Audience Theory

The Audience Theory
The word Audience stems from the latin word 'audire', which means to hear/sound.


Hypodermic Needle Theory

Developed in the 1920's, the Hypodermic Needle Theory was first to explore how mass audiences react to mass media. It suggests that audiences passively consume information from the media, which 'injects' the information like a drug, unchallenged. As the theory was created when mass media was quite new - radio and cinema were only a couple of decades old, therefore audiences were one mass consuming the same product, via the same message. It was then a good way to reach the 'mass' and governments discovered how powerful the media was to communicate a message. A particular example of that was 1930's German propaganda, used to indoctrinate the 'mass audience'. 
The basis of the theory is that media passes into the mass audience's minds, with no thought of individual audience members. This suggests that the audience hasn't got individual minds and opinions, but can be easily manipulated and changed by media producers.


Two Step Flow

The Two Step Flow Theory was first introduced by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet in 1940's The People's Choice. It was a step forward from the Hypodermic Needle Theory as mass media had been going for many decades now. They suggested that the audience wasn't as passive as previously thought, but is instead filtered through 'opinion leaders' who have influence over the messages the mass audience get from the media. The media, no longer a direct message from media producers to the mass audience, instead worked by the media producers information being filtered by the opinion leaders (e.g. politicians) who then sent their own message to the consuming audience. This indicates that the media could be used for indoctrination (like in WW2 Germany's case) of the audience. As the power of the media had decreased slightly the Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet concluded that social factors were an important factor in how audiences interpreted texts - referred to as the 'limited effects paradigm'.

Uses and Gratifications

In 1948, Lasswell developed four functions that media texts have for individuals and society: surveillance, correlation, entertainment and cultural transmission.
So in 1974, Blulmer and Katz expanded on Lasswell's theory, showing that individuals choose a media text for the following four reasons; diversion (escapism), personal relationships (emotional attachment with the characters), personal identity (finding your life reflected in media texts) and surveillance (useful information about the world). 


Abraham Maslow

In 1943 Maslow, an American psychologist, identified five levels of 'need' for each individual person. Since then his theories have been used by media producers to help them with audience research - what their audience really wants and needs in media texts. 


Media's functions for the Audience
An extension of the uses and gratifications theory and Maslow's hierarchy of needs is C. Wright Mills' four functions of the media for the audience. Media texts give individuals identity, aspirations, instructions on how to achieve those aspirations and also escapism. 


Active Audience

In the 1950's and 60's, media theorists began to realise that audiences actually made choices about the texts they were consuming. Not a passive 'mass', audiences were made up of individuals members who actively consume texts for various reasons. This realisation was a huge development for modern audience theories. Audiences had their own beliefs and opinions, therefore it was suggested that the media reinforced them, instead of persuasion or even indoctrination. Audiences were no longer really seen as a 'mass' but instead made up of different social groups and that audiences found meaning in texts through these groups. Thus audiences have an active role in their consumption, actively interpreting media texts, bringing their own meanings.


Reception Theory

In the 1980's and 90's the active audience concept was expanded further, developing in the Reception Theory, which we use today. Theorists found that individuals received and interpreted a text because of their individual backgrounds, age, class, gender, ethnicity, class etc, which affected how they read the text. Based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between audience and text. First, the media text is encoded by the producer, then decoded by the reader. There are multiple readings of the text, but by using recognisable codes and genre conventions, the producers can connote a 'preferred' reading to the audience, so the audience can understand the general meaning of the text and generally agree on the meaning of the code.