as being easily manipulated and controlled victims of propaganda.

Question 26

Who agrees with the effects theory and what evidence do they use to support this?

Answer 26

Elizabeth Newson suggests that violence is learned behaviour from the media and she uses the Bulger case as evidence to support this.

Question 27

What did Gerbner and Gross say about the representation of fear?

Answer 27

That the more TV that audiences watched, the more likely they were to have a fearful attitude to the outside world.

Question 28

What does Moore, Klein and Curtis say about the representation of fear?

Answer 28

A culture of fear is now deliberately exaggerated by the media, politicians and other dominant elites to boost ratings, support propaganda and keep audiences engaged, yet compliant.

Question 29

What is Dyer’s theory of Utopian Solutions?

Answer 29

• Community: Soap operas
• Intensity: Drama series
• Abundance: Celebrity lifestyle
• Transparency: News media
• Energy: Sports media

Question 30

What’s the difference between the uses and gratifications theory and the effects theory?

Answer 30

Effects studies believe that audiences are passive to the ‘all powerful message’, while the uses and gratifications theorists believe that the audience is the ‘all powerful receiver’.