How Audience Consume Media

The audience can consume media Actively and Passively

Passive Audience

A passive audience is more likely to accept the messages encoded in a media text without challenge and are therefore more likely to be directly affected by the messages.

-Gratification Theory

A theory that we are actively using the media to satisfy our base social needs.

-Diversion - A form of escapism from the stress and strain of everyday life. Maybe all media falls into this group. Audiences consume media texts to escape from their everyday lives. They choose entertaining texts that allow them to divert their attention from the real world, perhaps by watching a fantasy film like Harry Potter or reading a fashion magazine like Vogue.

 

-Personal Identity - The media supplies us with role models, ways of understanding our own place in society.  Some audiences like to watch or read media texts because they can compare their life experiences with those represented in it.

-Desensitisation occurs when an audience is repeatedly exposed to shocking or violent content. Repeated experience numbs the effect. 

-Social Relationships - 1) People make personal connections with the performers they see on screen 2) People can build their own relationships by discussing media with friends  

-Surveillance -  People use the media to inform themselves about the world around them. Keeping up to date with entertainment/fashion trends. Satisfying curiosity.

Active Audience

An active audience engages, interprets, and responds to a media text in different ways and is capable of challenging the ideas encoded in it.

-The Hypodermic Needle Theory is a model of communication suggesting that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver.

• Essentially - You believe everything the media says

• Brainwashed!

• One of the first media theories

• Not really considered accurate

-Reception Theory the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, explored how people make sense of media texts(Most media texts use words, graphics, sounds, and/or images, in. print, oral, visual, or electronic form, to communicate information and ideas to their audience.) and claimed audiences were active, not passive.