Audience theorists

Question 1

Albert Bandura

Answer 1

• the media industry can plant ideas in the mind directly
• Audiences acquire attitudes, emotional responses and behaviour through modelling#
• Media representations of transgressive behaviour can lead to imitation. eg bobo doll experiment

Question 2

George Gerbner

Answer 2

Cultivation Theory; exposure to repeated patterns of media representations over long periods of time can influence the way people perceive the world
- the media reinforces mainstream values

Question 3

Stuart Hall

Answer 3

Reception theory; communication involves both encoding by producers and decoding by audiences.

• Three ways in audiences ‘read’ texts
  1) Dominant/hegemonic/preferred (accepts intened meanings in the text
  2) Negotiated (reader adapts the intended meanings to fit with their values)
  3) Oppositional (reader understands the message but disagrees

Question 4

Henry Jenkins

Answer 4

• Fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual images
• Fans read and appropriate texts in ways that are not fully authorised by the media producers (textual poaching)
• Fans construct their social and cultural identities through their consumption of media images

Question 5

Clay Shirky

Answer 5

• The internet and digital technologies have had a profound effect on the relations between media and individuals
• We can no longer think of audience as ‘passive consumers’ in the age of the internet, but also as producers that ‘speak back’ to the media, as well as creating and sharing content with one another.