Media audiences

Question 1

Media effects - Albert Bandura

Answer 1

• This old-fashioned view of how media products effect audiences is associated with the Frankfurt School in Germany
• The effects model suggests that media can implant ideas in the mind of the audience directly – it is also known as the hypodermic needle model
• Audiences acquire attitudes, emotional responses and behaviours through media products modelling ideologies
• If a media product represents behaviour such as violence or physical aggression, this can lead audience members to imitate those forms of behaviour
• This model has many issues, though it still proves popular with the general public, newspapers and politicians who should frankly read a media studies textbook or two

Question 2

Cultivation theory - George Gerbner

Answer 2

• Being exposed to repeated patterns of representation over long periods of time can shape and influence the way in which people perceive the world around them (i.e. cultivating particular views and opinions)
• This process of cultivation reinforces mainstream hegemonic values (dominant ideologies)

Question 3

Reception theory - Stuart Hall

Answer 3

• To watch/read/play/listen to/consume a media product is a process involving encoding by producers and decoding by audiences
• There are millions of possible responses that can be affected through factors such as upbringing, cultural capital, ethnicity, age, social class, and so on
Hall narrowed this down to three ways in which messages and meanings may be decoded:
• The preferred reading - the dominant-hegemonic position, where the audience understands and accepts the ideology of the producer
• The negotiated reading - where the ideological implications of producer’s message is agreed with in general, although the message is negotiated or picked apart by the audience, and they may disagree with certain aspects
• The oppositional reading - where the producer’s message is understood, but the audience disagrees with the ideological perspective in every respect

Question 4

Fandom - Henry Jenkins

Answer 4

• Fandom refers to a particularly organised and motivated audience of a certain media producer franchise
• Unlike the generic audience or the classic spectator, fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings
• Fans appropriate texts and read them in ways that are not fully intended by the media producers (‘textual poaching’). Examples of this may manifest in conventions, fan fiction and so on
• Rather than just play a videogame or watch a TV show, fans construct their social and cultural identities through borrowing and utilising mass culture images, and may use this ‘subcultural capital’ to form social bonds. For example, through online forums like Reddit or 4chan

Question 5

‘End of audience’ theories - Clay Shirky

Answer 5

• New media, as in the Internet and digital technologies, have had a significant effect on the relations between media and audiences
• Just thinking of audience members as passive consumers of mass media content is no longer possible in the age of the Internet. Now, media consumers have become producers who ‘speak back to’ the media in various ways, creating and sharing content with one another
• This can be accomplished through comments sections, internet forums, and creating media products such as blogs or vlogs
• X - However, this theory can and should be criticised. Arguably the media industries are just as exclusionary as they always have been, and audiences are less ‘producers’ than ‘unwitting advertisers’ promoting pre-existing products through retweets, fan accounts and derivative vlogs that could never be financially successful without aggressive monetisation!