Audience theories

Question 1

Bandura- Media effects

Answer 1

• The media can imalant ideas into the minds of the audience directly
• Audiences acquire attitudes, emotional responses and new styles of conduct through modelling
• Representations of transgressive behaviour can lead audiences to imitate those behaviours

Question 2

George Gerbner- Cultivation theory

Answer 2

• Exposure to repeated patterns of representation over long periods of time can shape and influence the way in which people percieve the world around them
• Cultivation reinforces mainstream values and dominant ideaologies

Question 3

Stuart Hall- Reception theory

Answer 3

• Communication is a process involving encoding by producers and decoding by audiences
• Three positions from which messages can be decoded
  -Preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings

Question 4

Jenkins- Fandom theory

Answer 4

• Fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings
• Fan appropriate texts and read them in ways not originally intended by producers (textual poaching)
• Fans construct their social and cultural identities through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, and are part of a participatory culture that has a vial social dimension

Question 5

Clay Shirky- End of Audience theory

Answer 5

• The internet and digital technologies have had a profound effect on the relations between media and individuals
• The idea of audiences as passive consumers is no longer tenable in the age of the internet, and consumer shave now become active audience members who ‘speak back’ to the media, as well as creating and sharing content with one another (‘prosumers’)